Have been reading Nirad Chaudhuri's The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. A strangely compelling book: Chaudhuri's an anglophile Indian, writing about his Bengali family in the twenties and thirties, intersparsed with philosophical and historical reflections. He attempts a rigorous objectivity, writes in a neutral, rather charmless, resolutely grammatical style, and because he has not a cultural nationalist bone in him presents a very different India than the one that we have become accustomed to in the post-Rushdie moment: violent, litigious, money-grubbing, unsentimental. Indeed by comparison with Chaudhuri, it becomes clear how Rushdie, for all his political dissent, is in the business of magicing and sentimentalising the sub-continent. But Chaudhuri cant maintain his 'objectivity' of course: his conservativism and fuddy duddyness, a kind of imitation of an imaginery 'civilised' Englishman seeps through it. And because the India that he comes from is in many ways so awful, and his family so unnurturing—his descriptions of his mother's regular fits of what he calls 'hysteria' are particularly horrific— the stiff-upper-lip stance comes to seem like a flight from chaos. Maybe thing will change in the book, I'm only about half way through.
Reading this while listening to the Blue Note cds of Grant Green with Sonny Clark, recorded in the early (?) sixties but only released in the eighties (I have a pirated copy of the cds, bought I think in Beijing so I'm not to clear of its history). Anyway it's wonderful music, made before 'funk' became reified but headed in that direction, and made before the guitar sound went fuzzy and chordal: clean pure music. Its chastening to think what Chaudhuri would have thought of it: the problem with him (and the education into the West that he received) is that he obviously couldn't have listened to it at all.