Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T15:53:04.637Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Provincial Polymath: The Curious Cosmopolitanism of Nirad C. Chaudhuri

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Saikat Majumdar
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Is a humanist intellectual with a popular audience more likely to be a credentialed expert or an autodidact at odds with the established norms of scholarship? Is such an intellectual, to use Marjorie Garber's terms, a professional or an amateur? his essay considers these questions in the light of the institutionalization of a humanist curriculum in late colonial Britain and its overseas empire in order to examine the controversial figure of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a Bengali intellectual whose popular and provocative appeal derives from his position as an amateur and an autodidact. Such an intellectual identity is at odds with colonial education's ideological enterprise: to create a certain kind of professional subject. Though Chaudhuri is popularly perceived to be an Anglophile, his amateur identity not only provides the secret of his appeal but also departs from the institutionalization of humanist education that characterized the British Empire.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 2 , March 2015 , pp. 269 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Almond, Ian. “Four Ways of Reading Nirad C. Chaudhuri: A Case Study of a Postcolonial Conservative.” Orbis Litterarum 66.6 (2011): 1–18. Print.Google Scholar
Aparajito. Dir. Satyajit Ray. 1957. Sony, 2003. DVD.Google Scholar
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Ed. Cheah, Pheng and Robbins, Bruce. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. 91–116. Print.Google Scholar
Bandopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan. Aparajito. Upanyas Samagra. Kolkata: Mitra, 2006. 3–242. Print.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi. “The Vernacular Cosmopolitan.” Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa. Ed. Dennis, Ferdinand and Khan, Naseem. London: Serpent's Tail, 2000. 133–42. Print.Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, Dhruva N. Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Many Shades, Many Frames. Delhi: Niyogi, 2011. Print.Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, Nirad C. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. New York: Macmillan, 1951. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chaudhuri, Nirad C. A Passage to England. London: Hogarth, 1989. Print. Chaudhuri, Rosinka. Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project. Kolkata: Seagull, 2002. Print.Google Scholar
Chowdhury, Indira. The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Clifford, James. “Traveling Cultures.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Nelson, Cary, Grossberg, Lawrence, and Treichler, Paula A. London: Routledge, 1996. 96–116. Print.Google Scholar
Dasgupta, Swapan, ed. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, the First Hundred Years: A Celebration. Delhi: HarperCollins India, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Jack, Ian. “The World's Last Englishman.” Dasgupta 39–51.Google Scholar
James, C. L. R. Beyond a Boundary. New York: Pantheon, 1983. Print.Google Scholar
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “We Say Desh: The Other Nirad Babu.” Dasgupta 78–90.Google Scholar
Ranasinha, Ruvani. South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Rastogi, Pallavi. “Timeless England Will Remain Hanging in the Air.” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 28.3 (2006): 318–36. Web. 12 Aug. 2013.Google Scholar
Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Young, Robert J. C. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar