Nirad c chaudhuri autobiography of benjamin franklin

Nirad Chaudhuri was the product of the refined Anglo-Bengali humanist culture that briefly grew during the last generations of British rule. The most famous products of this renaissance were Rabindranath Tagore and Manmohan Roy. This book is a reflection on Chaudhuri's very ordinary life growing up in a small town in the Bengal, and later Calcutta. Although his reflections on that world were often charming, I was less interested in them than I was in him as a man and his perspective on what was then India. Chaudhuri was an Anglophile of the most severe type. But unlike many others, he was not merely a shallow imitator. He drank deeply from the wellsprings of the European culture that he adored so much. Incredibly, he never even set foot in Europe until he was almost in his sixties. He developed an idealized image of England and the West from afar, and was convinced that it was the civilization that he wanted to be a part of. In fact