The beginning of another century for Nirad Chaudhuri

LONDON, NOV 23: With a brief toast over a glass of champagne with a small circle of old close friends, Nirad C Chaudhuri, famous writer and...

LONDON, NOV 23: With a brief toast over a glass of champagne with a small circle of old close friends, Nirad C Chaudhuri, famous writer and Booker Prize winner, today celebrated his 100th birthday here reminiscing about a century of prolific writing which won him a fair share of accolades as well as brickbats.

“Nirad Chaudhuri is quite excited over completion of this landmark in his eventful life,” his eldest son, Prof Dhruv Narayan Chaudhuri said. My father is quite conscious of the momentous occasion and is overwhelmed by messages received from all over the globe,” he said.

His alma mater, the Trinity College, is organising a special function later in the day in his honour. The author’s family said he “very much wants to attend the function and if his health permits he would be taken to the college in a special car.”

Story continues below this ad

If he does attend the function, it would be after almost a year that he would leave his residence, a semi-detached house on Oxford’s famous Lathbury Road where you can still hear Metropolitan Opera’s soprano voices wafting A number of prominent British papers carried rich tributes to him yesterday while several Sunday papers carried special articles on his writings and life.

Born in Kishorganj, now in Bangladesh, the author who shot into prominence with his very first book in 1951, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, has come a long way since, collecting awards and accolades by a heapful while courting a fair amount of controversy as well.

His work is testament to a life of a romantic who idealised the past. Chaudhuri, a historian by training, failed to get a teaching job at Calcutta University and moved to Delhi to work as a broadcaster at All India Radio. Life in Delhi was hard and made harder by Chaudhuri’s frankly expressed views.

His first book, An Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, brought the ire of newly independent India to ear on him. The book, dedicated to the colonial rulers “who conferred subjecthood, but withheld citizenship”, made Chaudhuri a toadying colonialist in most people’s eyes. This was reinforced by the fact that Churchill (who said that India was being left to men of straw) and Arnold Toynbee both professed to like the book.

Story continues below this ad

With hindsight many of his critics will agree that he was misunderstood, and that he spoke out at a time when India brooked no criticism.He moved to Great Britain in 1970, settling in Oxford, where he has lived for the last 27 years.

A prolific writer, he has written 14 books in English and Bengali. Apart from Autobiography, his other better known books are a sequel Thy Hand Great Anarch, The Continent of Circe, Hinduism: A religion to Live By and biographies of Robert Clive and Max Mueller. His most recent book, Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse, published this year,deals with the idea of civilisations in decline.