Nirad c chaudhuri autobiography meaning

He was more than 50 years old when his first book was published; he moved from Delhi to Oxford when he was 73 and died there in at the ripe old age of Nirad C Chaudhuri was an extraordinary man. While Narayan is content describing people and places, Chaudhuri is an intellectual, writing about his life, the books he had read, and Indian society and culture.

Unlike those Scots who wanted independence, Chaudhuri identified with Britain. Those were provocative words when the book was published four years after Indian independence. What was more, he had the audacity to criticize Gandhi, who was venerated then as the father of the nation. Reading the autobiography now, I am struck by something else — the extent of British influence years ago.

Born in , Chaudhuri grew up in a small town called Kishoreganj, in what is now Bangladesh, where the children wore Indian clothes, played in the dirt, and yet learnt English poems at school. His mother told him the story of King Lear.

Nirad c chaudhuri autobiography book 1 summary

Their house had mud floors, but it contained reproductions of paintings by Italian masters and the works of Milton. His father was a lawyer. The rain came down in what looked like closely packed formations of enormously long pencils of glass and hit the bare ground. At first the pencils pitted the sandy soil, but as soon as some water had collected all around they began to bounce off the surface of water and pop up and down in the form of minuscule marionettes… As we sat on the veranda, myriads of tiny watery marionettes, each with an expanding circlet of water at its feet, gave us such a dancing display as we had never dreamt of seeing in actual life.

You can almost see the rain coming down. You have to admire the writer, who was recalling these childhood memories in his middle age when he was working for All India Radio in Delhi. He got the idea of writing his autobiography just three months before Indian independence. Why… I asked myself, do you not write the history you have passed through and seen enacted before your eyes, and which would not call for research?