Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers by Shashi Tharoor

highly of Winston Churchill than he did of Mahatma Gandhi or Pandit Nehru. It was typical that his take-no-prisoners assault on all the citadels of Indian culture and civilization was titled
The Continent of Circe:
he had to turn to Western mythology even for his principal metaphor.
Civis Brittanicus Sum
indeed: no doubt woggishness loses something in the translation.
    There is a great deal of truth in the indulgent suggestion by the American historian David Lelyveld that “Nirad Chaudhuri is a fiction created by the Indian writer of the same name — a bizarre, outrageous and magical transformation of that stock character of imperialist literature, the Bengali babu.” The problem is that the caricatured babu was not transformed enough. While the British laughed at the breed for their half-successful attempts to emulate their English masters, Nirad-babu sought to demonstrate that his success was impossible to laugh at. In 1835, that archimperialist Lord Macaulay had envisaged the creation of an intermediate class of Indians, educated in English, to serve and support British rule: they would be “a class of persons Indian in blood and color but English in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Not only did Nirad Chaudhuri teach himself tobecome the perfect English gentleman in terms of his intellect, tastes, and pro-imperial opinions (carrying the Macaulayan fantasy to its absurd extreme), but he went one better than most Englishmen, scattering phrases in French, German, and Italian through his writing.
    Nirad-babu moved to England for good in 1970, but in his mind he had always lived there. Yet his writing itself evoked the Bengali babu's obsession with his lofty heritage, and his petulance at the failure of the white man to recognize and reward it. That there might be something faintly comical about the sight of this wizened figure, in his immaculate Bengali dhoti, strutting about Oxford lamenting the decline of British civilization does not seem to have occurred to his admirers. But then comedy is not what one thinks about at the crematorium.

14
R. K. Narayan's Comedies of Suffering
     
    W HEN THE NEWS BROKE IN 2001 of the ending of India's most distinguished literary career of the twentieth century, that of Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Narayanaswami (contracted, at Graham Greene's suggestion, to R. K. Narayan), who had passed away at ninety-two, I immediately received a number of calls from journalists and editors, mainly in the United States, who were hastily penning appreciations of the veteran writer. In every case, they asked for a contribution, a few lines, or at least a quote; in every case, I demurred. Death is a moment for regret, for retrospection and remembered affection, but I had little admiration to offer. At the same time, only once had I allowed the news of a writer's death to prompt me to pour vitriol onto his pyre, and that was when the Indophobic Nirad Chaudhuri went to his Elysian fields. I certainly did not feel so negatively about Narayan. Better to say nothing, I decided, when you have nothing much to say.
    But the queries continued to come in, and once adecent interval had passed, I agreed that perhaps the time had come to unburden myself. First of all, of a past wrong. Back in 1994, in a review of his
Grandmother's Tale
in the
New York Times,
I had criticized R. K. Narayan's writing in a manner that, I later learned, deeply hurt the old man. (I had not intended to, but was guilty, like most reviewers, of forgetting that writers, however eminent they may be, also have feelings.) My review also offended a number of friends I liked and respected — friends who accused me of lèse-majesté, iconoclasm, and Stephanian elitism, among other sins. So I suppose I had better explain myself.
    To begin with, let me stress that my favorite Narayan story is the story of how he got his start as a novelist. “Some time in the early thirties,” Graham Greene recalled, “an Indian friend of mine called Purna