The Thorn in the Crown : THY HAND, GREAT ANARCH! : India: 1921-1952 <i> by Nirad C. Chaudhuri (Addison-Wesley: $29.95; 963 pp.) </i>

Nirad Chaudhuri is an extraordinary hybrid of two powerful cultures, the Indian and the British or, more broadly, the European. He is one of a rather limited class of writers found in several countries that were formerly colonies, and who constitute what is perhaps the most striking and beneficial result of the age of imperialism.

These are figures such as Chaudhuri’s fellow-Bengali Tagore, V. S. Naipaul, Ved Mehta and, in French, Leopold Senghor. They have come from indigenous peoples ruled by some imperial power, but they have made themselves total masters of the language and culture of the metropolitan state to such an extent that they handle its language superlatively well, and put to shame by their brilliance those whose language it is from birth.

India in modern times has been particularly productive of such writers. For one thing, the British connection with India lasted much longer than other similar relationships. The cultural penetration was deeper. Among such Indian writers, none is more dazzling in his effortless command of the English language (as well as of French and Latin), and familiarity with an enormous range of knowledge of European culture, than Chaudhuri. He can perform at any level, from minutely remembered curious incidents of his younger years and middle age, to the splendid diapason of the last 20 pages where, in a nobly stated credo, he sums up the philosophical and religious lessons of his long life.

That life began in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, when he was born in a village of East Bengal. His family was a moderately prosperous professional one. A first installment of his life story, his first book, “The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,” was published in Britain in 1951. There it attracted immense attention as a brilliant, eloquent and iconoclastic work. The icons smashed were mostly Indian, so the reviewers in India were, with equal unanimity, hostile, accusing it of being “anti-Indian.”

The “Autobiography” took the story of Chaudhuri’s life and opinions down only to 1921. The present book continues that story, but only to 1952. The implied third volume will probably never be written. The ample scale is partly explained by the author’s explicit intention to combine three elements: his personal life; his thoughts and feelings about the historical events through which he passed; and an account of what happened to India in those three decades “free from the current myths.” All this he accomplishes handsomely. It is all set forth with a gusto, precision and rhetorical intensity that would be notable in a man of 25; but this author is in his 90s.

Chaudhuri’s life, like his opinions, has taken some odd turns and twists. He has alternated between prosperity and indigence. He gained his BA in history from the University of Calcutta but, to the deep disappointment of his family, absolutely refused to proceed further with his education. A first, brief period of poverty ended when through the interest of a relative, he obtained a Civil Service post, in the Military Accounts Department in Calcutta. With reasonable diligence, this would have led in only a few years to a genteel sufficiency, but Chaudhuri’s diligence rather rapidly tapered off, and in 1926, he gave up the post.

Seduced by reading Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gypsy,” and encouraged by the appearance of his first publication in English, he struggled for 11 years to make a living only by his pen. He observed closely and with a sympathy that later evaporated the nationalist struggles of the early 1930s. His general attitude to the nationalist leaders is at best lukewarm. It was also in this period of near-poverty that he married--an arranged marriage. His wife was well-educated, courageous, and a great accession of strength to him.

From 1937 to 1942 he was secretary to Sarat Chandra Bose, Congress leader, till in 1942 he again took up a Civil Service post, as a writer of commentaries on military affairs and international relations for All-India-Radio. The talks he delivered, of which he cites many, were perceptive and included many accurate prophecies.

During this wartime period, he despised his fellow Indians for their gloating over British defeats. In 1952, after publication of the “Autobiography,” his employment with AIR reached, in his words, “a squalid finale” when a shabby intrigue by his Bengali superiors terminated his tenure.

Poverty again; until the French ambassador in Delhi gave him employment as a writer of English-language materials. In 1955, at the invitation of the BBC, he visited Britain. The trip produced his second book, “A Passage to England.” It was his first visit, but Britain had always been in some sort his spiritual home. He and his wife moved there in 1970 and have lived in Oxford ever since.

Chaudhuri might well, like Cardinal Newman, have called his book “Apologia Pro Vita Sua.” The actual title, from Alexander Pope’s “Dunciad,” expresses his profound pessimism. The book is rather longer than “Gone With the Wind,” and it is a kind of “Gone With the Wind” too. His native Bengal was once--like Virginia in the early United States--the supremely important part of the country, a nursery of leaders. All that went. The capital was moved from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911, East Bengal where Chaudhuri was born became part of Pakistan in 1947, and in 1971 turned into the most distressful country of Bangladesh. Beyond that, Chaudhuri deplores what has happened in India since independence, laments the decline of the West in general and Britain in particular. A profoundly pessimistic world-view akin to that of Spengler or Albert Jay Nock is set forth in prose a good deal sprightlier than theirs.

His highly individual opinions are always set forth with aphoristic pungency. “The worship of Gandhi is, in the British above all, unqualified imbecility and a sure proof of the degeneration of the British character.” “With the Hindus” the hunger strike “was nothing more than a particular application of their general strategy of exploiting the decencies of other people.”

“After the heroic efforts of six years (1939-1945) the will of the British people suddenly failed, and it is this . . . which destroyed the greatness of Britain.” “The withdrawal in 1947 . . . was ratting , nothing more, nothing less.” “In our age immorality has become as fanatical as Communism.” “I have always been immune to intellectual fashion.” He has, indeed.