Nirad Chaudhuri   CD and MP3

    Nirad Chaudhuri is a name that probably now means nothing to most Indian and non-Indians alike. Yet he was called in his lifetime (and it was a very long lifetime, spanning exactly one hundred years) the best stylist among living writers in the English language. Chaudhuri, who lived the second half of his life in Britain, also cheerfully acknowledged that he was one of the most hated and disliked people in his native India.

    1988 saw the publication of the second volume of Chaudhuri's memoirs, "Thy Hand, Great Anarch", a massive volume of over 950 pages chronicling just twenty five of Chaudhuri's adult years preceding Indian Independence in 1947. In 1951 he had achieved lasting notoriety with the publication of "The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian" , covering his childhood and early adulthood in East Bengal (later Bangladesh) and then Kolkata (Calcutta) in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century. Acclaimed in Britain, a political and literary scandal in India, Julian Crandall Hollick investigated the enigma of Nirad Chaudhuri, the "Unknown Indian," for NPR's Morning Editoon in 1988.