The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
	First UK edition
Author	Nirad C. Chaudhuri
Country	India
Language	English
Subject	Comparative– historical, cultural and sociological analysis of early 20th century India and the British colonial encounter in India
Genre	Autobiographical, non-fiction
Publisher	Macmillan
Publication date	1951
Media type	book
Pages	506
ISBN	0-940322-82-X
OCLC	47521258
Dewey Decimal	954/.14031/092 B 21
LC Class	DS435.7.C5 A3 2001
Followed by	A Passage to England (1959)

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 .

References

Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1969). The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. University of California Press. GGKEY:K5H0WSNGKZ6.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (2005). An Illust History of Indian Lit in English. Permanent Black. p. 209. ISBN 978-81-7824-151-7. Retrieved 12 July 2012.

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[Chaudhuri1969-1] Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1969). The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. University of California Press. GGKEY:K5H0WSNGKZ6.

[Mehrotra2005-2] Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (2005). An Illust History of Indian Lit in English. Permanent Black. p. 209. ISBN 978-81-7824-151-7. Retrieved 12 July 2012.