Published in 1951, the Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri is a classic work in the genre that he began writing when he was about 50 and covers years from his birth in 1897 to 1921 when his student days came to an end. The book made him well-known across the English-speaking literary world mainly because of the quality of its prose and the scope of its concerns. It is ambivalently dedicated to the “British Empire in India,” which touched everything in the lives of Indians and “conferred subjecthood” on them but “withheld citizenship.” The preface of the book says that it will be a “story of the struggle of a civilization with a hostile environment, in which the destiny of British rule in India became necessarily involved.”