The Provincial Polymath: The Curious Cosmopolitanism of Nirad C. Chaudhuri

Is a humanist intellectual with a popular audience more likely to be a credentialed expert or an autodidact at odds with the established norms of scholarship? Is such an intellectual, to use Marjorie Garber's terms, a professional or an amateur? This essay considers these questions in the light of the institutionalization of a humanist curriculum in late colonial Britain and its overseas empire in order to examine the controversial figure of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a Bengali intellectual whose popular and provocative appeal derives from his position as an amateur and an autodidact. Such an intellectual identity is at odds with colonial education's ideological enterprise: to create a certain kind of professional subject. Though Chaudhuri is popularly perceived to be an Anglophile, his amateur identity not only provides the secret of his appeal but also departs from the institutionalization of humanist education that characterized the British Empire.