by Ian Buruma
There may be a religious element in this brand of feminism. Japan and India, particularly Bengal, share strong matriarchal traditions of worshiping mother goddesses. This, by the way, is a thread running through Ritwak Ghatak’s films, where women sacrifice everything for their men. Ghatak, a keen student of Jung as well as Marx, tends to mix religious and political metaphors: his suffering heroines stand for the downtrodden peasants, for sacrificing goddesses, and even for his motherland, raped by the British imperialists and their Indian capitalist lackeys.
We speak of Western civilization because of shared religious, philosophical and political traditions. Do such widely different countries as India and Japan have enough in common (Buddhism, perhaps?) to allow us to talk of a distinct Eastern civilization? Tagore, as his statements in China and Japan made clear, believed so. In his fascinating essay about Japanese cinema in Our Films, Their Films, Ray, though a little more tentatively than Tagore, reaches the same conclusion. He quotes his old professor at Tagore’s academy as saying: “Consider the Fujiyama.… Fire within and calm without. There is the symbol of the true Oriental artist.” Mizoguchi and Ozu, Ray says, “both suggest enormous reserves of power and feeling which never spill over into emotional displays.” Well, this depends on what one means by emotional displays. But I think I know what Ray means. The emotions under the surface, the long spells of apparent calm, suddenly interrupted by an emotional climax—a look of terrible grief, a stifled scream, a burst of silent tears—the image of the woman betrayed by weaker men, biting her sari or kimono in anguish: these mark the style of Ray’s films, as they do that of Mizoguchi’s. Perhaps this offers a hint of what makes Ray’s films seem, for lack of a better word, Asian.
Ray’s films, like those of Mizoguchi, indeed of most Asian masters, are often accused of being slow. To those for whom only perpetual action can stave off boredom this may be true. But the lingering over everyday details, the moments of complete calm—compared by Ray to the slow movements in music—are necessary to express the intensity of the emotional highlights. The slow realism of the classic Asian cinema is a bit like the Japanese Noh theater or the English game of cricket: the slowness—which, to me, is never boring—draws you into the world expressed on the screen, the stage or the playing field. This process is more than entertainment—it is not always entertaining. And it is not a matter of slowing down life to the pace of real life—that really would be boring. Rather, it slows down moments in life sufficiently to, as it were, catch reality.
It is a form of realism that has almost died out in the Japanese and Indian cinema. Commercial pressures, especially acute in a place like Bengal, with only a very small educated audience, are partly to blame. With the advent of television, videos and other new entertainments, the film industries have opted for safe formulas: song and dance in India, soapy melodrama in Japan. But I do not believe this is the only reason for the cinematic regression.
Ray made the following point about the great Japanese directors:
I am not saying that these masters did not learn from the West. All artists imbibe, consciously or unconsciously, the lessons of past masters. But when a film-maker’s roots are strong, and when tradition is a living reality, outside influences are bound to dwindle and disappear and a true indigenous style evolve.
This was certainly true of Ray, Mizoguchi, Ozu, even Kurosawa. They all imbibed the work of such different directors as John Ford, Frank Capra and Jean Renoir. But they also were steeped in their own aesthetic traditions, which was the very condition that made their art universal. This is what has changed. Few young Japanese filmmakers are at home in Japanese painting, as Mizoguchi was; few Indian filmmakers could compose a score of Indian music, as Ray does. What is left, in this world of instant communications, is a constant exposure to Western fashions, which, without a strong traditional culture to absorb them, become meaningless ornaments. These ornaments are merged with the showy conventions of local pop culture. The result is often profitable, sometimes entertaining, but never a masterpiece. There are still serious films being made in India, but they tend to be melodramas containing political messages. Both in style and in content they are parochial in a way that Ray’s films never are. One fears it will be a long time before another Satyajit Ray appears in India. He is one of the last true cosmopolitans, and perhaps the very last Bengali renaissance man.
1987
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
CITIZEN OF
THE BRITISH EMPIRE
Nirad C. Chaudhuri is in many ways a most unusual Indian. Fellow Indians sometimes dismiss him with a casual flick of the wrist. “Oh, him,” said a journalist from Bombay, whose opinion I sought—“just a cantankerous old fellow.” A more charitable Bengali scholar called him “a kind of museum piece, a nineteenth-century relic.” But many Indians continue to read him.
Chaudhuri, born in 1897, has spent a lifetime kicking against the myths and shibboleths held by the majority of his countrymen: he has ridiculed the pacifism of Mahatma Ghandi; he has exposed Hinduism as a form of xenophobic power worship; he has castigated Indian nationalism for being corrupt, self-seeking and destructive; he has mocked the pretensions of Anglicized Indians and vented his spleen at the stupidity and philistinism of the British in India, while at the same time beginning his first and most famous book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, with the following dedication:
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.
It was this sentiment, perhaps more than anything else, that most irritated Indians, not to mention British liberals: the former because of nationalist pride, the latter for reasons of colonial guilt, or, as Chaudhuri himself would put it, degeneracy of national character.
“Just a cantankerous old fellow.” “Totally irrelevant.” “A reactionary relic.” No matter how often these mantras of dismissal were recited, Chaudhuri refused to go away or shut up. His voice is as strong, idiosyncratic, erudite, garrulous and at times cantankerous as ever. Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India 1921–1952, his chronicle of the intellectual life and times of a no longer unknown Indian, is almost a thousand pages long. Indians, as Chaudhuri himself tells us, and as anybody who has ever sat next to an unknown Indian on a plane or train will know, love to talk. It testifies to Chaudhuri’s eloquence, wit and intellectual brilliance that he can go on at such length without once becoming a bore.
Chaudhuri’s theme is decadence. It permeates everything he writes. “It is a fatality with me,” he writes in the introduction, “that wherever I go the spectre of decadence treads at my heels like the Foul Fiend.” The title itself, a quotation from Alexander Pope, refers to this foul fiend: “Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; / And Universal Darkness buries All!” In his first book he described the decadence of Bengal, specifically the decline of high culture in Calcutta, which flowered briefly in the nineteenth century, inspired by Western learning that came with British rule. This decline, in Chaudhuri’s account, is but part of a larger decadence, that of the British empire itself, which, like all decadent empires, “ceased to create or defend values associated with [it].”
In Thy Hand, Great Anarch! the empire dies, in Chaudhuri’s view, squalidly and ignobly, leaving at least a million slaughtered Hindus and Muslims in its wake. The death of Empire spelled the death of the British people. They died, as Chaudhuri put it to me in his Oxford house, savoring his words, “not as the noble Roman perishing in his marble bath, but as cheap hussies in a whorehouse.” But even that is only part of a much greater death, for the Universal Darkness is descending upon us all—upon America, where he thinks the gulf between technological mastery and social and cultural depravity is widest, but also upon “the least civilized of the non-European human groups, e.g. those in Africa,” who are “socially and culturally as decaden
t as the Europeans.”
Personally, Chaudhuri tells us, it has been his aim in life to navigate through the currents of history—never to be carried away by them. His prescription to remain untainted by the decay around him is to cultivate the “capacity to shake off the fetters of the present. No one who is in bondage to it can have any true view of life.… Fashion, the tyrant of humanity taken in the mass, had no hold on me.” This has lent an aristocratic detachment to his views, and the ability to see through the received opinions that give comfort to lesser minds than his. While he picks his way through the debris of modern civilization, he sounds a warning to his fellow men.
But Chaudhuri’s writing is so much more than a mere warning; his vision of doom is integral to his art, an expression of foreboding, but also of fascination. There are loud echos of Burke in his elitist conservatism, to be sure, but also of the refined urbanites of Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” obsessed by the menace without. He wants to warn us about the impending disaster, but cannot avert his fascinated gaze, not wanting to miss a minute of the action. As he put it in his first autobiography,
In my student days I used to be specially drawn towards these periods of history in which some great empire or nation, or at all events the power and glory of a great state, was passing away. I was induced to agonized fascination by these periods, and the earliest experience I had of this feeling was when I read about the final defeat of Athens at the hands of Sparta. I seemed to hear within me the clang of the pickaxes with which the long walls to the Peiraeus were being demolished, and was overwhelmed by a sense of desolation which men have when they see familiar landmarks suddenly disappear or witness the unexpected bouleversement of the purpose they had assumed to be inherent in the unfolding of their existence.
The curious thing about highly civilized men drawn to the spectacle of barbaric violence done to high civilization is that it is never entirely clear which holds the greater attraction; the dying civilization or the Sturm und Drang that topples it. Chaudhuri is a connoisseur of everything that is fine and lofty. He is at home in the literature of Europe; he is an amateur of classical European music, testing his wife on her knowledge of Beethoven on their wedding night; he is a student of Mogul miniatures and architecture, and a proud champion of the great Bengali writers and poets. He is also a student of war, with a deep knowledge of military history. In his house in Oxford hang several portraits of Napoleon. When I commented on this, he remarked, “We are great Napoleon worshipers, you know.” For a moment I was taken aback. Admirations for great power and the love of high culture do not always exist in harmony. But one can imagine why a Bengali born at the zenith of the British raj would associate the one with the other. And one can also see why the decline of power can be relished and deeply regretted at the same time.
Bengal, especially Calcutta, was and still is a perfect place to observe cultural, social, political decay. “Life in Calcutta,” wrote Chaudhuri in his first book, “was the symbol and epitome of our national history, a true reflection of the creative effort in our modern existence as well as of its self-destructive duality.” It was there, in the grandiose capital of the raj, that high-caste Hindus imbodied European civilization during the nineteenth century, partly through mimicry of their British masters, but mostly through literature. Great libraries were founded, grand houses built, stocked with books, fine European furniture, and paintings. There they still stand, for the inspection of tourists (“that abomination, the white tourist,” says Chaudhuri), who pose for pictures before the busts of Queen Victoria covered in bird droppings, and gaze at the cobwebbed chandeliers and the gilt-framed prints of the Battle of Waterloo. Calcutta for the Hindu gentry, the bhadralok, was a city of poetry readings, religious reform movements and musical evenings. This modern Indian culture was known as the Bengali renaissance. Chaudhuri came of age in its twilight.
In many ways he is a typical bhadralok, an aristocrat of the mind, who taught himself to read and, where possible, quote from the European classics—in English, of course, but also in French, Italian, Latin and Greek. Steeped in this remarkable high culture of Calcutta, Chaudhuri saw it gradually deteriorate into the sad caricature it has become today. Bengalis still chatter away in their crumbling coffee shops about structuralism, deconstructionism and postmodernism, and there are Satyajit Ray’s films to admire, but the great days of the renaissance ended around the turn of this century. And, writes Chaudhuri, “from 1921 onwards the influence of Bengal in Indian politics began to decline.” India’s fate was to be determined more by Gandhi’s mass movement than by Calcutta’s cultivated bhadralok. “In the cultural field the same decline became perceptible to me, and I myself took some part in what might be called the Bengali Kulturkampf. With independence, the eclipse of Bengal was completed.”
Again and again Chaudhuri points out the confluence of power, or decline in power, and cultural decay. Later in Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, referring to the postcolonial British, and specifically to Sir Richard Attenborough’s naive and sentimental liberalism (“The worship of Gandhi is, in the British above all, unqualified imbecility and a sure proof of the degeneration of the British character”), he turns a famous saying upside down: “Loss of power corrupts, and absolute loss of power corrupts absolutely.” Maybe so. But was loss of power really the reason for cultural decadence in Bengal? What is the connection between culture and power? Are they truly Siamese twins who live and die together?
At first sight Bengal would seem to prove Chaudhuri’s case. Having created more or less in their own image a vigorous Bengali elite, the British, like a suddenly panicked Dr. Frankenstein, did their best to snuff it out, or at least rob it of power. First there was the attempt to divide Bengal in 1905 between Muslims and Hindus, causing riots, communal bitterness and a permanent British distrust of unruly Bengal. Then there was the transfer of the Indian government from Calcutta to New Delhi in 1912. There were practical reasons for this, to be sure, but behind it was a cultural prejudice. The British who ruled India during the jingoistic age of New Imperialism were no longer the hearty adventurers and high-minded gentlemen who arrived in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
In An Area of Darkness, a book that irritates Indians almost as much as Chaudhuri’s works do, V. S. Naipaul described how in the latter half of the nineteenth century the raj had become a swaggering fantasy, expressed in bombastic monuments and racial arrogance: “To be English in India was to be larger than life.”
An imperial ideal well on the way to a necessarily delayed realization was foundering on the imperialist myth, equally delayed, of the empire-builder, on the English fantasy of Englishness, “the cherished conviction,” as one English official wrote in 1883, “which was shared by every Englishman in India, from the highest to the lowest, by the planter’s assistant in his lowly bungalow … to the Viceroy on his throne … that he belongs to a race whom God has destined to govern and subdue.”
So there was Chaudhuri, lover of Mozart, Pascal, Burke, Wordsworth and Dante, ruled by Englishmen whose intellectual tastes were adequately served by Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. Their fantasy of Englishness did not include the literary Bengali babus, for whom they felt contempt and distrust. More congenial to the British New Imperialists were the brave and philistine warriors of the northern frontiers, Muslims whose tribal pride mirrored the “muscular Christianity” of the British. The British mission civilisatrice had run into the sand, and Chaudhuri felt betrayed: “Any exhibition of knowledge of European life, civilization or history drove the British community in India to make the gesture which peasant boys in India make at a passing train. They expose themselves and wave their hips.”
The fantasy of Englishness had the unfortunate effect that Indians, especially Bengalis, retreated into fantasies of their own: the fantasy of ancient India, a civilization whose magnificence put even its modern, humiliated descendants on an unassailable plane, or the fantasy of superior spirituality, beyond the reach of the materiali
st West. Bengali intellectuals, made defensive by English contempt, often became show-offs, ridiculed by Kipling in The Jungle Book. (It is a weakness that Chaudhuri points out and, it must be said, often exemplifies.) Kipling likened Bengali intellectuals to monkeys, the Bandar Log. When Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for a book in English in 1913, Kipling remarked in a letter to Rider Haggard, “Well, whose fault is it that the babu is what he is? We did it. We began in Macaulay’s time. We have worked without intermission to make this Caliban.” Caliban would have his revenge by gloating over every British setback during the two world wars—a show of petty hatred that disgusted Chaudhuri as much as did British arrogance.
Chaudhuri felt the British contempt particularly keenly because he believed in the mission civilisatrice. He took Queen Victoria at her word when she said the imperial mission was “to protect the poor natives and advance civilization.” He can still say without a hint of self-consciousness that “I remain a Bengali, an Indian, an Englishman, while being a citizen of the world.” He is the embodiment of the highest imperial ideal, a man Queen Victoria would have been deeply proud of, and precisely for that reason a man utterly out of sync with modern India. “L’Inde c’est moi,” he wrote in his first autobiography. Perhaps “Bengal c’est moi” would have been more accurate, but even that may have been too wide a net in which to catch this lifelong maverick. He thought of giving Thy Hand, Great Anarch! the title “One Man Against His People.” He gave that up, though, because, as he put it, he is not against any people, but against historical trends.
