Dr. Dr. Radha Nag, Radha Nag
“Atmaghati Nirad Choudhuri” is a welcome answer to Nirad C. Chaudhuri's ‘Atmaghati Bangali’ and two-volume ‘Atmaghati Rabindranath’. In more than a decade since the publication of the first volume of this trilogy on the dire self-destruction of the Bengali people and their greatest poet Rabindranath Tagore, no Bengali has raised his voice against this charge - perhaps because it was framed by a Bengali who penned them in a respectable university town in England, clad in a Bengali dhoti, sitting on a Bengali mat. Radha Nag has used Nirad C. Chaudhuri's Bengali works to show that obscenities abound in them. The writer who held an honorary D.Litt. from Oxford, it seems, could not make his points without outraging the proverbial British sense of decency. Chaudhuri the author, shows Nag, had been so trapped by Chaudhuri the man that he often makes unseemly self-revelations. And it may not be improbable that he was deliberately ribald to cater to popular tastes. Nag's book is written in a delightfully ironic style and if she's sometimes hard on Chaudhuri, she has been so for the sake of truth.
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