Nirad Chaudhuri was a scholar and artist, an exile, a man with a tragic view of life but also a comedian, in every way a free spirit. Just five feet tall, he filled the room with the solar energy of his extraordinary personality. He was rightly proud to publish a book at the age of 100, and up to the last days before his death on August 1 at age 101, he was still reading and writing and listening to great music.
He was born in Kishorganj, a village in Bengal, in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, just in time to see the British Empire in its heroic mode as ruler of a sixth of the globe and with a self-imposed duty to see that all its subjects would be free and equal under the rule of law. Bengali, Sanskrit, and Prakrit were the languages of his own culture. But as a boy, according to his memoirs, he used to wander along the banks of the local river declaiming in English the speeches of Edmund Burke, the poems of Matthew Arnold, and even Nelson’s message to the Trafalgar fleet: “England expects every man will do his duty.” Then he decided he had to learn French, to read Remy de Gourmont and Sorel. And German too, for Ernst Bernheim’s Lehrbuch der historischen Methode.
