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Abhinaba Chatterjee
M. Phil (English)

Multiple interpretability of Autobiography:

Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian

Notoriously difficult to define, autobiography in the broader sense of the word is

used almost synonymously with “life writing” and denotes all modes and genres of telling
one’s own life. More specifically, autobiography as a literary genre signifies a
retrospective narrative that undertakes to tell the author’s own life, or a substantial part of
it, seeking (at least in its classic version) to reconstruct his/her personal development
within a given historical, social and cultural framework. While autobiography on the one
hand claims to be non-fictional (factual) in that it proposes to tell the story of a ‘real’
person, it is inevitably constructive, or imaginative, in nature and as a form of textual
‘self-fashioning’ ultimately resists a clear distinction from its fictional relatives
(autofiction, autobiographical novel), leaving the generic borderlines blurred.

Emerging from the European Enlightenment, with precursors in antiquity,

autobiography in its ‘classic’ shape is characterized by autodiegetic, i.e. 1 st person
subsequent narration told from the point of view of the present. Comprehensive and
continuous retrospection, based on memory, makes up its governing structural and
semantic principle. Oscillating between the struggle for truthfulness and creativity,
between oblivion, concealment, hypocrisy, self-deception and self-conscious
fictionalizing, autobiography renders a story of personality formation.

With its dual structural core, the autobiographical 1st person pronoun may be said to
reflect the precarious intersections and balances of the “idem” and “ipse” dimensions of
personal identity pertaining to spatio-temporal sameness and selfhood as agency (Ricœur
1991). In alternative theoretical terms, it may be related to “three identity dilemmas”:
“sameness […] across time,” being “unique” in the face of others; and “agency” (Bamberg
2011: 6–8; Bamberg → Identity and Narration). In a more radical, deconstructive twist of
theorizing autobiographical narrative in relation to the issue of identity, the 1st person
dualism inherent in autobiography appears as a ‘writing the self’ by another, as a mode of
“ghostwriting” (Volkening2006: 7).

Beyond this pivotal feature of 1st person duality, further facets of the 1st person
pronoun of autobiography come into play. Behind the narrator, the empirical writing
subject, the “Real” or “Historical I” is located, not always in tune with the ‘narrating’ and
‘experiencing I’s’, but considered the ‘real author’ and the external subject of reference.
The concept of the “ideological I” suggested by Smith and Watson (eds. 2001) is a more
precarious one. It is conceived as an abstract category which, unlike its narrative siblings,
is not manifest on the textual level, but in ‘covert operation’ only. According to Smith and
Watson, it signifies “the concept of personhood culturally available to the narrator when
he tells the story” (eds. 2001: 59–61) and thus reflects the social (and intertextual)
embedding of any autobiographical narrative. Reconsidered from the viewpoint of social
sciences and cognitive narratology alike, the ‘ideological I’ derives from culturally
available generic and institutional genres, structures and institutions of self-representation.
Depending on the diverse (inter-)disciplinary approaches to the social nature of the
autobiographical self, these are variously termed “master narrative,” “patterns of
emplotment,” “schema,” “frame,” cognitive “script” (e.g. Neumann et al. eds. 2008), or
even “biography generator” (Biographie¬generatoren, Hahn 1987: 12). What ties this
heterogeneous terminology together is the basic assumption that only through an
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engagement with such socially/culturally prefigured models, their reinscription, can

individuals represent themselves as subjects.
The social dimension of autobiography also comes into play on an intratextual level
in so far as any act of autobiographical communication addresses another—explicitly so in
terms of constructing a narratee, who may be part of the self, a “Nobody,” an individual
person, the public, or God as supreme Judge.

To read Nirad Chaudhuri is to experience the dizziness of the astonished reader on a

number of different levels: spiritual, political, thematic, formalistic. Dry, disenchanting,
thoroughly Weberesque dissections of religious practice accompany moving moments of
awe and terror at the contemplation of infinity; moments of sexual conservatism and
almost bashful self-consciousness jostle alongside detailed and explicit re-descriptions of
coitus and orgasm from the Bhagavata Purana.

However, not all autobiographies possess the artistic power and depth of
imaginative literature. It is here that the chief merit of Chaudhuri’s work lies. The two-
volumes have an organic unity and are controlled by a central idea. No inner
inconsistencies and false notes or endless details mar the integrity of design and form.
Chaudhuri achieves a balance between the subjective self and the objective world. He
renders other characters vividly alive and reveals insight into their motives and passions.
As one of the finest masters of English prose in India, Chaudhuri belongs not with the
Indian English novelists but with writers of reflective prose, such as Emerson,
Vivekananda and Rammohun Roy. To their long and supple sentence, he adds sinewy
strength and vitality. A relatively abstract diction is accorded a richer, more evocative
metaphorical life. His prose has majestic grandeur. Passages of great beauty and poetically
vivid descriptions nestle among others heavy with opinonated vigour. Despite its severe
thought and strenuous scholarship, the two volumes of Nirad Chaudhuri’s autobiography
are a joy to read for the passionate energy of its prose, its sparkling wit, lively anecdotes,
varied allusion, and irony possessed of extraordinary range and depth.
There are patterns to be found in the plethora. There is the almost fort-da rhythm of
Chaudhuri’s endlessly sequential extolling ⁄ denigration of Bengali life; the recurring
climactic ‘‘explanations’’ of Indian character as a geographical consequence of habitation
on the Indo-Gangetic plain – one of Chaudhuri’s coarser German influences which returns
like an ideological tic again and again in his oeuvre. There is the immense store of
erudition, largely Western when displayed, the enormous underground lake of German
philology, French biography and English letters which feeds the drawing-well of
Chaudhuri’s reference-peppered prose. The Bengali who has not simply read the
biography of Napoleon, but also that of his valet; or who can describe the village
communities and practices of Mymensingh in terms borrowed from classical Greek –
polis, nomos, metoikoi. And hidden beneath all the references to Bernheim’s Lehrbuch
and Zola’s La terre lies the subaltern voice of Chaudhuri’s East Bengali, speaking the
language almost completely excluded from the Autobiography, a language not even
conceded the tradesman’s entrance of a footnote or a parenthesis.

Chaudhuri’s own critical legacy displays, as a consequence, some mechanisms and

patterns of its own. In the reception of his classic Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,
the most quoted response to the book – V. S. Naipaul’s description of it as ‘‘the one great
book to have come out of the Indo-British encounter’’ (de Souza 2003, 209) – gives a
good idea of the kind of codes the book possesses, and the kind of reader who will be
most likely to decipher them in exchange for comprehension and gratification. Hence a
recognition of Chaudhuri’s prose talents, despite his sometimes outrageous anti-Indian
positions, becomes a recurring feature in the critical legacy, one which dominates one of
the few book-length studies of him (Karnani 1980),1 and in more recent times has been
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foregrounded as an interpretative device in itself: Amit Chaudhuri places Chaudhuri’s

difficult relationship to Bengali culture within a strategy of disownership and recovery (A.
Chaudhuri 2002, 89–105), with the critic Pallavi Rastogi seizing upon the same
ambiguities to discern a ‘‘dialectic interplay’’ of different cosmopolitanisms in his work
(Rastogi 2006, 318–336).

A more Foucauldian approach to Chaudhuri – more ‘‘Foucauldian’’ in the sense of

a greater emphasis on the bi-directionality of power in Chaudhuri’s relationship to Empire
– is also a familiar reading of works such as Autobiography and Passage to England. Such
a reading would belong to the Bhabhaesque discernment of ‘‘productive ambivalence’’ in
the colonized’s reiteration of the colonizer’s discourse (Bhabha 1997, 38), that recognized
gesture of restoring ⁄ reemphasizing the agency of the colonized subject, usually through
some reference to the subject’s textual ability to subvert or even re-appropriate the
discourse imposed upon him⁄ her. The Anglophile who is happy to describe his fellow
Calcuttans as oxen is equally happy to describe the English he sees as ants.

Within his relationship to the European – and particularly British –discourse he is

so problematically indebted to, Chaudhuri demarcates and clears the resistant zone of his
autonomy in a number of ways. Careful, focussed irreverence is one strategy; Chaudhuri’s
story of how, as a young child, he had been given a lamb, is a good example. Provoked by
his son’s obsession with pictures of Christ, the father provides the seven-year-old with a
young ewe (N. C. Chaudhuri 2005, 202). Chaudhuri then goes on to relate, in some detail,
how they went from village to village, trying to find a ram who would mate with the ewe
– with the ‘‘lamb of Christ.’’ What begins as a story predictably underlining the boy
Chaudhuri’s precocious empathy for Christianity becomes a mischievous and implicitly
blasphemous anecdote, one certain to cause offense to a believing Western audience.
Chaudhuri’s gesture here of calculated offense is one of distancing, a strategy to create a
space, however aggressively interstitial, in which he reserves the right to parody and mock
that which he elsewhere praises as the fons et origo of his mature self. His conviction that
the British ‘‘never had an effective answer to the Bengali Renaissance’’ (N. C. Chaudhuri
1974, 55), his admiration for Boers and Bonapartists, the silencing of the English in his
travelogue, not to mention his startling description of the English in India as being as rude
and offensive ‘‘as the overpowering smell of our wild red dog’’ (N. C. Chaudhuri 2005,
431), all belong to this desire to create a space for a self of one’s own.

A second, less conscious way in which the subversive ambivalences in Chaudhuri’s

work reveal themselves lies in the disruptive teleologies that sometimes bubble to the
surface of his texts. The paucity of these moments should be underlined; Chaudhuri’s
general understanding of the development of Indian history (Aryan to Moghul to British),
along with his approval of Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s designation of Bengali culture as
essentially imitative (N. C. Chaudhuri 1988, 152), conforms to the standard 7 Western
teleology that assigns India, to use Chakrabarty’s wonderful phrase, to the ‘‘waiting room
of History’’ (Chakrabarty 2000, 9). Even the interesting re-descriptions that flicker back
and forth between his Easts and Wests – the comparison of his father’s educational
philosophy to Rabelais (N. C. Chaudhuri 2005, 167), of Bengali Muslim children to
Renaissance baby Christs (p. 39), his Hellenizing of village life – keep Chaudhuri’s
chronos forever one step, one century, sometimes even one millennium behind that of the
West. More interesting are the moments when Chaudhuri dangerously contemporanizes
Bengali culture – linking a Homer with a Valmiki, seeing students from Calcutta as
Normaliens – or even jumps outside the structure altogether. The places in the biography
that link the Ramayana to the Cid, which show the narrator reading the Mitfords at the age
of eleven, or which proclaim the need to stand on ‘‘broader grounds’’ (p. 413) than merely
Indian or European, imply something profoundly expansive in Chaudhuri’s texts –
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something that could almost be articulated as a post-European yearning, simultaneously

nurtured and kept back by the shell of late nineteenth-century liberal erudition
surrounding it. To suggest a third-century BC Sanskrit poem says the same thing as a
twelfth-century Spanish epic, or that the central significance of a Haydn quartet is its
evocation of an East Bengali village (p. 208), is to momentarily disturb the referential
topography of the Western mind map.

Another way of reading Nirad Chaudhuri would involve a Z izˇekan ⁄ Lacanian

approach: ‘‘Lacanian’’ in the sense that the symbolic order the Father tries to construct as
the Subject is forever threatened by the shifting, lurking imminence of the Real;
Zˇizˇekan insofar as no one has proved more adept at translating the political ramifications
of these intra-psychal struggles than Zˇizˇek, particularly with regard to how certain
fantasies (such as the faintly filial illusion of Chaudhuri’s, quoted above, of participating
in the African spoils of Empire) reinforce and regulate the political behavior of a subject.

Such an approach would chronicle the moments of disgust and repulsion in

Chaudhuri’s Autobiography, and categorize them in a way that demonstrates both the deep
symbolic affinity Chaudhuri felt for Empire – the remarkable degree to which he could
take personal offence at Hindu defamations of cowardice and uncleanliness against the
English (N. C. Chaudhuri 1954, 19–24) – and a very Kantian desire for the integrity of
boundaries (Grenzen) which permeated his respect for that selfsame order. Chaudhuri
once said that, whenever he arrived in England, he felt like a soldier on home leave,
returning from the war on the Front (Ivory 1972).4 The moments that attest to this deeply
felt identification on Chaudhuri’s part with the imperial father are sprinkled throughout
the memoirs: the pictures in his play-hut familiar to him since childhood – Edward VII,
Archbishop Temple, Lord Rosebery (N. C. Chaudhuri 2005, 68) – the almost ritual
reading out of the names of the officers and regiments fighting in the Boer War, which the
elder brother performed for the eight-year-old narrator on a weekly basis, their conviction
that ‘‘the military might of Great Britain [was] equally divided between England and
India’’ (p. 122). The intimacy of this commitment leads to the first and most powerful
disgust in the Autobiography – that of the narrator’s treatment, as an Indian, by the
English themselves. At the age of twenty-two, Chaudhuri describes his visit to a British
warship docked in the harbour of Calcutta – and the racist practice of only allowing
Indians on after the European visitors had seen it and left. Indian crowds were forced to
wait outside, and were even physically beaten back, until the Europeans were done:
I have seen this spectacle repeated year after year, on the occasion of every visit of
the ships of the East Indies Squadron. These visits gave occasion for a display of
racial discrimination which was not surpassed even in all the squalid history of
Indo-British personal relations … I often wanted to go on board these ships. More
particularly did I want to see the Southampton when it came to Calcutta, because I
had a romantic feeling for this ship for its part in the battle of Jutland. But I was
deterred almost every time by the fear of intolerable humiliation …
These experiences turned my stomach. In 1919, more especially, I was
indescribably disgusted…The presence of the [British] political police on the ship
gave me a momentary feeling of sickness. It was only my great and inborn love of
warships which prevented my acquiring an unconquerable dislike for them from the
recurrent association of national and personal degradation with their image. (p. 341)

In one sense this passage exemplifies, more than any other passage from Indian
writing in English, the son’s rejection by the father. The strength of Chaudhuri’s wholly
understandable reaction – ‘‘squalid,’’ ‘‘intolerable,’’ ‘‘turned my stomach,’’
‘‘indescribably disgusted,’’ ‘‘sickness,’’ ‘‘degradation’’ – borders on the mildly
traumatic, as Chaudhuri’s fantasy of intellectual participation in the ultimately
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‘‘benevolent’’ project of Empire encounters the Real, in the form of a baton and a sneer.
The British warship, simultaneously an object of love and repulsion, embodies the
unarticulated paradox around which, in this reading of the Autobiography, Chaudhuri’s
whole identity is built – his admiration and desire to belong to something that detests and
controls him. The nausea the narrator feels as he sees the police on his beloved warship is
not simply the unconscious, somatic recognition of this unspeakable fact, but also the
traumatic, subject-dissolving effect of the experience upon his carefully structured and
compartmentalized self.

In the Autobiography, Chaudhuri confesses to having had violent feelings toward

British rule in the past – as a youth, he had fantasized about dropping a bomb in the
middle of an English theatre audience (N. C. Chaudhuri 2005, 492). Although this is
safely delivered in an anodyne passato remoto, it does explain the second category of
things Chaudhuri feels disgust for: the violent resistance of nationalist movements to
British rule. An unambiguous picture of British rule as providing a ‘‘rock-like
foundation’’ to a society otherwise beset by ‘‘murder, assault, robbery, arson and rape’’
(p. 54) is presented to us, a perfect picture of Reason wisely ruling the appetites of the
body. As a consequence, resistance to this moral order can only spring from a desire for
the immoral:
when … I heard of Mr Subhas Chandra Bose [a famous resistance leader] being
presented with a silver model of a pistol … I felt disgusted. (p. 282)

in Calcutta to my great disgust I saw bands of ragged street urchins throwing

mud and dust at the [European] tram cars. (p. 471)

The teeth [of Indian patriotism] are the teeth of reptiles: the venom-injecting
fangs of the Krait, the low-lying and insidious cousin of the comparatively
decent cobra. (p. 493)
What emerges from this transformation of British rule into an ethically constituted, if
somewhat Hobbesian presence, is that a symbolic order of things, a kind of code,
accompanies this process, transforming both sexuality and ignorance into acts of
resistance against the order. When Chaudhuri writes how ‘‘with inexplicable perversity’’
he and his fellow villagers used to call tiger ‘‘spotted deer’’ (p. 17), an act of ignorance
becomes a perverse gesture against the symbolic order, a transgression of the rationalizing
codes of Empire every bit as ‘‘disgusting’’ and reproachful as violent resistance itself. The
irrational suspicions and quarrels of village women suddenly become ‘‘revolting,’’ ‘‘dark
and terrifying emotions,’’ expressing the ‘‘primeval, subconscious being of these
women’’ (p. 87); the petty vices of Hindu society cover it ‘‘like a coat of slime,’’ its
behavior ‘‘filled one with choking disgust’’ (pp. 250–251). In many ways, such
descriptions – and the Zˇ izˇekan ⁄ Lacanian implications to be drawn from them –
constitute the most deeply troubling aspect of Chaudhuri’s imperialist sympathy ⁄
empathy: namely, the profundity of its structure.

A final approach to Chaudhuri’s writings, dwelling on their predilection for the

origin and the historicizing explanation, would be a deconstructive one. If a
deconstructive response to Chaudhuri is proffered here, it is not one that sees Chaudhuri
embarked upon a Derridean expose´ of self-presence in Indian historiography, and
certainly not an unveiling of proletarian complexities a` la Guha or Chatterjee, but rather
posits Chaudhuri’s work as a relentless historicizing of practices and institutions. In
certain moments, particularly in the late work on Hinduism, this activity almost becomes a
sequential emptying of belief-systems, a methodology that – while not leading to any
Derridean insights into the impossibility of ‘‘justify[ing] a point of departure absolutely’’
(Derrida 1976, 162) – does produce a number of semantic anxieties on Chaudhuri’s part.
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Chaudhuri delights in the unmasking of false origins, especially if the puncturing of

a particular myth or relocation of a certain origin leads to the deflation of a nationalist
hybris or (less frequently) a Western superiority complex. Most of the signifying chains
whose origins he reveals to be misconstrued inevitably belong to Hinduism or modern
Indian nationalism: thus, Nehru’s costume – the classic example of Indian national dress –
turns out to be of Moghul origin (N. C. Chaudhuri 2005, 586), much South Indian culture
is less Dravidian and more Sanskritic than anyone realized, whilst the greater part of the
contemporary Hindu legacy itself (and here Chaudhuri is speaking of rituals, temples, and
image worship) is allegedly derived from Greek settlers in the Punjab and Afghanistan
around the time of Christ (N. C. Chaudhuri 1979, 64, 95). For Chaudhuri there is
something authentic, almost spiritual, about locating the correct source of the river in
whose currents you swim, a moment of expansive self-awareness more to do with
Arnold’s ‘‘The Buried Life’’ than Of Grammatology or Glas. The original Hindus, who
‘‘regarded themselves as autochthons’’ (N. C. Chaudhuri 2005, 558), certainly do not
labor under the kind of Rousseauistic illusion Derrida discerns in Le´vi-Strauss, and yet
the way Chaudhuri sketches the painted political universe of what he considers to be the
deluded modern Indian is striking, and not merely for its arrogance. Beneath the hauteur
lies a keen awareness of the power of the origin, and the mischievous hope that its
emptying and relocation will somehow disenchant the devotee.

At one point in the Autobiography, in the middle of a recollection of the religious

songs he sang as a child, it produces one of his most eloquent passages:

My childlike faculty of wonder at the beauty of Nature became suffused with a very
vivid awareness of another world, infinitely more happy, joyous and serene than
ours. In my boyhood I often lay on a mat in the courtyard of our house at Banagram
looking at the sky through a pair of opera glasses, professedly studying the stars but
perhaps trying really to locate that unknown and unseen world and I was filled with
an unbearable homesickness mingled with awe.
Even to this day I have not been able to shake off this feeling, this conviction of the
material world around me being insubstantial, although I have completely lost all
religious conviction and also faith in the other world. Therefore I find myself at
times in the curious position of being a denier of this world without having anything
to put in its place. Though I have not the assurance of that duration which makes
pyramids pillars of snow and all that’s past a moment; though I have not the hope
which makes one ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content
with six foot as the moles of Adrianus; yet the earth seems to lie in ashes for me.
And this happens to me not only in regard to the world which is of the world
worldly, the world of far-stretched ambitions and madding vices, but even with the
world which is made up of the wild loveliness of the face of the earth; of the grace
of animal forms; of light raining down from heavens – the light of the milky spray
of the stars which illuminates only when the universe is composed to rest by a vast
darkness. The feeling seems to cut the ground from under my feet and throw me
down from the only country I know into a dark abyss. (N. C. Chaudhuri 2005, 248–
249)

The sadness we are presented with is, at least in part, the sadness of no longer
having a self, the melancholy self-alienation of the postcolonial intellectual, caught in
transition between two language games, lost between two tribes. The abyssal note with
which the passage ends, however, also suggests something else: that the relentless (self-
)contextualization and secular analysis of social ⁄ religious structures has led Chaudhuri to
a sudden moment of emptiness, a dark epiphany, one that discloses nothing else but the
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ineluctable materiality of the sign. For all of Chaudhuri’s empirical maneuvers and
disenchanting designs, he still cannot bring himself to affirm the solidity of the new world
he has discovered. No triumphal march from metaphysics to empiricism, but merely the
melancholy, somewhat leveling observation that they both share the same
‘‘insubstantiality.’’ The realization of this continuity may not bring us to the kind of
insight we find in Of Grammatology – ‘‘from the moment there is meaning there is
nothing but signs’’ (Derrida 1976, 50) – but it is the closest thing to a deconstructive
moment we can find in the Autobiography, even if it is stumbled upon rather than sought.
For this reason alone, the most Derridean thing one can ultimately say of Chaudhuri is that
he is an incomplete deconstructionist; being a denier and emptier of signifiers does not
stop him from chasing their signifieds.

In his Autobiography, Nirad Chaudhuri achieves a balance between the subjective

self and the objective world. In the process he successfully defines his own life in the
context of the times during which he lived, provides a valuable interpretation of the march
of history through the eyes of a “truly unknown Indian” through insight, scholarship and
wisdom.

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