Celebrating Europe: An Asian Journey

7. England

7 England Presidency College shares a playing field with Hare School, my father’s school. Like the school, the establishment of the college in 1817 had opened an early chapter of the Bengal Renaissance. An extraordinary quickening of the senses accompanied every class or tutorial with our teachers at Presidency, most of whom had been students of the college themselves. They impressed on us the importance of not reading backwards into literature, of not imposing our values on the past in a regressive attempt to recover it for our age. Each age and its literature had to be judged on its own terms, which meant placing it in the tradition that it had grown from and the tradition that it had grown into. No age could be judged by extrapolating back into it what a subsequent age did, nor by looking in it for seeds of the future, except inasmuch as the earlier age had itself tilled the field. Thus, G.B. Harrison’s scholarly approach to Shakespeare was dinned into us by the head of the department, the stern but saintly Professor Sailendra Kumar Sen. Harrison’s approach rested on recreating Shakespeare’s historical environment; recognizing the conditions of dramatic production in which he had functioned; and knowing the conditions of publication that had delivered to posterity his plays as printed texts.1 To read Shakespeare meant viewing the Elizabethan world England 93 picture that he worked within, not least for its reflection in the Tudor view of history. This historical approach to literature was conservative; it was, to employ Sir Herbert Butterfield’s analogous metaphor, a warning against a Whig interpretation of literature in which the written word from Chaucer to Browning is studied with reference to its receding distance from a centrally situated present. All the past then becomes a preparation for the present: Literature, like history, becomes a story of progress. We were permitted no such illusions, literary or historical. Apart from the dhuti-clad Sailenbabu (babu is a term of respect), there were the Renaissance scholar Sukanta Chaudhuri — my tutor, who had received a Congratulatory First at Oxford — and Mrs Kajal Sengupta, who, too, had gone from Presidency to Oxford. There was also the Oxonian Arun Kumar Das Gupta. AKDG — we referred to our teachers by their initials — threw me, at least, into the deep end of the pool with a breezy instruction to read Basil Willey’s The Seventeenth Century Background. I imagined that Willey’s chapter on the rejection of scholasticism meant that, thenceforth, I could dispense with the scholarly approach to literature. Little did I suspect the torments of scholarship that awaited me! It was the first time in my life that I managed to read an entire book without understanding more than a tenth of it. It was AKDG’s lectures on tragedy, where Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus exchanged existential news with King Lear, which made me think that the examined life was, after all, worth living. Dhuti-clad Arunbabu, returning from his European exertions in college to his home in Beadon Street on time for his Hindu evening prayers, was a seamless and permanent rejection of all 94 Celebrating Europe binary oppositions of East and West, Bengali and English. We ourselves, the students of the English Department, were all Bengalis and spoke Bengali among ourselves and to our teachers except in class and when we discussed our essays with them. College over, I joined The Statesman as a subeditor in 1979. Although it was a conservative English-language newspaper that had begun life in colonial times, it had become an Indian institution even before the British had left in 1947. In 1943, it had published photographs that had made it impossible for the colonial authorities to deny the reality of the Bengal Famine. Then came India’s independence. The Statesman’s pages now reflected how free India saw the world and how the world saw India.Again, it is extraordinary how a group of largely Bengali journalists chatted away in their tongue while producing India’s premier Englishlanguage daily then. Under the distinguished editorship of S. Nihal Singh and Amalendu Das Gupta, who followed a long line of editors and who were succeeded by Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, The Statesman’s editorials were used by exacting fathers to teach their children how to write essays in the English language. My eyes still longed for Cambridge though...