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Why I mourn for England
Collection of essays, previously published in various journals, of the author's love and affection for England and his grief over the loss of its glory in cultural and social fields.
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About the author
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
31 books82 followersNirad C. Chaudhuri (Bangla: নীরদ চন্দ্র চৌধুরী Nirod Chôndro Choudhuri) was a Bengali−English writer and cultural commentator. He was born in 1897 in Kishoreganj, which today is part of Bangladesh but at that time was part of Bengal, a region of British India.
He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1975 for his biography on Max Müller called Scholar Extraordinary, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters. In 1992, he was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom with the title of Commander of Order of the British Empire (CBE). His 1965 work The Continent of Circe earned him the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, becoming the first and only Indian to be selected for the prize.
In 1951 he published his most famous book, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, a penetrating and challenging analysis of Indian history, culture and British rule. The controversial dedication to the memory of the British Empire caused a furore at the time but the book is now considered a classic work of Indian literature. He was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for The Continent of Circe (1965), was made CBE in 1992 and received the Hon.D.Litt from the University of Oxford; the University of Viswa Bharati also awarded him Deshikottama, its highest honorary degree.
A passionate admirer of western culture, he first visited England in 1955, a visit which inspired his book Passage to England. He decided to make his home in Oxford in 1970 when he was over seventy. He was a familiar and arresting sight out and about in Oxford, a diminutive figure, always impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit, although he wore Indian attire at home. He wrote his last book Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse only a year before his death at the age of nearly 102.
He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1975 for his biography on Max Müller called Scholar Extraordinary, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters. In 1992, he was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom with the title of Commander of Order of the British Empire (CBE). His 1965 work The Continent of Circe earned him the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, becoming the first and only Indian to be selected for the prize.
In 1951 he published his most famous book, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, a penetrating and challenging analysis of Indian history, culture and British rule. The controversial dedication to the memory of the British Empire caused a furore at the time but the book is now considered a classic work of Indian literature. He was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for The Continent of Circe (1965), was made CBE in 1992 and received the Hon.D.Litt from the University of Oxford; the University of Viswa Bharati also awarded him Deshikottama, its highest honorary degree.
A passionate admirer of western culture, he first visited England in 1955, a visit which inspired his book Passage to England. He decided to make his home in Oxford in 1970 when he was over seventy. He was a familiar and arresting sight out and about in Oxford, a diminutive figure, always impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit, although he wore Indian attire at home. He wrote his last book Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse only a year before his death at the age of nearly 102.
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August 11, 2025
If Why I Mourn for England were a dish, it wouldn’t be an Edwardian tea served in Calcutta — it would be a reheated plate of leftover roast chicken smuggled under the table of the British Raj, served with a side of groveling and garnished with a forged ration card from 1943.
Nirad C. Chaudhuri doesn’t just mourn for England; he all but throws himself across her grave in full morning coat, sobbing into the Union Jack like a man who’s just been told the Empire won’t be sending him any more invites to the garden parties. This is not nostalgia — this is imperial necrophilia.
Chaudhuri, for the uninitiated, was the kind of man who could be in Calcutta during the Bengal famine and still find a way to blame Indian “indiscipline” while quietly winking at the British administrators. And yes, the rumours of him playing informant during the Second World War weren’t exactly whispered in the shadows — they were practically printed on his calling cards. Reading Why I Mourn for England, you can’t shake the feeling you’re holding the literary equivalent of a wartime intelligence report disguised as an elegy, with half the sentences meant for British eyes only.
The book itself is an unbroken aria of longing for an England that never actually existed — at least, not outside of Eton’s school prospectus and some dusty Oxford quad in Chaudhuri’s mind.
To him, England is not a flawed, evolving country; it’s a cathedral of imperial virtue, vandalised by post-war socialists, decolonisation, and the unbearable reality that the world no longer revolved around Whitehall. He writes as if Clement Attlee personally torched Shakespeare’s folios and nationalised the Magna Carta. The loss of the British Empire, in his telling, wasn’t just geopolitics — it was the death of civilisation itself.
It’s all very moving if you happen to be a retired colonial officer with a whisky habit and a trunk full of medals. But if you’re literally anyone else, you start to wonder why this Indian intellectual is essentially delivering a TED Talk for the preservation of British imperial superiority — twenty years after the Empire had been shown the door. Chaudhuri is the rare colonial subject who doesn’t just forgive his oppressors — he writes them love letters, binds them in leather, and sends them back across the sea with a little spritz of lavender water.
His prose is, infuriatingly, brilliant — needle-sharp, rhythmically perfect, and loaded with references that make you want to hurl your Penguin Classics shelf at the wall. That’s part of what makes him so maddening.
You want to write him off as a simpering apologist for Empire, but then he drops a paragraph so perfectly balanced in syntax and wit that you almost — almost — forgive him for being a political embarrassment. It’s like watching a master fencer who insists on using his skill to defend the honour of the guy who robbed your house.
The tone of Why I Mourn for England is pure drawing-room lament: all candlelight, polished brass, and polite despair over the collapse of the Empire. But the subtext is less romantic — it’s a kind of cultural fifth-column work.
Chaudhuri positions himself as the last true interpreter of English greatness, but in doing so, he plays straight into the hands of those in Britain who still wanted to believe that India’s greatest minds secretly yearned for the old days of the Raj. He becomes their favourite pet intellectual, the one who confirms their superiority with eloquence so refined they don’t even notice it’s cringe.
There’s a particularly perverse moment when you realise that Chaudhuri’s mourning for England is not just about England — it’s about mourning the social position he enjoyed under the British. The loss is personal. Under the Raj, he was a clever man with access to British patronage, British publishers, and British circles of prestige.
Post-independence India was messier, hungrier, less in need of Anglophile essayists, and far more interested in building its own identity than in keeping the Union Jack ironed. It’s hard to escape the suspicion that Why I Mourn for England is less a funeral for a nation and more a bitter diary entry from a man who’s just been made irrelevant.
Even his criticism of post-war Britain rings hollow, because it’s delivered from such a bizarre vantage point. He’s not angry at England for the crimes of empire; he’s angry at it for losing the confidence to keep doing them.
In Chaudhuri’s imagination, the welfare state and decolonisation were not victories of human dignity but symptoms of a national moral collapse. It’s the kind of logic you only get from someone who truly believes the pinnacle of human history was a handful of aristocrats in morning coats dictating policy for a quarter of the globe.
And then there’s the spy question — the wartime service that wasn’t quite military, wasn’t quite civilian, but somehow kept him conveniently useful to the British cause. Chaudhuri liked to present himself as a man above petty politics, a servant of pure intellect, but it’s striking how often “pure intellect” seems to coincide with the interests of the imperial state. Reading Why I Mourn for England, you can almost picture him in 1943, penning glowing prose about English virtue while sliding coded notes under a certain office door in Calcutta.
The result is a book that, for all its elegance, feels fundamentally dishonest — a performance of grief designed to flatter his chosen audience. It’s an act, and like all acts, it wears thin. You begin to notice how often he skips over the uglier facts, how he glides past the working-class poverty in pre-war Britain, how he politely ignores the exploitation and repression that funded the grandeur he so adored. It’s as if you’re listening to someone mourn the Titanic without mentioning the iceberg, the lifeboat shortage, or the fact that half the passengers were locked below deck.
Still, credit where due: Chaudhuri was never a coward about his opinions. He knew they’d scandalise independent India, and he published them anyway. That takes a certain kind of nerve — the kind of nerve, unfortunately, that’s easiest to muster when you’ve already secured your income from British publishers and your place in British literary society. If you’re going to be a colonial contrarian, it helps to know you can always retreat to the mother country for applause.
In the end, Why I Mourn for England is exactly what you’d expect from a man who never really left the Raj behind. It’s an extended toast to the Empire, delivered in absentia, with the glass held high and the eyes misty. For those who share his nostalgia, it’s a masterpiece; for the rest of us, it’s a reminder that intelligence and integrity don’t always share the same address.
As literature, it’s sharp, polished, and occasionally dazzling. As politics, it’s a museum piece — a fossilised worldview preserved in the amber of self-importance. Chaudhuri may have fancied himself the last Englishman in India, but history will remember him more as the last colonial courtier: eloquent, loyal, and hopelessly out of step with the century that replaced him.
And if England truly needed a mourner, it deserved one who loved it enough to tell the truth — not just about its glories, but about its crimes. Chaudhuri gave it half that love, wrapped in perfect sentences, and handed it back across the sea.
The British, of course, adored him for it.
Nirad C. Chaudhuri doesn’t just mourn for England; he all but throws himself across her grave in full morning coat, sobbing into the Union Jack like a man who’s just been told the Empire won’t be sending him any more invites to the garden parties. This is not nostalgia — this is imperial necrophilia.
Chaudhuri, for the uninitiated, was the kind of man who could be in Calcutta during the Bengal famine and still find a way to blame Indian “indiscipline” while quietly winking at the British administrators. And yes, the rumours of him playing informant during the Second World War weren’t exactly whispered in the shadows — they were practically printed on his calling cards. Reading Why I Mourn for England, you can’t shake the feeling you’re holding the literary equivalent of a wartime intelligence report disguised as an elegy, with half the sentences meant for British eyes only.
The book itself is an unbroken aria of longing for an England that never actually existed — at least, not outside of Eton’s school prospectus and some dusty Oxford quad in Chaudhuri’s mind.
To him, England is not a flawed, evolving country; it’s a cathedral of imperial virtue, vandalised by post-war socialists, decolonisation, and the unbearable reality that the world no longer revolved around Whitehall. He writes as if Clement Attlee personally torched Shakespeare’s folios and nationalised the Magna Carta. The loss of the British Empire, in his telling, wasn’t just geopolitics — it was the death of civilisation itself.
It’s all very moving if you happen to be a retired colonial officer with a whisky habit and a trunk full of medals. But if you’re literally anyone else, you start to wonder why this Indian intellectual is essentially delivering a TED Talk for the preservation of British imperial superiority — twenty years after the Empire had been shown the door. Chaudhuri is the rare colonial subject who doesn’t just forgive his oppressors — he writes them love letters, binds them in leather, and sends them back across the sea with a little spritz of lavender water.
His prose is, infuriatingly, brilliant — needle-sharp, rhythmically perfect, and loaded with references that make you want to hurl your Penguin Classics shelf at the wall. That’s part of what makes him so maddening.
You want to write him off as a simpering apologist for Empire, but then he drops a paragraph so perfectly balanced in syntax and wit that you almost — almost — forgive him for being a political embarrassment. It’s like watching a master fencer who insists on using his skill to defend the honour of the guy who robbed your house.
The tone of Why I Mourn for England is pure drawing-room lament: all candlelight, polished brass, and polite despair over the collapse of the Empire. But the subtext is less romantic — it’s a kind of cultural fifth-column work.
Chaudhuri positions himself as the last true interpreter of English greatness, but in doing so, he plays straight into the hands of those in Britain who still wanted to believe that India’s greatest minds secretly yearned for the old days of the Raj. He becomes their favourite pet intellectual, the one who confirms their superiority with eloquence so refined they don’t even notice it’s cringe.
There’s a particularly perverse moment when you realise that Chaudhuri’s mourning for England is not just about England — it’s about mourning the social position he enjoyed under the British. The loss is personal. Under the Raj, he was a clever man with access to British patronage, British publishers, and British circles of prestige.
Post-independence India was messier, hungrier, less in need of Anglophile essayists, and far more interested in building its own identity than in keeping the Union Jack ironed. It’s hard to escape the suspicion that Why I Mourn for England is less a funeral for a nation and more a bitter diary entry from a man who’s just been made irrelevant.
Even his criticism of post-war Britain rings hollow, because it’s delivered from such a bizarre vantage point. He’s not angry at England for the crimes of empire; he’s angry at it for losing the confidence to keep doing them.
In Chaudhuri’s imagination, the welfare state and decolonisation were not victories of human dignity but symptoms of a national moral collapse. It’s the kind of logic you only get from someone who truly believes the pinnacle of human history was a handful of aristocrats in morning coats dictating policy for a quarter of the globe.
And then there’s the spy question — the wartime service that wasn’t quite military, wasn’t quite civilian, but somehow kept him conveniently useful to the British cause. Chaudhuri liked to present himself as a man above petty politics, a servant of pure intellect, but it’s striking how often “pure intellect” seems to coincide with the interests of the imperial state. Reading Why I Mourn for England, you can almost picture him in 1943, penning glowing prose about English virtue while sliding coded notes under a certain office door in Calcutta.
The result is a book that, for all its elegance, feels fundamentally dishonest — a performance of grief designed to flatter his chosen audience. It’s an act, and like all acts, it wears thin. You begin to notice how often he skips over the uglier facts, how he glides past the working-class poverty in pre-war Britain, how he politely ignores the exploitation and repression that funded the grandeur he so adored. It’s as if you’re listening to someone mourn the Titanic without mentioning the iceberg, the lifeboat shortage, or the fact that half the passengers were locked below deck.
Still, credit where due: Chaudhuri was never a coward about his opinions. He knew they’d scandalise independent India, and he published them anyway. That takes a certain kind of nerve — the kind of nerve, unfortunately, that’s easiest to muster when you’ve already secured your income from British publishers and your place in British literary society. If you’re going to be a colonial contrarian, it helps to know you can always retreat to the mother country for applause.
In the end, Why I Mourn for England is exactly what you’d expect from a man who never really left the Raj behind. It’s an extended toast to the Empire, delivered in absentia, with the glass held high and the eyes misty. For those who share his nostalgia, it’s a masterpiece; for the rest of us, it’s a reminder that intelligence and integrity don’t always share the same address.
As literature, it’s sharp, polished, and occasionally dazzling. As politics, it’s a museum piece — a fossilised worldview preserved in the amber of self-importance. Chaudhuri may have fancied himself the last Englishman in India, but history will remember him more as the last colonial courtier: eloquent, loyal, and hopelessly out of step with the century that replaced him.
And if England truly needed a mourner, it deserved one who loved it enough to tell the truth — not just about its glories, but about its crimes. Chaudhuri gave it half that love, wrapped in perfect sentences, and handed it back across the sea.
The British, of course, adored him for it.
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