Almost forgotten in the country to which his unabashed Anglophilia brought him three decades ago, Nirad C Chaudhuri, the Indian writer, will turn 100 in November. In India he has always had more baiters than readers; it is only the approaching centenary that has at last brought him official recognition from cultural bureaucrats willing to overlook his frequent references to India as a land of “barbarians.” As for Britain, Chaudhuri’s uncompromising intellectual elitism-he steadfastly refused to translate quotations from Latin and Greek in his books-has long lost him the few readers he had: none of his books, either the great Autobiography of an Unknown Indian or the biographical studies of Max Muellar and Robert Clive, are in print. Yet his fate is no worse than that of Ram Mohan Roy, another great Bengali, born 225 years ago and now lying buried in Bristol. Roy and Chaudhuri stand at the beginning and the end of one of the longest, if not most fertile, cultural relationships between two parts of the world which were not then supposed to meet. Roy was the first, Chaudhuri is the last, in the great line of 19th century Bengalis who believed that their own and India’s future lay in apprenticing themselves to the modern west, specifically Britain, without detaching themselves from their cultural roots. Their belief, caricatured by a thousand institutions of education and culture across the country, lies at the very basis of modern India’s cultural identity.

Roy’s quest for a liberal British culture allied with a reformist Hinduism was to result in what is grandly called the Indian renaissance. Some of its leading figures, such as the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, went on to bigger things; others lay trapped in their country homes or Calcutta mansions in Chekhovian isolation, well evoked by the filmmaker Satyajit Ray-himself a late product of the Anglo-Bengali school.

The renaissance was not destined to endure; predictably, it led to no enlightenment. It was riven with internal contradictions, most notably the discrepancy between Britain’s crudely exploitative policies in India and the refinements of Victorian high culture on which the Anglo-Bengalis were hooked. The racist excesses of the British before and after Lord Curzon made the Anglo-Bengalis culturally defensive; the partition of Bengal was the last straw for many of them. The Jallianwallah Bagh killings in 1919 prompted Tagore to renounce his knighthood and strengthened his attachment to a vague “internationalism.” The Anglo-Bengali movement petered out; the idea of improving on the British through diligent emulation was replaced in India’s cultural mainstream by the ideological tensions between the nativist Gandhi and the modernist Nehru.

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