Praxeology of Anglophilia and Postcolonial Rupture: A Critical Exegesis of the Imperial Afterlife in Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian and A Passage to England

Abstract

This research paper meticulously deconstructs Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Anglophilia in The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) and A Passage to England (1959), situating it within colonial and postcolonial epistemes through Elleke Boehmer’s theoretical lens of the “imperial afterlife.” Boehmer’s framework, defined as “the lingering presence of imperial structures and values in the aftermath of formal colonial rule” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 17), illuminates how Chaudhuri’s reverence for British cultural hegemony—epitomized by his claim, “I was brought up to regard England as the land of all virtue and wisdom” (Chaudhuri, 1951, p. 112)—reinscribes colonial ideologies while harboring fissures of postcolonial critique. The study interrogates the perpetuation of imperial hierarchies through Chaudhuri’s narratological binaries, where British refinement overshadows indigenous agency, as seen in assertions like “The British Raj was a golden parenthesis in our history” (Chaudhuri, 1951, p. 237). Employing a methodology that synergizes textual explication with theoretical praxis, the analysis draws on Edward Said’s Orientalism, Homi K. Bhabha’s ambivalence, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s subaltern critique to probe the silencing of native epistemologies, reflecting Boehmer’s notion of “the simultaneous presence and absence of empire” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 19). The paper further explores aesthetic enchantment and temporal layering, where colonial memory persists as “a structuring presence” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 19), yet critiques like “Their civility was a dream we could not live” (Chaudhuri, 1959, p. 75) signal postcolonial reckoning. By synthesizing these dimensions, the study repositions Chaudhuri’s works as contested terrains within postcolonial scholarship, proposing trajectories for further inquiry into their cultural palimpsests. This rigorous interrogation elucidates the enduring reverberations of empire in the Indian literary imagination, navigating the fraught interplay of colonial vestiges and postcolonial resistance.