Nirad C. Chaudhuri

A memoir of the first twenty-four years of his life, organised less as a personal narrative than as an account of the making of a mind. It opens with the environment: his birthplace Kishoreganj, the ancestral village Banagram, and Kalikutch, his mother's village, each described with the precision of a naturalist. It moves through his English education, his reading, his discovery of European history and music, and the intellectual formation of a Bengali boy of the professional class in the last decades of the Raj. The second half turns to Calcutta and to the political and cultural currents of the early twentieth century — the Swadeshi movement, the growth of nationalism, the Bengali middle class — and closes with an extended, sceptical analysis of the environment of his youth and of what he saw as the failure of Indian nationalism to build anything durable.

The prose is the reason the book survives its politics: a formal, Latinate, deeply read English that Chaudhuri built from Gibbon and the eighteenth century, and which V.S. Naipaul and others judged the finest written by any Indian. The famous dedication to the British Empire is more double-edged than its reputation suggests, since it goes on to note that all that was good and living within Indians was made, shaped, and quickened by British rule while also observing that the subjection to the empire brought no citizenship. His argument is a critique of Indian society from a position of Western high culture, and it has been read as colonial self-hatred, as Anglophile snobbery, and as the honest testimony of a man who valued what he was educated into. All three readings are available for examination purposes.