This remarkable book vividly evokes the first 24 years of the author's life in Calcutta and in his ancestral village in East Bengal. First published in 1951, it rapidly established itself as a classic work combining intimate memoirs with a sweeping, highly individual survey of Indian history and culture in the final era of the Raj. VS Naipaul said about this Autobiography:"...may be the one great books to come out of the Indo-English encounter. 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."