Cultural Awareness in Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian

Abstract

The early part of the nineteenth century, the Indian cultural movement reached its climax and then began to break up. The sign of decay starts to come in perception in the years between 1916 and 1948. So the first hand sense of build up modern Indian culture started by the great Bengali reformers like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Raja Ram Mohun Roy, Swami Vivekananda and Rabindra Nath Tagore. In the beginning of twentieth century, the attempt of these social reformers created a sense of literary, humanistic, religious and ethical values of Indian culture. After the independence, Chaudhuri confirms that the attempt of them made the sense of cultural equality. The native culture realized that it should not imitate the traits of the alien culture any longer and began to cleanse itself of the contamination by the alien culture. But Chaudhuri observes that Hinduism and Indian culture has supernatural sense and it should be modify reasonably to make rich the ethical values. The literary works of Nirad C. Chaudhuri have generally presented him to be an anti-Indian writer. He considered as a communicator of the complexity of his native culture, embodies newness and describe the colonies as exotic perspective. This essay studies Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s attempt to write the output of Indian culture through an autobiographical non-fiction The Autobio-graphy of an Unknown Indian establishing his views and position detached from his countrymen. Here he expresses his views regarding the West and the East from a self-detached point of view. The critics and literary personalities related to him believe that he is a social observer more than a social writer. In this book, he gives an account of cultural, religious, and political aspect of society. In this paper, we will study how much relevant the book in respect of Indian cultural ethos.