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The Autobiography of An Unknown Indian

Nirad C. Chaudhuri's 1951 autobiography The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian records his life from birth in 1897 in present-day Bangladesh. The book relates his intellectual development and observations of changing India as the British exit became imminent. It is divided into four books with the first entitled "Early Environment" describing his birthplace, ancestral place, mother's place, and England. The autobiography provides Chaudhuri's dual perspective as an observer of his childhood, enchantment with and disillusionment of colonial Calcutta in a highly readable way. Later praised by Winston Churchill as one of the best books he read, it examines the penetration of Western culture into India.

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961 views

The Autobiography of An Unknown Indian

Nirad C. Chaudhuri's 1951 autobiography The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian records his life from birth in 1897 in present-day Bangladesh. The book relates his intellectual development and observations of changing India as the British exit became imminent. It is divided into four books with the first entitled "Early Environment" describing his birthplace, ancestral place, mother's place, and England. The autobiography provides Chaudhuri's dual perspective as an observer of his childhood, enchantment with and disillusionment of colonial Calcutta in a highly readable way. Later praised by Winston Churchill as one of the best books he read, it examines the penetration of Western culture into India.

Uploaded by

Pooja Kumar
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is the 1951 autobiography of Nirad C.

Chaudhuri,
an Indian writer.[1][2] Written when he was around 50, it records his life from his birth in 1897
in Kishorganj, a small town in present-day Bangladesh. The book relates his mental and
intellectual development, his life and growth in Calcutta, his observations of vanishing
landmarks, the connotation of this is dual—changing Indian situation and historical forces that
was making exit of British from India an imminent affair.
The book is divided into four books, each of which consists of a preface and four chapters. The
first book is entitled "Early Environment" and its four chapters are: 1) My Birth Place , 2) My
Ancestral Place, 3) My mother's Place and 4) England.

Nirad, a self-professed Anglophile, is in any situation an explosive proposition and in the book
he is at his best in observing as well as observing-at-a-distance and this dual perspective makes it
a wonderful reading. His treatment of his childhood, his enchantment, disillusionment and
gratitude to the colonial capital Calcutta is highly factual as well as artistic to the extent highly
readable.

Arguably, his magnum opus considering his literary output that he could generate as late age as
ninety years, Autobiography is not a single book, it is many. Consciously or unconsciously he
has left traces of all his erudition, his spirit and learning. Declaring himself a cartographer of
learning, the book is also a cartographic evidence of the author's mind and its varied geographies,
of the map as well as of the mind.

The dedication of the book runs thus:

“To the memory of the British Empire in India,

Which conferred subjecthood upon us,

But withheld citizenship.

To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge:

"Civis Britannicus sum"

Because all that was good and living within us

Was made, shaped and quickened

By the same British rule.”

Over the years, the Autobiography has acquired many distinguished admirers. Winston Churchill
thought it one of the best books he had ever read. V. S. Naipaul remarked: "No better account of
the penetration of the Indian mind by the West - and by extension, of the penetration of one
culture by another - will be or now can be written." In 1998, it was included, as one of the few
Indian contributions, in The New Oxford Book of English Prose .

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