Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri, who would live to see the 20th century turn and fade, was perhaps the last surviving witness to the twilight of an empire and the fractured dawn of a nation.

Born in 1897 in the small town of Kishoreganj in East Bengal, his life became an extraordinary testimony to the collision of two worlds — a collision that shaped every word he would write. The Bengal Renaissance, that great ferment of intellectual awakening that had nourished his childhood, instilled in him a love for both Shakespeare and Sanskrit. This duality, this hunger for what was good in both civilisations, would become both his gift and his terrible curse.

When his first book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), appeared, it struck like a stone through glass. In a gesture of intellectual d

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