ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the English self-fashioning of the memoirist Nirad C. Chaudhuri and the unique trajectory of homecoming that underlines it. Here I argue that Chaudhuri’s anglicised self-fashioning is based on the nineteenth-century discourse of Hindu nationalism which asserted that true Indianness was foreign to the present-day Indians who existed in a degenerate state. This allowed Chaudhuri to argue that though he represented the quintessential Indian, he was not part of the Indian masses. Chaudhuri introduced a further twist to this narrative by combining it with the theory of Aryan migration. This now debunked theory developed by the nineteenth-century European Orientalists like Friedrich Max Müller claimed that the modern-day Hindus had their ancestors in the Aryans who migrated to two different directions from their homeland in Central Europe. One part of the Aryans migrated to Western Europe and the other part ended up in India via Iran. The chapter discusses how, based on this theory about ancient Aryans, Chaudhuri defined his life's project as recovering his lost Europeanness/Englishness and migrating to his “real” homeland in the West.
