Nirad C. Chaudhuri (born November 23, 1897, Kishorganj, East Bengal, British India [now in Bangladesh]—died August 1, 1999, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England) was a Bengali author and scholar who was opposed to the withdrawal of British colonial rule from the Indian subcontinent and the subsequent rejection of Western culture in independent India. He was an erudite and complex individual who acknowledged the British Empire’s role in modernizing India—a stance that polarized his contemporaries, who found it either objectionable or commendable. He seemed to have been born at the wrong place and in the wrong time. Distinguished Indian critic K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar clarifies this claim, stating: “The truth about him seems to be that he is at once more Indian than most Indians and more English than many Englishmen. With this double edge of sensitivity he achieves insights denied to most, but he also isolates himself from the crowd.”
Chaudhuri was the son of a country lawyer, Upendra Narayan Chaudhuri, and Sushila Sundarani Chaudhurani. In his youth he read William Shakespeare as well as Sanskrit classics, and he admired Western culture as much as he did his own.