KK Srivastava
On my doing “well” in graduation in 1978 from DAV Degree College, Gorakhpur, my uncle gifted me a book titled The Continent of Circe whose author was one Nirad C Chaudhuri. The book interested me; I made efforts to read it; greater efforts to absorb it and yet to make greatest possible efforts to come to grips with it. When I attempt to write about a scholar-extraordinary like Nirad C Chaudhuri after a gap of more than thirty eight years when I read him first, I front a riddle more complex than the riddle: the writer Nirad C Chaudhuri himself.
That is the grandeur of great literature: great literature is one that ejaculates out one riddle the moment the last one is solved. It continues to be an unresting cycle. Great Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, Joyce and Beckett like a host of their ilk are yet to be understood even marginally not to speak of completely. So is true of Chaudhuri. They represent a riddle for a human mind to grapple with in times to come. Here is a small effort.
What stunned me while reading that book was its very vastness: vastness in terms of depth of knowledge, observation, penetration, language and relevance. As you look at the waves of the ocean only imagining the depths hidden and most certainly allowing an unconscious fear overtake you, you think how fragile you are before this mightiest empire God has created for you. So is The Continent of Circe: a gargantuan empire of thoughts and ideas: an apoapsis of intellectual paradigm, to my mind, unmatched thus far in the history of Indian writing in English about India.
Chaudhuri, quite aware of the fragility of our knowledge and wisdom (as he thought), did not mince words while letting his fellow-intellectuals know his standards of knowledge, learning and wisdom. What a fantastic giant he was writing untiredly of what he thought of the society. He was as much proud of his wisdom and learning as he was ashamed of his peers lacking in these. So he chose to name four gentlemen, all foreigners, whom he honoured by calling them “truly learned”: Harnack, Edurad Meyer, Mommsen and the fourth one – a difficult name – Wilamowitz-Moellndorf. Thus set Chaudhuri the benchmark for his evaluation. Chaudhuri, when young, cherished the ambition of being the fifth in the series. But he wore no veneer. For instance there is no dearth of people who set their own standards as the sole criterion for judging others without realising that in any society even a child has eyes: piercing eyes: eyes which can look through designs of those who are past masters at the game how to charter a path for post-retirement awards and cozy assignments? They master the art of reaping where they have not sown. Chaudhuri had those eyes that could, in seconds, sift the wheat from the chaff. He possessed eyes of a young child avid to know the mysteries around him and brain of an alert, agile, old man who, to quote Chaudhuri, “has read to live and not lived to read.” This rare combination made him scan everything in history and then apply to things around him.
Coming to these four scholars, obviously I had not heard of any such name. With my curiosity tiptoeing me, in due course of my progression which initiated me into a wider world of people, intellectuals and systems, I asked a few persons from elite planes of the country if they had read about these names. They straightway told they had either not heard of Nirad Chaudhuri or if they had heard, they had not read The Continent of Circe. People from academia had heard of him but many of them thought there were better books to read than the one in question. “Rubbish, we must not read rubbish,” said one of them. That is the pity. One consigns a book to flames even without reading it. Is it not pathetic? Remember Vladimir Nabokov lecture on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, “Where there is beauty, there is pity because beauty decays.” Good enough. But what if there is only pity and pity. Shallow knowledge does not make one a good judge of anything. It represents only pity and pity resulting in greater pity and pathos.
No doubt, no true Hindu worth his salt and I as a Hindu to the core, will never tolerate a book full of venom for Hindus and their traditions. Our greatness lies with us and we are aware of it. But with Chaudhuri, there are harsh truths. He required no special efforts to drive home the point that, “In fact, the necessity to be psychologically proof against filth is the first condition of understanding our life,” This is something which hardly needs a reiteration. The real problem is Chaudhuri, with his gargantuan knowledge of history and religious books, gave illustrations which were sickening and nauseating. Let us see this example he gave in support of his contention that, “Squeamishness is out of place in India.”