Chronicler of an Indian Atlantis
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We speak of people with remarkable powers of memory but we don’t have a single word for this gift. The term “photographic memory” doesn’t quite fit. What I have in mind is an ability not merely to recall but to discern the patterns of the past and to do so in vivid particulars. Here the Spanish have us beat. Spanish has a wealth of words for capaciousness of memory. There is “memorion” for a person so endowed; better still, there is the nice adjective “memorioso.” Quaint as “memorious” sounds, we should consider appropriating it.
Jorge Luis Borges used it, of course, in his story “Funes el Memorioso” (“Funes the Memorious”). In that vertiginous tale, Funes is a rough ranch-hand on some farm in the pampas, otherwise unremarkable except for his mega-memory. He has learned Latin by memorizing the dictionary; he holds 24,000 numbers in his mind, each of which he has given a personal name. His dilemma is that his recollection is so exact that he’s incapable of general conclusions. He worries how a dog at 3:14 p.m. can be described as the same dog at 3:15 p.m.; after all, he himself has indelible memories of the dog at each successive instant. How, then, can he ever speak of “dog” as a general category?
Apart from Proust, the most memorious contemporary writer I’ve ever read is the Indian-born autobiographer Nirad Chaudhuri. Chaudhuri, who died in 1999 at the age of 101, seems to have been able to recall not only every episode in his long and tumultuous life but the specific shape and savor of past events, including the tiniest. When, four decades afterward, he remembers first opening the pages of the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a young boy, he remarks that “a delicious fragrance gave us notice of the unusual greatness of the work.” He can still feel, and evoke, the smoothness and thinness of the India paper of its pages. It is a distinct physical sensation he summons up, but it becomes, through the magic of his prose, the very scent and feel of knowledge itself. Such episodes occur throughout “The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,” his masterpiece, first published in 1951 and now available in a new paperback edition (NYRB Classics, 640 pages, $16.95).
Good memory alone doesn’t make great books. To his powers of recollection Chaudhuri brought as well an idiosyncratic but sonorous prose style and an analytical intelligence of fierce, and sometimes scathing, sweep. Perhaps most important, he had an astonishing story to tell.
Born in Kishorganj, a modest village in East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) in 1897, Chaudhuri seems to have been endowed as a child with an omnivorous curiosity. He imbibed a love of literature and of history from his parents and extended family, reading first in Bengali, his mother tongue, then in Sanskrit, and later in English, French, German, and Latin. Machines fascinated him, too; as he remarks, he had “a great and almost inborn love for warships” (along with locomotives and the innards of breech-loading rifles!). At the same time, he was passionately curious about every nuance of village life, from the rowdy festivals, both Hindu and Muslim, to the vast natural landscape surrounding his birthplace.
The “Autobiography” tells a remarkable story, but what is most remarkable is not Chaudhuri’s stubborn and meandering progress from country boy to Calcutta sophisticate, nor even his surprising command of English prose. Rather, this is an account of the formation of a sensibility and of the seething hubbub of contradictions that went in to composing it. Chaudhuri, for all his learning and Augustan cadences, was a supreme contrarian. This showed even in his dress. While working in New Delhi, he insisted on wearing a Western business suit and bowler hat. After he moved to Oxford in the 1950s, he insisted on donning a traditional Indian dhoti. While he was still in India, England offered a refuge to his imagination; ensconced in England, he rediscovered India.
His notorious dedication to the “Autobiography” outraged Indian readers. It was meant to. Here it is in full:
To the memory of the
British Empire in India
Which conferred subjecthood on us
But withheld citizenship;
To which yet
Every one of us threw out the challenge:
“Civis Britannicus Sum”
Because
All that was good and living
Within us
Was made, shaped, and quickened
By the same British rule.
This is not, of course, the fawning paean to the Raj it was taken to be by zealous nationalists, but a backhanded gesture of affection. Chaudhuri is merciless in his criticism of British racism in India, almost as merciless, in fact, as he is towards the superstition, ignorance, and fanaticism he found everywhere in his native land. (Rubbing the rawest salt into his compatriots’ still smarting wounds, he went on to publish “The Continent of Circe: An Essay on the People of India.” Circe, you’ll recall, is the enchantress of “The Odyssey” who turns men into swine.) Chaudhuri’s considerable feistiness spices his prose. His models were Gibbon and Burke and Swift, all savage rationalists like himself, but he subverted Augustan prose even as he gloried in it. The Indian reality tends to ruffle poised periods and balanced cadences. When he says of the countryside around Calcutta that “it lay like a mangy bandicoot bitten by a snake,” we have the sudden, and rather welcome, sensation that a sly garam masala has been pinched into the prose.
Chaudhuri published his last book, aptly titled “The Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse,” at the age of 99. His love of what was best in English, and European, culture and thought filled him, in true contrarian spirit, with an abiding dread. He had witnessed racial hatred and mob savagery on the part of both Europeans and Indians. He detested the irrational even while he took a connoisseur’s pleasure in holding up especially pungent instances for appalled inspection. He deplored what he saw as an almost irreversible decline in both civilizations, but the force of his jeremiads came from a profound love of the best in both.
Though he dwelled on the past, Chaudhuri kept his eye cocked to the future. In the “Autobiography” he writes, “If there is to be any vanished or vanishing Atlantis to speak of in this book, it should and would be all our life lived till yesterday. All that we have learnt, all that we have acquired, and all that we have prized is threatened with extinction.” Unlike poor Funes, who remembered a different dog at every instant, Chaudhuri was “memorious” in a deeper sense. He discovered a design in the labyrinth of the past, from which memory alone could rescue us.