Folded in my copy of Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India: 1921-1952 is the last letter Nirad C. Chaudhuri ever wrote to me. I have kept it not because of the author but because of my father. Dated December 4, 1987, and written in Chaudhuri?s scrawl, it says, ?I have to tell you that the reference on p 179 to the friend who escorted me to my cousin?s home at the time of the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1926 in Calcutta is to your father. You will be amused to note the (illegible) between him and my West Bengal friend Bibhuti Babu.? ?Father? is underlined twice; ?amused?? scratched out and rewritten; the word I cannot read ? it could be in any language ? baffled Chaudhuri too when Andrew Robinson, the English writer who specializes in Bengal, showed him the letter last year. My reason for recounting this in an obituary column is to indicate that the humble past always walked with Chaudhuri even as he walked with the world?s great. It was a fallacy to think of him as a ?brown sahib? ? a clearly recognizable once-upon-a-time Calcutta breed with which he had nothing in common ? and to miss his imperishable bangal identity. For if god gave all men all earth to love, for Chaudhuri it narrowed down to the banks of the Narasindhu river in Mymensingh district (as it then was) where he was bred. The point of the anecdote concerning my father was that while Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay of Pather Panchali fame, being a mere ghoti, fled at the first sign of communal trouble after having sworn loudly to stand by Chaudhuri, my father, the strong silent bangal who had made no bombastic promise, risked his own life to protect him from a mob chanting ?Kill the fellows!? Seventy two years later Chaudhuri told Andrew that he recollected the incident perfectly. Posterity will remember him as the prophet of doom. He wrote with insight of the decay of Bengali culture, the decline of Bengal?s influence on Indian politics and of the degradation of the imperium that shaped modern India. His later essays (like ?Why I Mourn for England?? in The Daily Telegraph in 1988) and that extraordinary volume, Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, written when he was 99, lamented that having given the empire an inglorious burial, the British had ceased to deserve their heritage. The Horsemen title, as well as the title of his last great work, taken from Alexander Pope?s lines, ?Thy hand, great Anarch! Lets the curtain fall;/ And Universal Darkness buries All!?? explain why decadence was a recurring theme. ?It is a fatality with me,? he wrote, ?that wherever I go the spectre of decadence treads at my heels like the Foul Fiend.? Perhaps it began with the death of the East Bengal that he fled. I had glimpsed this undying loyalty to his roots, to which he did not ever directly refer, and to his photographic memory, of which he made much, long before Thy Hand, at our very first meeting in his poky flat near Delhi?s Kashmiri Gate. Smarting from what Dom Moraes and Ved Mehta had written about him, Chaudhuri was reluctant to receive me at first. Then, suspecting a bangal connection, he overwhelmed me with family lore: my grandfather who had been dead half a century and whom he eulogized as a famous man of ?amader desh? ? meaning the green and gold of East Bengal ? and an uncle, my father?s sister?s husband, Chaudhuri?s Tuinna-mama in whose Kishoregunj house he had read his first Greek classic. Chaudhuri could be warm and chatty at that simple level, the humanity he projected captured in the photographs of a barebodied man in a dhoti pruning his roses in Oxford, a habitat that I did not ever see, that his devoted wife Amiya sent me many years later. At the exalted level of writer, he took great pride in displaying the formidable erudition and keen analytical powers that won Winston Churchill?s admiration for his magnum opus, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, which V.S. Naipaul thought was probably the ?one great book to come out of the Anglo-Indian encounter?. But de mortuis nil nisi bonum (speak no ill of the dead ? Chaudhuri would have grit his teeth at the translation) notwithstanding, I must say that his social dogmatism, though intended to impress, made him the laughing stock of two continents. When he told me early on that no Indian could speak English because no one had been weaned on beef I had not the courage to suggest that there might be plenty of beef-eaters as well as English speakers, without any nexus between the two, in an Anglicized milieu to which he did not have the entr?e. He dropped a similar brick in England, prompting a hilarious little article in The Guardian about how, having himself scaled the dizzy heights of Gorgonzola, he was trying to persuade his wife to cultivate a taste for ripe cheese so that she could better understand English life and letters. All great men have their foibles. It must not be held against Nirad Chaudhuri that in his hankering for a lifestyle to which he was not born and which he never quite mastered, he sometimes invited ridicule. His refusing Jacqueline Kennedy?s invitation to write Aristotle Onassis?s biography confirmed an integrity that was never in doubt. He was master of the bon mot ? ?the survival of the unfittest? (of himself), ?loss of power corrupts, and absolute loss of power corrupts absolutely? (of Britain). His was a world of the imagination spun out of voracious reading in many languages and an uncanny sense of the continuum of civilization. He saw instinctively what others laboured to learn. When I read Edward Said on orientalism, I thought that Chaudhuri had preempted him when writing about the Bengal renaissance, but, of course, without Said?s academic structure. Chaudhuri?s sense of cultural siege reminded me of Constantine Cavafy?s poem, ?Waiting for the Barbarians?. He had no time to waste on those who could not share his vision or follow his allusions. Critics were eminently dispensable. In spite of a mystic attachment to East Bengal, he attributed his flowering to escape. Life was always a westward pilgrimage, Kishoregunj to Calcutta to Delhi to Britain. ?I have not crossed the Jamuna in 30 years,? he boasted. The general impression is that fellow Indians are dismissive about Chaudhuri. To my mind, it is precisely because his writings are taken more seriously in this country than abroad that he received no official Indian decoration though the British and Americans honoured him. Hatchards bookshop in London had none of his books. The assistant had only a dim memory of having read something about ?the very old geezer?. It made no difference to Westerners that he mocked Gandhi?s pacifism, denounced Hinduism as xenophobic power worship or exposed the corruption and self-aggrandizement of Indian nationalists. They probably welcomed his tirades against democracy and aid, and the implications of his remark that far from making men out of chimpanzees, foreign money would ?only make them more efficient and cunning chimpanzees? who could blackmail the West for more. As for his criticism, the English have always lapped up Hyde Park Corner?s anti-British soapbox oratory. Rudyard Kipling?s sneer at Rabindranath Tagore as Britain?s ?Caliban? and Evelyn Waugh?s ?clever little nigger? (of Naipaul) come to mind. I doubt if Chaudhuri ever realized that the critics received his first book on England, A Passage to England, with amused indulgence, or detected the Telegraph?s patronizing tone in introducing the author of ?Why I Mourn for England? as ?a tiny figure, bursting with indignation for this country?s mental and moral decay?. The beef and cheese came too late in life for Nirad Chaudhuri ever fully to understand the force that shaped and quickened all that was good and living in modern Indians.