A Passage To England

Nirad C. Chaudhuri was a well-known Bengali intellectual, a writer, editor and literary journalist who had worked for the independence activist Sarat Chandra Bose in the thirties, but later became rather critical of the politics of post-independence India, an attitude that often left him marginalised and - probably unfairly - branded as "pro-British" in later life. He moved to the UK in the 70s. Chaudhuri was educated in Kolkata at a time when the curriculum was heavily weighted towards British literature and history: he probably knew the works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Spenser and Sidney much more intimately than most of his contemporaries who had been through the British school system, not to mention being on familiar terms with Horace, Virgil and Racine. He quotes Hardy or Grey's Elegy at the drop of a cowpat, and takes his ideas of country-house tourism from Elizabeth Bennet's holiday in Derbyshire. But he obviously also knows what he's talking about when it comes to Hindu culture and history. He's clearly not a socialist of any kind, and seems to take a perverse pleasure in caricaturing himself as something like a 1950s embodiment of Kipling's Babu. You would imagine that it must have been quite a shock for someone like that to arrive in England for the first time in 1955 as the guest of the British Council and the BBC, and find himself in the world of the Welfare State, British Railways and the National Trust (not to mention Angry Young Men and Anthony Eden). But he robustly resists any temptation to be disenchanted by what he finds. He's on holiday and he's determined to have a good time. And he takes a huge pleasure in discovering that the English are still just as enthusiastic about their cultural heritage as he is, even if they don't always know very much about it. He is happy to pay his half-crown at Knole, Kenwood and Penshurst Place and to see Sir Laurence doing Twelfth Night at the Old Vic.