In search of Nirad Chaudhuri
The false sense of complacency in Washington DC, now restored as the imperial capital of the world, is only matched by a tone of utter bafflement. History has apparently renewed its march toward a progressive utopia, and the American cabinet seems as epidermally diverse as it is ideologically totalitarian. But there remains a sense of unease. The imperium suffered a systemic shock in 2016, one that needed and still lacks explanation. The shock was not limited to America. The Guardian struggles to comprehend that British Indians tended to support Brexit, and that members of their…
The false sense of complacency in Washington DC, now restored as the imperial capital of the world, is only matched by a tone of utter bafflement. History has apparently renewed its march toward a progressive utopia, and the American cabinet seems as epidermally diverse as it is ideologically totalitarian. But there remains a sense of unease. The imperium suffered a systemic shock in 2016, one that needed and still lacks explanation. The shock was not limited to America. The Guardian struggles to comprehend that British Indians tended to support Brexit, and that members of their community such as Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel have risen to influence in the Conservative party and high office in the government. The New York Times is so baffled at the swing of minorities to a socially conservative Republican party, despite corporate-funded ‘anti-racist’ discontent, that it blames their defection on the quasi-theological concept of ‘multiracial whiteness’.
They should read the grand old man of reaction, Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri. An upper-class, cosmopolitan Bengali, born into a feudal family under the British Raj, Chaudhuri might seem to be an unusual guide to the roots of our current discontents. Born in November 1897, when the British Empire was at its apogee, he studied at the University of Calcutta, worked as a minor clerk in the imperial civil service and as a secretary to a nationalist politician, and then joined All India Radio during World War Two. The war, the threat of a looming Japanese invasion, and increasing sectarian conflict in India as imperial order weakened all shaped his worldview. He moved to England to work as a writer in the 1950s. Eventually, after being permanently hounded out of then-socialist India for alleged pro-imperial nostalgia, he settled in Oxford in the 1970s.
