ABSTRACT
Just a few years before his death Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1992) wrote an article, ‘Ami Keno Bilate Achi’ (‘Why am I living in England’) explaining in great detail his reasons for self-exile. Mr Chaudhuri, then in his matured age of 95, was responding to an innocent letter from a Kolkata woman who wanted to know why someone as famous as Nirad Chaudhuri does not want to return to his native land. Chaudhuri provides a long justification as to why he left India and makes other points, such as that he left before he was famous and so on. In that long essay, it is evident that after quarter of a century of self-exile, this wellknown ‘unknown Indian’ is still nostalgic and yet bitter about India. An India he hates, an India he loves; an ambivalence that describes many diasporic Indians and for that matter Bengalis. Needless to say, the late Mr Chaudhuri was a Bengali.
