Not a Nice Man to Know

by Khushwant Singh

  I could not take my eyes off Ramkali during the hour I spent in their hut. She was aware of the admiring glances she received from our party. ‘Everyone who comes wants my photo,’ she said saucily to our photographer. He turned to me and asked: ‘Isn’t she worth a crime? If Phoolan looks anything like her, I am willing to join her gang.’

  When we left Gurh-Ka-Purwa, it was high noon. We went through its narrow lanes, stepping gingerly, avoiding the slimy ooze that ran in the middle and the blobs of cowdung strewn everywhere. A large black cobra slithered out of a hole and went along the base of the wall. A herd of buffaloes coming down the lane came to an abrupt halt. The cobra raised its hood and looked angrily around. Seeing that neither the buffaloes nor we meant any harm, it continued its journey and disappeared into a mound of drying cowdung cakes.

  ~

  The police net is closing round Phoolan Devi and her current lover, Man Singh Yadav. They are believed to be hiding in an area of some fourteen square miles along the Jamuna. The police have grounded all fishing and ferry boats to prevent her crossing over. They have announced a Rs 10,000 prize on her head for anyone who gets her dead or alive. She is reported to be ill and in need of hospitalization. The police have arrested some villagers suspected of having taken medicines for her. They keep a watch on the movements of her brother Shiv Narain whom she is reported to have visited last ‘sisters’ day, to tie a string bracelet on his wrist. She has narrowly escaped capture. Once on 31 March 1981, only a few weeks after Behmai, she almost walked into a police trap and had to shoot her way out. It was a close shave which she herself ascribed to providence. Since then she always carries a silver figurine of her patron goddess Durga on her person. How long Durga will protect her is anyone’s guess.

  ‘The average life of our Indian dacoit is about thirty years,’ said a police officer to me. ‘They usually join these gangs when they are seventeen or eighteen years old. Most of them are captured or shot within ten or twelve years. Phoolan is now thirty. Her career of crime is about to come to an end.’

  ‘It is you press people who have made a common criminal who has the blood of innocent men on her hands into a heroine,’ said S.K. Datta, DIG, Police. He gave me many examples of how journals (mainly Hindi) had cooked up all kinds of romantic stories about Phoolan Devi’s favourite film songs and her daredevil escapades. His superintendent, Vijay Shankar, who is in charge of the district in which Phoolan has been operating, added: ‘All our normal police work has come to a standstill because of these dacoit gangs. We must clear them out of the countryside before we can attend to other duties. The longer we take in nabbing them, the more acute other tensions become. And how is it that the press has seldom anything to say of the heroism of the policemen who give their lives fighting these gangsters or of the widows and orphans of men slain by these thugs?’

  I had no answers. Besides, the atmosphere was Phoolan-charged. We were sitting on a balcony overlooking the Jamuna. Soft breezes, the river shimmering like quicksilver under a full moon, fireflies flitting about among frangipani: ‘A savage place! As holy and enchanted as ever beneath a waning moon was haunted by a woman wailing for her demon lover.’ One could almost hear Phoolan wailing for Bikram. My reply to the charge against the press was very tame: ‘It is human nature: Phoolan Devi has such a beautiful name—Flora, Goddess of flowers. And she may soon be dead.’

  ‘I don’t want to kill her,’ said Vijay Shankar. ‘I don’t look upon her as a dacoit but as a child that has lost her way. We will find her and put her on the right path.’

  I don’t know what that ‘right path’ can be for one who has taken so many lives except one that leads to the gallows.

  Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary

  This piece combines two articles that Khushwant Singh wrote on Nirad Chaudhuri, the first soon after the publication of A Passage to England in 1959, and the second in 1988, to mark Nirad Chaudhuri’s ninetieth birthday.

  ‘There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect, compared with which reproach, hatred and opposition are names of happiness.’ These words of Dr Johnson were inscribed by Nirad Chaudhuri on my copy of his book A Passage to England. These words hold the key to Nirad’s past life and present personality. They explain the years of neglect of one who must have at all times been a most remarkable man; his attempt to attract attention by cocking a snook at people who had neglected him; and the ‘reproach, hatred and opposition’ that he succeeded in arousing as a result of his rudeness.

  Nirad had been writing in Bengali for many years. But it was not until the publication of his first book in English, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, that he really aroused the interest of the class to which he belonged and which, because of the years of indifference to him, he had come heartily to loathe—the Anglicized upper-middle class of India. He did this with calculated contempt. He knew that the wogs were more English than Indian but were fond of proclaiming their patriotism at the expense of the British. That having lost their own traditions and not having fully imbibed those of England, they were a bastard breed with pretensions to intellectualism that seldom went beyond reading blurbs and reviews of books. He therefore decided to dedicate the work ‘To the British Empire . . .’ The wogs took the bait and having only read the dedication sent up a howl of protest. Many people who would not have otherwise read the autobiography, discovered to their surprise that there was nothing anti-Indian in its pages. On the contrary, it was the most beautiful picture of Eastern Bengal that anyone had ever painted. And at last India had produced a writer who did not cash in on naive Indianisms but could write the English language as it should be written—and as few, if any, living Englishmen could write.

  Nirad is not neglected any more. He has become a celebrity and the most sought-after man in the social circles of Delhi. For the last many years, he and his family consisting of his charming wife and three equally remarkable sons have been living continuously under the blaze of arc lamps. Anecdotes of their incredible fund of knowledge are favourite topics at dinner parties.

  The first story I heard of the Chaudhuri family was of a cocktail party given by the late director-general of All India Radio, Colonel Lakshmanan. Nirad had brought his wife and sons (in shorts and full boots) to the function. After the introductions, the host asked what Nirad would like to drink: he had some excellent sherry.

  ‘What kind of sherry?’ asked the chief guest. Colonel Lakshmanan had, like most people, heard of only two kinds. ‘Both kinds,’ he replied. ‘Do you like dry or sweet?’ This wasn’t good enough for Nirad so he asked one of his sons to taste it and tell him. The thirteen-year-old lad took a sip, rolled it about his tongue and after a thoughtful pause replied, ‘Must be an Oloroso 1947.’ I do not know if the story is true. The Chaudhuris’ encyclopaedic knowledge has created a lot of anecdotes like those which grew round Professor Spooner, some true, others made up to confirm the truth.

  There is little doubt that Nirad can talk on any subject under the sun. There is not a bird, tree, butterfly or insect whose name he does not know in Latin, Hindi, Sanskrit and Bengali. Long before he went to London, he not only knew where the important monuments and museums were, but also the location of many famous restaurants. I heard him contradict a lady who had lived six years in Rome about the name of a street leading off from the Coliseum—and prove his contention. I’ve heard him discuss stars with astronomers, recite lines from an obscure fifteenth-century French poet to a professor of French literature, advise a wine dealer on the best vintages from Burgundy. At a small function in honour of Laxness, the Icelandic winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, I heard Nirad lecture him on Icelandic literature.

  This fantastic accumulation of the bric-a-brac of knowledge has been acquired over years of study aided by a phenomenal memory. His small flat in one of the old bazars of Delhi is crammed with books on all subjects in many languages. He spends a good twelve hours of the day in reading and making notes.

  Nirad is a small, frail man
a little over five feet tall. He leads a double life—one at home where he is his real self, a conventional Bengali intellectual dressed in kurta and dhoti (in summer only a dhoti), doing his work sitting cross-legged on the floor. He is a devoted husband and a fond father who has taught all his sons himself. As soon as he steps outside the house he dons a different dress and personality. He always wears a suit with a tie and carries a monstrously large khaki solar topee on his head. He is then at war with the new India of Gandhi caps and khadi. He expects everyone to misunderstand him and succeeds in his attempt. For the many years he walked through the bazars to Broadcasting House, the street urchins greeted him with cries of ‘Johnny Walker, Johnny Walker’ and chanted ‘Left, right, left, right’, in time with his steps. To Indians outside his home he wants to be, and is, a kala sahib. That is the incarnation in which he is known to people who do not really know him; it is the Nirad Chaudhuri of the offensive dedications and not the 500 pages that follow. Nirad is quite emphatically not a kala sahib. He is as Bengali as his Bengali accent and he is more Indian than most Indians of his class because he knows more about his country, its history, literature, flora and fauna than almost any of his compatriots. What is more, in his own way, he has won more friends for India than those who wear their patriotism on their sleeves.

  Nirad Chaudhuri is not a modest man: he has much to be immodest about. No Indian, living or dead, has written the English language as well as Nirad Chaudhuri (the only other I can think of as a peer is the neglected writer, Govind Desani.) As a matter of fact there are few English writers who have the same mastery over their mother tongue shown by this Bengali bhadralok in the books he has written. (Even if he were not to write another word, he has an assured place in the English world of letters.) The English have been gracious enough to acknowledge his greatness. It is only in his own country that he has been denied the honour he richly deserves. The Government of India issued a fiat to its various publicity organizations not to publish anything by him; and he has been vilified by soured critics in most Indian journals. There is little doubt that the civil servant who initiated the ban never read beyond the dedication of The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.

  Nirad is an angry man; and he has much to be angry about. But the combination of pride and anger has made life somewhat difficult for him and his family. Success has not mellowed him. The Autobiography, despite its greatness as a work of art, was not a best-seller. With the job gone and three growing sons on his hands, life became hard for the Chaudhuri family. Many jobs were open to him—commissions for articles and broadcasts (from foreign countries) could have come to him for the asking. But what Nirad has never done is to sell himself for money.

  An incident illustrates the man’s unbending adherence to his principles. Two years ago, the then finance minister, T.T. Krishnamachari, summoned me to his office and asked me to persuade Nirad to write a series of articles on the plight of the Bengal refugees on any terms he liked. I told the minister of the official ban on Nirad. Armed with the assurance that it would be raised, I asked Nirad over to break the good news to him personally. When he came, I told him of the enthusiasm with which Krishnamachari (and H.M. Patel) had referred to his writing and how they were willing to give him a blank cheque and clear official objections.

  He sat back in the chair for a couple of minutes without saying a word and then asked me in a slow, gentle voice, ‘So the Government of India has decided to raise its ban on me?’

  ‘Yes, it has.’

  ‘But I haven’t decided to raise my ban on the Government of India.’ Without another word, he picked up his solar topee and walked out of the office.

  Nirad cannot suffer criticism. He first tries to ignore it but his pugnacity soon gets the better of his resolve. The Autobiography, which has been acclaimed by most English critics was, due to the dedication, adversely criticized by the Indian papers. Nirad tried to take the Indian reaction in his stride. ‘A hound of a good breed never pays any heed to the barking of pye-dogs,’ he said somewhat disdainfully. But as soon as a leading English literary magazine came out with a mildly critical review, Nirad’s dander was up. ‘I will teach the . . . a lesson,’ he roared shaking his fist in anger. ‘Wait and see what I do to them in my next book.’

  A Passage to England received the most glorious reviews in the English press. Three editions were rapidly sold out and it had the distinction of becoming the first book by an Indian author to have become a best-seller in England. The bay windows of London’s famous bookshop, Foyle’s, were decorated with large-sized photographs of Nirad. Some Indian critics were, as in the past, extremely hostile. Nirad’s reaction followed the same pattern. At first he tried not to be bothered by people ‘who didn’t know better’; then burst out with invective against the ‘yapping curs’. I asked him how he reconciled these two attitudes. After a pause he replied, ‘When people say nasty things about my books without really understanding what I have written, I feel like a father who sees a drunkard make an obscene pass at his daughter. I want to chastise him.’ Then, with a typically Bengali gesture demonstrating the form of chastisement, ‘I want to give them a shoe-beating with my chappal.’

  ~

  On 23 November 1988, Nirad Chaudhuri was ninety. For over fifteen years he has lived in Oxford where he evidently intends to stay till the end—as did the man after whom he patterned his life, Max Mueller. His biography of Max Mueller is sub-titled Scholar Extraordinary.

  Nirad C. Chaudhuri has good reasons to stay away from India. For some years he was persecuted by the government; then he received only grudging recognition for his scholarship. There were a handful of people (amongst whom I am privileged to count myself) who stood by him in his dark days and gave him the homage due to a man of genius. For a genius he certainly is. Nirad Babu has just completed the second volume of his autobiography. It should be the great literary event of 1988.

  The period after the publication of The Autobiography of An Unknown Indian brought out the best and the worst in Nirad C. Chaudhuri. His second book, A Passage to England—the title being a take-off from E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India—was largely an eminently readable travelogue though lacking in the acerbic quality of the earlier work. He had become a celebrity but being one did not increase his bank balance. He had dark moods of despair and became edgier than before. His small circle of friends which comprised the Jhabvalas, Mehra Masani and myself made it a point to celebrate Nirad’s birthday by rotation in our homes. When John Freeman became Britain’s High Commissioner in New Delhi, his wife Catherine took on the annual celebration in her home. An invitation to Nirad’s birthday party at King George’s Avenue became the hallmark of acceptance by Delhi’s literary elite. None of this made much difference to Nirad’s touchiness on some subjects, chiefly the chronic shortage of cash. I, who regarded it as a privilege to be able to help him out burnt my fingers doing so. I will let Nirad narrate the episode in his own words. His preface to The Continent of Circe entitled ‘In gratitude’ puts it as follows:

  My thanks are due first and foremost to my friend, Khushwant Singh, the well-known Sikh writer, good companion, and man-about-town, for the loan of his portable typewriter. Though it may be said that my mind is feudal, my hands at least are of the machine age. I can write only on a typewriter, and mine was worn out. As soon as Khushwant Singh heard that my project of writing this series of works was held up because I could not immediately replace my broken machine, he lent me his own; afterwards he presented me with a brand new portable. He is also the only fellow-Indian (significantly a Sikh, and not a Hindu) who has put in good words for me in print in India. This needed courage.

  But living where I live, even in feeling gratitude I cannot get away from return indicarum natura, one aspect of a duality in a great Zoroastrian manner, a secular conflict between Ahriman and Ahura Mazda in which light was bound to triumph over darkness. But the duality of the Hindu existence is like the cat-and-dog life of a maladjusted married couple who can neither separ
ate nor live together. So just when, with the near-completion of one of the essays, my gratitude to Khushwant Singh was at its highest I read an account of the loan of the typewriter in public print. It was contained in an article entitled An Interview with Khushwant Singh by an American woman in a magazine which described itself as ‘the official publication of the American Women’s Club of Delhi’—and in it I read:

  Interviewer: ‘Who is the best Indian writer today?’

  Khushwant Singh (as reported): ‘In non-fiction? Without a doubt Nirad Chaudhuri . . . A bitter man, a poor man. He doesn’t even own a typewriter. He borrows mine a week at a time.’

  I was struck all of a heap. My poverty is, of course, well-known in New Delhi and much further afield, and therefore I was not prepared to see it bruited about by so august a body as the American Women’s Club of Delhi. Why did the impressive board of twelve American women who were jointly looking after the magazine think it necessary to publish such small talk about a man who was even smaller by their standards, who had neither of the two things they understood and respected, namely money and official position? Was it because I was a writer? When I would only lament:

  Why did I write? What sin to me unknown

  Dip’t me in ink, my parents’ or my own?

  Khushwant Singh told me that he had never made the statement in the form and spirit in which it was reproduced, and that he was not even aware of the real intention of the women he was entertaining at tea. Of course, I took his word for it. But even if in the course of a private conversation he had said all that was reported, that would not have made any difference to my affection for him. I tried to show that I bore no grudge by again borrowing the machine after the publication of the article and by most gratefully accepting the present of the new typewriter.