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Sir J. C. Squire to Dr. C.R. Reddi

My dear old Reddi,

I spent five days and nights over Christmas and the New Year reading a manuscript for Macmillans (this is between ourselves) called “The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian�. The author’s name is Chaudari - though I don’t think I have spelt it properly. I wish that you had been here when I read it. He has his defects, for instance, he has never been out of Bengal, and although he has drawn spiritual sustenance from all the great English authors of the past, and thinks that any Indian revival must come from Europe and mainly from England, he has met very few Englishmen, and has certain resentment against the commercial community in Calcutta, who I don’t suppose would suit me any better than they suited him.

He was born the son of a small landowner-cum-lawyer in Eastern Bengal. While he was making his acquaintance with England and English literature through Miss Mitford’s “Our Village�, and thinking how pleasant English village inns, cottagers and cricket must be, his family were, in honour of Kali, cutting buffaloes, throats in the courtyard and then pelting each other, still in honour of the goddess, with dumplings, compounded of warm buffaloes� blood and dirt.

He went to Calcutta University - he reproduces an essay about the principles on which history should be written, which he wrote at nineteen; you, precocious as you were, might have written it at that age, but I should be pleased with myself if I could write it now. He came out first in the first class, in the Calcutta B.A. examination; he was frail and over-tired, and failed his M.A. Without M.A., he could not pursue the academic career for which he was superbly qualified; so he meekly became a clerk in a Government Department.

Reddy, my dear, he is a sage; he is as familiar with all the arts of the world as he is with religions and philosophies. His English is so good that one is tempted to think that he must have had a translator; but a translator as good as that would never have bothered about translation, but have written great works of English prose on his own. This “Unknown Indian� hovers above our globe, and sadly scrutinises the fluctuating fortunes not merely of India, with her succession of invaders, but of all mankind.

He comes up to the present day; explains Gandhi better to me than he ever has been explained before, and faces all the contemporary facts in India and elsewhere (he sees and regrets a decaying civilisation in Europe): seldom reading a manuscript do I feel that I am in contact with a Mind. He could meet any of the great thinkers of the past on an equal footing. It seems to me evident that you should make contact with him, though he is probably a thousand miles away from you.

If his book comes out, as I hope it will, it may put India into an uproar. But it will certainly enlighten all historically-minded men; and he might possibly, if necessary, find a refuge in England where in spite of all we have lost, we are still allowed liberty to think.

All my love,
Jack

(�TRIVENI� already paid tributes to Nirad Chaudry Chaudhury, a Titan among the writers in English)