This book narrates the author's experiences growing up in India during the early 20th century.
The book frames itself as the story of a civilization (India) struggling against a hostile environment, implicating British rule.
The author intends the book to be a contribution to contemporary history, written with honesty and accuracy.
The author uses the autobiographical form to persuade and convince readers through personal experiences.
The reader is entitled to understand the author’s background to interpret unfamiliar viewpoints subjectively.
The author, after fifty, feels the need to start life anew, writing off past years.
He refutes the idea of failure, viewing his recollections not as "des memories d’outre-tombe" but as a strategic retreat.
The author aims to connect with the English-speaking world, addressing curiosity about the dynamics between man and geography that shaped the British Empire in India.
Personal Development
The author admits his personal development is exceptional and not typical of a modern Indian of the 20th century.
His independence from the environment has given him increased sensitivity to it.
He compares himself to an airplane, still connected to earth but gaining a better view.
He acknowledges exceptions to every generalization in a vast and populous country like India, where millions may form the exceptions.
The exceptional individuals are of two kinds:
Those who intensify the dominant qualities of the general mass.
Those who form the national opposition.
He focuses on the second kind of exceptions, exceptions for the good.
They are contending against the prevailing current and have less influence.
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the encouragement of his sons.
He thanks his nephew for help in checking early recollections.
He also thanks friends who read portions of the manuscript.
He appreciates the publishers and printers for eliminating mistakes.
He is deeply grateful to two friends who assisted in preparing the typescript.
He credits Clarendon Press, the Institute of Sociology, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, Ltd., and translator John D. Sinclair for allowing quotations in the text.
He thanks his wife for her objective interest, balanced regime, and for sustaining the balanced regime amidst life's torments and modern-day inconveniences.
The quote, "Here lies the happy man who was an islet of sensibility surrounded by the cool sense of his wife, friends, and children," is included as an epitaph.
Early Environment
The book will describe three places that deeply influenced the author's boyhood.
The first account will be of the little country town in which he was born and lived until his twelfth year.
The second will be of his ancestral village and the third of his mother's folk's village.
England, evoked by imagination has also been a great influence on the author, so a chapter will summarize boyish notions about England.
The villages were not more than six miles apart, in East Bengal-Mymensingh.
The mother's village was about forty miles away, across the great river Meghna.
Quote: "Who doth ambition shun…But winter and rough weather"
My Birthplace
The birthplace, Kishorganj, is described as a country town, but not like an English one.
Kishorganj was a normal specimen of British administration in East Bengal.
It was a sub-divisional headquarters, an administrative unit next to the district's principal town.
From above, the town would have looked like a patch of white and brown mushrooms.
The white corrugated iron roofs were too hard, but the brown mat walls matched the environment.
The huts were flimsy and were destroyed in a strong cyclone.
The town had grown along a visible thread, a three- stranded thread, which was formed by a little river with two roads running along its two banks.
The town was named the "gift of the river".
The river water was used for drinking.
The cows and elephants of the town also bathed in the river, but, as a rule, only after the residents had had their turn and never alongside them.
The water had an acrid smell of cattle.
The river looked majestic as Joyka's elephant bathed in it.
Besides the bathing areas the river had pools.
Within the town there was one such pool about half a mile from the narrator's house behind the excise depot and treasury.
It was an oval expanse of water where people bathed.
It was the home of the big and fierce-looking but silvery Chital fish.
Peasant women with earthen pitchers went for water.
A dilapidated half-ruined mosque stood on a terrace jutting well forward into the bed of the river.
During the monsoon season the contrast between poverty and wealth vanished as the river filled out and permitted navigation all the way through.
Frogs and leeches arrived and the peasants came with fishing cages and nets running into the water.
Last of all came the boats, which came like migratory birds.
The boats, country boats, had outlines and shapes of model boats found in the tombs of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt.
The boats looked like plantations of bamboo shorn of leaf because of the poles used to make fast.
They were classed by function and power of propulsion.
The tramps had no roof and carried people, market produce, or even fish.
Other boats stuck fastidiously to carrying passengers or cargoes.
Burning paddy-husk hung about boats because of the braziers to keep the hookah burning.
In respect of power they were graded according to the number of boatmen they had.
The smallest had one boatman while the largest had three.
During the day the boats were pretty and friendly but at night they became mysterious.
A less companionable vessel also visited the town occasionally, the budge row of Mr. Stapleton the Inspector of Schools.
On the day of August or September the grand boat race of the year took place.
Racing boats came for the occasion.
The crews, varying between ten and thirty men, sat in two rows, oars in hand who alternately sturk the gunwales with them to beat time to their boat-song and plunged them into the water.
The picture on the river during the rainy season was the Deluge and the Ark made homely, gregarious, and sociable.
Everything was wet to the marrow of the bone with sodden trees, showers held up the meals, wet servants, and drenched birds.
The crows had the appearance of a "bedraggled crow" which became the figurative synonym in the Bengali language for an untidy and disheveled person.
The rain came down in what looked like closely packed formations of long pencils of glass.
A palm stood in water midway between the two permanent banks of the river during the monsoon.
The Process of the Seasons
A revolution took place between Mid-October and Mid-November, which was like passing from Shakespeare's sea dirge to Webster's Land dirge.
By the middle of October the water was going down and ugly grey mud-flats were coming up.
The road hardened to ankle-deep dust.
There never was any time of the day and night when the road did not show footmarks which pointed differently at different times.
Every field and lawn had jute-stem stacks.
The stems of jute were used for lighting fire or turning into screens.
The stacks were full of hairy caterpillars.
The only remedy of these blisters on the bodies was smearing with a mixture of mustard oil and slaked lime, which was considered to be as bad as the disease.
The expression, “To have a centipede in the head”, was equivalent in parts of saying that a person was crazy or had inexplicable fads and crotchets.
Towards the middle of November bonfires were lit.
The municipal workmen cleaned the ditch that ran from one end of the town to the houses.
The grounds were weeded, bulbous arum plants destroyed, and special workmen tore up grasses in the inner courtyard.
The floors were earthen and built on platforms that were rubbed every morning.
The author mentions a just claim by a Bengali incunabulum about the princess’s three R’s to support the use of mud floors such as theirs.
The pigs encamped on the low meadow before the house where they squealed perpetually while the people hung around the camp.
Gypsies encamped, as well.
The people were not familiar with asses until the Gypsies came to town.
There was general ignorance about animals.
A folk-ritual was performed from the middle of January to the middle of February.
Girls took the powders in handfuls, closed their fist, and released the colors through the hole formed by the curled little finger, regulating the flow by tightening or loosening their grip.
The tree bought came and were piled by the wayside and along the river for the year's firewood.
The oranges from the Kashii Hills were also winter visitors.
The cold season was marked by the flavor, fragrance, and colour of oranges.
*. The typical flowers began to come out as soon as the cold was passing off.
the two commonest and most prized scents were two floweres.
It was an essential part of their education to be able to wear garlands containing certain kinds of flowers.
The seasons were also marked with an association between seeing cholera and a laborer burning sulphur.
Our House
The home described in the autobiography was lived in from 1903 to 1909.
The land measured two acres.
The plot was divided into three portions: the front or outer house, the inner house, and the back.
The real nucleus of the house was the inner courtyard.
On the western side of the inner court was a big hut with an open veranda which was the living-room.
On the northern side was the kitchen.
On the east was what they called The East Hun and Vegetarian Hut which was assigned to the widower relation.s
*. Jack-fruit tree, tall bamboos, mango tree, and other trees were used to grow around the houses.
The north-eastern corner of the inner house was set apart for garbage.