A view from an aeroplane

Amit Chaudhuri

THREE HORSEMEN OF THE NEW APOCALYPSE by Nirad C. Chaudhuri OUP, £10.99, pp. 137 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, three years older than this century, reached his 100th year in 1997. The millennium, no doubt, will be marked by its own alarming celebrations, but already, in different parts of the English-speaking world, there have been celebrations on a smaller scale as this diminutive Bengali, once reviled by many of his countrymen for dedicating his first book to the memory of the British empire (`because all that was good and living with- in us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule'), turned 100 years old.

Chaudhuri was born to a well-to-do family (his father was a lawyer) in a small town called Kishorganj in what was once East Bengal and is now Bangladesh. It is described in his autobiography as

one among a score of collections of tin-and- mat huts and sheds, comprising courts, offices, schools, shops and residential dwellings, which British administration had raised up in the green and brown spaces of Bengal.

His antecedents and origins remind us how Western education, like the railways, once opened up unsuspected springs of experience in the remotest area of colonial India even as they rendered other forms of experience, and society, obsolete. The British might have intended, through English education, to create a breed of native clerks for the purposes of their administration, but as the writing of Chaudhuri's autobiography, among much else, testifies, it created many other things as well that they could not have foreseen. It has to be said that it is very doubtful whether an Indian small town like Kishorganj could produce a Chaudhuri today; there might be satellite television in the villages, but relatively little education and intellectual influence penetrates them now.

But things have changed in the West as well (and this, of course, is the subject of Chaudhuri's new book). For instance, it is hard to believe that any English publisher today would publish an autobiography by an unknown person, let alone an unknown Indian; but it is Chaudhuri's first book, published when he was 54, The Autobiogra- phy of an Unknown Indian, that is still his most famous one, and is, indeed, one of the great books of the 20th century. In it was contained, for the first time in English, the most complete picture drawn yet of the psyche and religion of the secular, middle- class, colonial Indian, possessing, and pos- sessed by, on one level or another, the English language and also his mother tongue, never quite escaping his forefathers' way of life but never quite belonging to it either, living in the city but haunted by the names and presences of the rivers and the flora and fauna of his land- scape. In one sense the book is a study, long before the literature of the post-Independence Indian diaspora, of how displacement both erases and generates culture. Moreover, the profound cross- fertilisation between disparate, often politi- cally opposed cultures, that is at the heart of the book is evident from the style in which it is written; it is a style which, through sound and sentence-structure, suggests both the cadences of the classical English prose Chaudhuri absorbed in his youth and the sensibility of the Bengal renaissance (itself a product of the conflu- ence of Indian and Western culture) in whose cradle he grew up.

Chaudhuri is perhaps the last great living representative of the cultural intermingling that created modern Bengali culture; the secular Indian middle class, the modern Indian nation-state, and, ironically, the demise of colonialism itself in India. The physical and material world of Chaudhuri's youth and middle age may have decayed or changed, but the intellectual and cultural world he inhabited has certainly vanished. No wonder, then, that his new book, completed in his 99th year, should be entitled Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse. The 'horsemen', apparently, are individualism, nationalism, and democracy, which, according to the jacket, Chaudhuri 'finds have acquired debased meanings in the contemporary world'. The book purports to be a meditation on the decline of something Chaudhuri calls "Western civilisation', but, like almost everything in Chaudhuri's writing, it is also a poetic response to change.

There is a short digression on the death of his wife in 1994:

She had been a heart patient for over eight years, with other serious disabilities like arthritis. Over all that I tried to prepare myself for the inevitable.

Three Horsemen brings to an end one of the most affecting stories of marriage and com- panionship of our time, always told piece- meal and without emphasis, in small asides in Chaudhuri's books, repeated in hearsay and spoken of in interviews. The first time that an account of that relationship appeared in print was in the introduction to his first book, where he confessed:

She has organised and sustained a balanced regime for me and kept me on an even keel amidst the many torments and not fewer inconveniences of present day living. Those who know what it means in these days to pro- vide a husband with good food and similar amenities of life, and how necessary and yet how impossible it is for a man to ride on an even keel in the contemporary world, will understand my gratitude to my wife.

Briefly, in Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, the second instalment of his autobiography, he recorded the conversation he had had with her on their wedding night. In the new book, he notes that since her death I am now seeing the world I have lived in and fought in exactly in the same way, perhaps, as I would see it today from an aeroplane. I no longer see it in three dimensions, I see it like a map, with everything in its location.

This book, then, is the first one written after one half of his self had gone missing, a silent half perhaps as far as we are con- cerned, but central, as far as he is, to the act of writing.

But in the next section itself he returns to grappling with the ideas of individual- ism, democracy and nationalism, passing judgment and offering opinions on subjects as diverse as American entrepreneurship and the American constitution, the family, Princess Diana, television, fashion, tele- vised versions of Jane Austen's novels, technology, with an idiosyncratic fervour undimmed by mortality, with an engage- ment that testifies to the perpetual youth- fulness of his writing. Years ago, on a BBC programme on television, bemoaning the decline of the English culture so important to him, Chaudhuri compared England to a Roman senator in a bath cutting open a vein in his wrist. This book might be said to be a long essay that elaborates, with the aid of Dante, P4scal, and Alexis de Tocqueville among others, that gloomy insight. On one level, thus, it is a record of his growing dis- illusionment with the unvisited Yarrow, the country of his imagination, after it became the country of his domicile (Chaudhuri migrated to England in 1970). But Chaud- huri's works exist on several levels, and on another one it is a celebration of his youth- ful readings as a student of history, com- municating to us the continuing and unexpected life that writers like Pascal have in this Bengali's imagination and thought-processes; for Chaudhuri self-con- fessedly reads few, or no, new writers, and although he frequently makes intriguing references to contemporary mass-culture, almost no mention is made of any books (save his own) published in the last 50 years. Scattered among the serious cogita- tions are statements such as these from the chapter on democracy, typical of the book's style:

Lincoln had previously expressed his confi-

dence in the judgment of a people taken as a whole in these famous words: 'You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.' It was simply the reiteration of the old saying: Vox populi, Vox dei (the voice of the people is the voice of the God) and of the Islamic dogma that the ijma (collective opinion) of a whole people cannot be wrong. Lincoln could not foresee the power of television to fool all the people all the time.

These sentences, in their rapid transition between erudition and personal comment, scholarly detail and detail from present-day popular culture, neutral observation and bitter humour, sum up the pace and tenor of the book. Many will disagree with some of Chaudhuri's opinions; but it cannot be denied, either, that any voice that identifies the present time as one of enervating and apocalyptic upheaval is a voice of sanity. Early on, Chaudhuri 'arrived at the convic- tion that the universe is an endless process and flow' (a view similar to Tagore's and not unusual in two writers who were both products of a historical process as complex as colonialism), and it has been his lifelong endeavour as a writer to place himself within that 'process and flow', shaped by it and commenting on it. This latest, small book, for all its pessimism, bears the vivid imprint of that process, and confirms that Chaudhuri still is, and probably will for some time continue to be, our contempo- rary.