Nirad C. Chaudhuri (Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri) Biography

Indian historian, born in Kishorganj, Bengal, educated at the University of Calcutta; he worked as a clerk and as a secretary to the Nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose before becoming a freelance writer in 1952. In 1970 he settled in Oxford. In addition to offering an account of his early life, his The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) constituted an idiosyncratic and penetrating survey of India's political development in the years up to 1921. Equally a combination of autobiography and modern history, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1987) covers the years 1921 to 1952. The Continent of Circe (1965) analyses India's social and cultural situation. His biographies Clive of India (1974) and Scholar Extraordinary (1974), a study of Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), sustain the theme of relations between Britain and India which runs through much of his writing. His other works include A Passage to England (1959), on his first visit to Britain under the sponsorship of the BBC in 1955.