As the old song does not have it, old soldiers never die nor fade away, but write memoirs. But let us grant it to them, they usually make a much better job of it than old civil servants. At least General Chaudhuri does. The book is written in crisp and cultivated English, which I attribute less to Sandhurst and the lesser English school he went to earlier but to his mother—Newnham and Sorbonne graduate eighty years ago—who read aloud to him as a boy all the more interesting classics and made him memorize a good deal of poetry, which came in handy much later when General Chaudhuri wanted an old saw or a modern instance to garnish his conversation with. A slightly less orthodox education was provided by his uncle’s library, which had such suitable material for young minds as Havelock Ellis’ Psychology of Sex, with its tantalizing case histories that had a fair sprinkling of Latin in an otherwise Anglo-Saxon text. The General did not probably acquire his Latin from them, though, like many others before and after, he must have tried hard to construe these passages! His latter-day taste in erotica was, as in the case of most of us, different: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to wit, a copy of which he lent (why?) to a brigadier’s daughter, who never returned it. That is how one’s library gets depleted, but that is another story.[ih`c-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”block” ihc_mb_who=”unreg” ihc_mb_template=”1″ ]
The book is no formal memoir, portentous and dull, full of reasons why the general did not win the wars he lost or of opaque descantation on strategy or defence organization. There is a certain amount of the latter in the second—and lesser—half of the book, which is clearly eked out. Here the anonymous military correspondent of the Statesman takes over from time to time and holds forth on India as the natural arsenal of West and South-East Asia, the necessity to study ‘Insurgency and the value, to developing countries, of the infantry man, ‘the cat-burglar, gunman and poacher’ of Wavel1’s definition. All this is somewhat scrappy and much less interesting than the first half of the book, in which the young ‘Koi Hai’ was in the making. It is agreeable anecdotage to the author and the reader alike, a case of looking back with nostalgia not so much on the high spots as on those convivial moments of camaraderie. General Chaudhuri has a sharp eye for the absurd and a turn of phrase that, if not exactly witty, is humorous enough to please. There are any number of ‘characters’: an uncle in Paris who gave him a hundred francs and asked him to go out for the evening and ‘get some experience’; his English servant at Sandhurst who lent him money when he was low in funds and called everyone a ‘bastard’; the English Major at Poona who consigned inconvenient queries from Headquarters to WAC or ‘the White Ant Cupboard’; another English Major’s wife who told him on the race course at Quetta that ‘To be or not to be …’ was a quotation from a famous English poet called Shakespeare. Captain Chaudhuri told her that he was surprised for he had always believed that it was a translation from a Persian poet called Sheikh Pir.
General Chaudhuri’s has been a full and reasonably fulfilled life, though one must remember Solon’s injunction, ‘Call no man happy till he dies, he is at best fortunate.’ General Chaudhuri himself says, talking of Slim and Auchinleck, that ‘luck has always played a great part in the career of generals in addition to competence.’ And so it has, in his own case, as he would be the first to acknowledge and, as is indeed the thrust of this autobiography Seeming set-backs in career have turned out to be blessings in disguise. And soon after he took over from General Thapar as Chief of Army Staff, the Chinese declared an unilateral cease fire ‘which was a bit of luck for us.’ His luck has held in other ways, though he has had difficult assignments whose successful conclusion cannot be wholly attributed to luck. Chaudhuri has met everyone who was anyone, from Idi Amin to Mao Tse-tung, whom he charmed into calling him ‘a rascal’ (in chaste Mandarin Chinese, of course) by his quick repartee.
General Chaudhuri is totally apolitical which is hardly surprising, given his family background—affluent and anglophile, on both sides—and training. Contrary to the impression spread by some latter-day myth-makers—Nirad. C. Chaudhuri, among them—that Bengal’s servitude to England was only intellectual, there has been in Bengal as elsewhere a hard core of empire loyalists untouched by the upheavals of Curzon’s partition of Bengal or the nationalism of the last years of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century. Chaudhuri mentions quite candidly that there was ‘hardly any significant political action or discussion either in our own home or in the homes of our relations or friends’ and that his ‘generation of Chaudhuris and Bonnerjees, with their friends among the Chatterjees, Mukherjees, …… all good Bengali names had little real political education or awareness.’ Later when occasions did arise at Sandhurst and in the Army when racial discrimination reared its ugly head they seem to have been in rather trivial contexts like Indian meals not being served in the mess. At any rate, Chaudhuri does not mention more serious instances. And one gets the impression of a certain amount of unconscious editing of memories at the time of dictating the memoirs, if not of an earlier Freudian suppression of unpleasant experiences. But even the quoted instances of discrimination were accepted without demur and Chaudhuri is at a loss to explain ‘why we Indians did not protest more vigorously.’ Could one reason be that they thought of themselves as Englishmen? At least in Chaudhuri’s psyche this ‘Englishry’ is deeply embedded, leading even to such English behavioural idiosyncrasies as verbal understatement not usually associated with a Bengali. Who but an Englishman would say that the ‘Nizam maintained a very satisfactory symphony orchestra’? It reminds one of the joke about two Englishmen admiring the sunset. When one of them said after a long pause, ‘Not so dusty, what?’ the other admonished him, ‘No need to rave like a bloody poet.’
Chaudhuri’s Sandhurst background no doubt helped, though from time to time, he had some ambiguous compliments paid to him by being told ‘You are, after all, one of us, you know.’ Quite the Kiplingesque situation:
‘So ‘ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy’ at your
‘ome in the Soudan,
You’re a pore benighted ‘eathen, but a
first class fighting man.’
Some of the earlier books of Vikas had given the impression that they grudged the salary of a literary editor. But with a text that had perhaps less need of one, they seem to have dispensed with the proof-reader! Rather hard on General Chaudhuri, but ‘Thrift, Horatio, Thrift!’
N.S. Jagannathan is Assistant Editor, The Statesman, New Delhi.
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