The Missionary and the Libertine

by Ian Buruma

  Chaudhuri’s defense of imperialism is interesting and not easily dismissed. Empires are by definition hierarchical, but also cosmopolitan (one of the greatest promoters of the British empire, Benjamin Disraeli, was a Levantine Jew): “There is no empire without a conglomeration of linguistically, racially, and culturally different nationalities and the hegemony of one of them over the rest. The heterogeneity and the domination are of the very essence of imperial relations.” But this domination, in Chaudhuri’s view, is perfectly justified if power is exercised morally, indeed to protect the poor natives and advance civilization. Chaudhuri distinguishes imperialism from mere colonialism. The conquest of the Americas, and the consequent slaughter of the native population, was colonialism. The Roman empire and the British raj worked to the benefit of all.

  History, says Chaudhuri, “had shown empires as protectors and reclaimers of civilization, and empires had taken over the keepership of civilizations when its creators had become incapable of maintaining them.” It is true that empires impose order and often preserve native elites, whose assistance they require. The Manchus did that in China and so did the Dutch and the British. The Soviets, of course, did not—they murdered the old guard. The British raj, despite its skill at dividing to rule, kept the peace in India better than its successors have done. But the trouble with empires is that they tend to freeze the existing social order artificially: social conflicts are not solved but frozen into place. Old elites are kept in power, symbolically, without retaining real authority; their high culture survives but becomes lifeless. New hybrid elites, the compradors and middlemen, are created in the imperialists’ own image. But, as soon as the imperial rulers leave, the tensions break out again, the high culture turns to dust, the new elites find themselves isolated and betrayed and, in the unlucky event of a revolution, up against the execution wall.

  This does not excuse the way in which Britain left India. Chaudhuri is quite right to feel bitter about Attlee and Lord Mountbatten, the Richard Attenborough of the empire’s dying days, more interested in his own liberal image than in the consequences of his actions. India was left wholly unprepared for the mass migrations and massacres that came with partition. But I am not convinced that prolonging British rule would have done all that much for the things that Chaudhuri holds dear.

  Chaudhuri is an unashamed elitist, as were the great writers of the Bengali renaissance. Tagore, he says, “never had any friendliness for anybody who did not belong to an elite.” Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Bengal’s first novelist and a Hindu nationalist, wrote, to Chaudhuri’s approval, “It is indeed a matter of hope for the Bengali people that they are imitating the English.” But, writes Chaudhuri, also with approval, what Chatterji “wholly condemned and regarded as despicable was imitation by those who are devoid of talent.” And, still on a high cultural note, when Chaudhuri himself learned to appreciate European classical music, he observed that “if I had heard pop music then, my chance encounter with European music would not have had any sequel. A man moored to the highest in one’s own culture does not go over to barbarism, nor is he beaten by it, even if it were as strong as King Kong.”

  Chaudhuri’s favorite word of condemnation is “crude.” Bengali revolutionaries were crude. Middle-class Indians are crude. The British in India were crude. The British in their own country today are crude. Crude people cannot be good rulers. They cannot advance civilization. And so Congress rule in India is turning the country into “a Caribbean island on a continental scale.”

  There is a seeming contradiction between Chaudhuri’s elitism and his assertion that the greatest betrayal by the British was their leaving India without having achieved a social transformation of Indian society. But there is no real contradiction there. Chaudhuri’s elitism has little to do with class. He did not think his own class, the upper middle-class Hindus, were fit to rule, for they only looked after their own interests. But neither did he have any trust in the Indian masses—or any masses for that matter—for they did not understand politics; all they knew was communal hatred, which should be kept in check at all times, if necessary by force. Gandhi’s greatest crime, in Chaudhuri’s eyes, is that by mobilizing the masses he effectively unleashed the primitive emotions that the British had kept under control for so long. Chaudhuri’s elite, the only one fit to rule, is a cultural and moral aristocracy. Only this enlightened elite could have effected a social transformation, from the top on down, with the help and might of the British; but this, as we know, was denied it.

  Gandhi tried to do the exact opposite: he had no time for high culture. Indeed he tried by example to return India to the level of folk religion and the spinning wheel. His transformation had to come from the bottom up. Chaudhuri does not deny that Gandhi was a moral man, but “even after the best had been said about it, it still remained the morality of the servus, very pure and lofty certainly, none the less bearing in all its manifestations the unmistakable stamp of its lowly origin.” But that was of course Gandhi’s whole point: only through the morality of the servus could he make the Indian masses feel proud of themselves.

  Chaudhuri’s defense of high culture is deeply antidemocratic:

  Neither biological evolution nor human history reveals anything like equal status for all. They do not bear witness to the achievement of anything good, great, wise, abiding, or new, by the exercise of the equal vote. The cosmic process is revealed as a living and evergrowing pyramid, whose apex is rising higher and higher, leaving more and more strata underneath.

  Chaudhuri believes that democracy advances cultural decadence. Yet nowhere are the fruits of high culture so abundantly available as in the democracies of the decadent West; and many of those fruits were sown in democracies, beginning with ancient Greece. Still, when the Attlee government decided to relinquish British power in India, the preservation of high culture was not high on its list of goals: the very idea of a mission civilisatrice had become an embarrassment. Britain was not prepared to rule by force, because it no longer seemed moral to do so. Instead it was hoped that the instruments and institutions of law and democracy would last beyond the raj. And, to an astonishing degree, despite corruption, economic mismanagement, political demagoguery and communal violence, it has turned out that way. India is still a functioning democracy. This might have resulted in a loss of aristocratic values, but that is a price worth paying.

  It would be hard to convince Chaudhuri of that, however. His sense of betrayal goes too deep. It is a sign of his decency and common sense that, unlike some European participants of the Kulturkampf against democratic vulgarity, Chaudhuri never fell for fascist poseurs in fancy uniforms. There were plenty of them in Bengal; Gandhi’s greatest political rival was the Bengali politician Subhas Chandra Bose, known to his followers as Netaji, meaning Leader.

  Chaudhuri’s revenge against his betrayers was more subtle than that. In 1970 he moved to Britain, where he is not just a cantankerous old fellow, let alone totally irrelevant, but a literary celebrity. His newly found role is to castigate his former masters for their crudeness, ignorance and illiterate philistinism. The Bengali babu has finally come into his own as an arbiter elegantiarum in the pages of the Tory press. WHY I MOURN FOR ENGLAND was the headline to a 1988 piece in The Daily Telegraph in which Chaudhuri analyzed the decay of the English mind by pointing out the sloppy, ungrammatical, imprecise use of the English language as it is spoken by the British today. He has great sport by inserting literary allusions which he refuses to identify and which he can be quite sure few of his readers will recognize.

  As a young man in Bengal, Chaudhuri was hurt by the contemptuous laughter of arrogant Englishmen who mocked him for knowing more about their culture than they did. Now he has the last laugh. But irony still finds a way of catching up with its most elusive targets. Now that every politician feels compelled to talk about “values” again, Nirad C. Chaudhuri is fast becoming the very thing he had avoided with such success for ninety years: fashionable.

  Mircea Eliade />
  BENGAL NIGHTS

  In 1928 Mircea Eliade left Bucharest for India. He was a twenty-one-year-old student of philosophy, and an aspiring novelist. His purpose was to study in Calcutta under Surendranath Dasgupta, a famous historian of Indian philosophy. Dasgupta was so taken with his Romanian student that he invited him to live in his house.

  Eliade fell in love with India. As he wrote much later in his Autobiography, after he had become a famous historian of comparative religion, “In India I discovered what I later came to refer to as cosmic religious feeling.” He took to wearing a dhoti—“the apparel of the people with whom I wished to become one”—and eating with his hands. He had no interest in other Europeans. He despised the Eurasians, or “Anglo-Indians,” whom he described as “idiots” and “fanatics.” He did not feel he was a visitor in India: “I felt completely at home.” And he fell in love with Professor Dasgupta’s teenage daughter, Maitreyi, a talented poet already at sixteen, whose first volume was introduced by Rabindranath Tagore. The two talked secretly about marriage. Eliade thought his teacher would be delighted.

  But, when Dasgupta found out about the affair, Eliade was told to leave the house at once. He had abused his teacher’s hospitality. He was forbidden to see Maitreyi again. Eliade was devastated. He had tried to live like an Indian, even to become one, and now he had been rejected, like a foreign body in a healthy organism. As he put it in his Autobiography, “I knew that, along with the friendship of the Dasgupta family, I had lost India itself.” His romance had come to an end, even if his cosmic feelings had not: he escaped to a Himalayan monastery to “find himself.”

  Eliade wrote up the affair as a roman à clef, which had considerable success, especially in France. It was also made into a film, which was less successful. Eliade appears to have stuck closely to the facts, as he saw them. Indeed, you hardly need a key to identify the characters. Eliade himself became a Frenchman called Alain, and Surendranath Dasgupta became an engineer named Narendra Sen, but most of the other people, including Maitreyi, kept their own names.

  Bengal Nights belongs to a popular subgenre of confessional literature. The backdrop can be India or China or Japan; the story remains essentially the same: young, romantic Westerner falls in love with mysterious Oriental girl and, through her, with the mysterious Orient, only to bang his head on the prison wall of exclusive Oriental customs. It is a genre subject to spiritual melodrama; only a rich sense of humor can save the author from self-pity. But humor, so far as I can make out from his novel, was not one of Eliade’s most notable qualities.

  Yet the book is of interest, partly because the author was a great scholar, but also because of the existence of a kind of counterbook, written years later in response to it. The counterbook, first published in English in 1976, is Maitreyi Devi’s It Does Not Die—an account of the same events, which gives a Rashomon-like spin to the story. She had become a well-known poet in India, and wrote books on Tagore, philosophy and social reform. She read Bengal Nights more than forty years after the event, and was so furious at the depiction of her as the willing partner in a sexual affair that she decided to respond: “In the innocent heart of a little girl there was no dirt. The filth has been created by that man in his imagination.”

  Whether or not they actually “did it,” only she and Eliade would have known (she maintains that they did not), but I can see why she objected to his overheated prose:

  As though mad, driven, she offered her breasts to me, doubtless awaiting the thunderbolt that would annihilate us both.… Maitreyi was desire incarnate, her face immobile, her eyes fixed on me as though I were the embodiment of some god.

  Her angry response is naive and rather Indian:

  Why did you not write the truth, Mircea? Was not truth enough? Did you write for financial gain? Yes, you did—that is the way of the West—books sell if they deal with lust, not love.

  Maitreyi is so distressed that “I feel hot in the face and go and splash water on myself under the tap.” She cannot sleep, for the “fire of anger is burning and along with it are burning many other things, my honour, my good name.” The writing in English has the stilted feel of a period piece, and Maitreyi Devi’s sense of humor is not much more in evidence than Eliade’s. But, read together, the two books are a source of rich and entertaining ironies.

  The India into which the young Eliade plunged was a good deal more complex than his description suggests. The Dasguptas were hardly paragons of Indian tradition: they were upper-class Bengali intellectuals who prided themselves on their liberalism, rationalism and cosmopolitanism. Although they were looked down on by the British and the Eurasians, who called the Indians “negroes” or “blacks,” the bhadralok were in fact far more sophisticated than most Europeans in India—or in Europe, for that matter. The women in educated Bengali households were not in purdah, but mixed freely with male guests. Maitreyi even visited boys’ colleges to recite her poetry. She worshipped Tagore, and read “forbidden” books by progressive Bengali writers. So far as mysticism is concerned, Maitreyi writes that “especially in the late twenties and early thirties, the higher middle class hesitated to show credulity. They were ‘rational’ not ‘superstitious.’ ”

  She tells an interesting story about a visit to Calcutta by a Russian couple, who performed telepathic feats in the theater. Professor Dasgupta called them “jugglers,” but was sufficiently intrigued by their act to wish to test them further. He asked them to perform for the great poetic guru himself, Tagore, who believed “it was more scientific to enquire into unusual matters than to reject them outright.” Perhaps inevitably, the “magic” failed to work in Tagore’s skeptical presence.

  These, then, were hardly the sort of people among whom one would expect cosmic experiences to occur. And, judging from her book, Maitreyi was far from being the “primitive and irrational creature” depicted by Eliade; nor was she the “pure” Indian goddess he described at other times. She was something far more interesting: an intelligent young woman who knew every detail of the customs and traditions that ensnared her, yet was unable to free herself from them. Eliade, in her view, understood too little of Indian life:

  He does not know how much even our family is bound by these irrational rules. And father, who is learned, who knows so much, does not know that happiness never depends on a person’s caste or clan name. And me? I don’t care about these things. Never, never will I enter into the prison house of prejudice. Even if I am not married to him I will prove with my life that I don’t care for these silly customs. I don’t care for anything in Hindu society.

  But of course it was not to be as simple as that. After her relationship with Eliade is severed, she enters into a perfectly orthodox arranged marriage with a man who is, by her own account, decent, humorous, tolerant and loving, but for whom she can never muster the same passion she felt for Eliade. The coolness with which she accepts her fate is impressive. When her mother asks her whether she wants to meet her prospective husband before marrying him, she answers that there is no need for that. When her mother expresses surprise at this refusal of a modern, progressive innovation (brides never used to meet their husbands before the ceremony), Maitreyi answers:

  “Why should I see him? Suppose I say I won’t marry him, I don’t like him, I would rather marry Mr K., he is of another caste, never mind, I like him, will you then listen to me? You will begin to argue, won’t you?”

  “Well, why won’t you like him? Looks are not everything in a man, there are many handsome nitwits.”

  “Stop talking nonsense, ma. You are all the same. You have no courage to face the truth and specially you, you are to be blamed more than anybody else. You keep your eyes shut.”

  This is the same woman who seemed at first to Eliade like “a child, a primitive. Her words drew me, her incoherent thinking and her naïveté enchanted me. For a long time, I was to flatter myself by thinking of our relationship as that of civilized man and barbarian.” By making this admission, Eliade does not flatter
himself at all.

  The truth—and the irony—of the Dasgupta home is that the learned professor cannot match his liberal ideas with deeds. He is as bound by the rules of caste and creed as the next man, no matter how much he has traveled abroad or conversed with other learned men, in English and in French. It is an old and common story, to be sure: what is good for others doesn’t apply to one’s own. Besides, knowledge can deepen prejudice as well as diminish it. Maitreyi’s mother had read Maupassant, so she knows all about the immoral behavior of Europeans. How could she condone a marriage with a Frenchman after reading “Necklace”? Maitreyi sees through her parents and feels betrayed by Eliade when he fails to put up a fight. But then she doesn’t put up much of a struggle either. Perhaps she counted the odds and realized the game wasn’t worth the candle. Even so, the Eliade affair had shown her possibilities she could never forget.

  Eliade’s version of the thwarted love affair is so self-obsessed that he misses the irony of Dasgupta’s contradictory attitudes. He confesses to a rather lame mea culpa. Asked whether he hates the Dasguptas for what they did, he says, “Why should I hate them? It is I who have done them wrong. What have they done? The only wrong they did was in bringing me to the house …” You begin to see why Maitreyi felt betrayed by him as much as by her father. But, in the context of his story, Eliade’s response is plausible, even logical, for he turns everything into myth, in which all the characters behave according to type. There is little room for ambiguity. The Eurasians, living in their seedy boardinghouses, are all oversexed, vulgar and racist, as well as being idiots and fanatics. And Dasgupta behaves like a traditional Indian paterfamilias.