Customer Reviews

Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India: 1921-1952

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This sequel to "The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian" clearly shows the author losing his grip on both the English language and his sense of structure. This book is far inferior to its predecessor in quality. Some gems are: the portrait of Sarat Bose, the analysis of the Bengali Revolutionary Movement of the 1930s. The chief value of this book is the deliberate departure from the standard mythology of the Indian Independence Movement, and first hand experience of some of its leading lights.

<i>Thy Hand, Great Anarch!</i> comes to us from the veteran Anglophile and Indophobe Nirad C. Chowdhury, at the heels of his earlier masterpiece <i>The autobiography of an unknown Indian</i>. Unlike the first book, Choudhury is nolonger unknown but his vitriolic pontifications against Indian self-rule continues in this book. After having finished his earlier Indian years with the first book, Choudhury goes on to praise the British rule and continues to lament the demise of the "great British Empite"(sic) in this volume, this time from his dreamland of England. Different name, greater number of pages, same foul stench and the same old ideas. To his credit, Chaudhury proves he is still the masterful craftsman he showed as he was in the autobiography and continue to dazzle us with well written intellegent prose. Perhaps he is the best practitioner of English composition living in England and the best 19th century-style British Gentleman left in the UK.