Sketches from Memory (A Journey to Gandhi,Remembering Gandhi) Set of 2 Volumes

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Written at the suggestion of a friend, this book chronicles a tale in space and time, a journey from one culture to a completely different one. After the introductory sections dealing with the author's early life, the influences that were at work, and the interests developed, the focus shifts to people met in the course of unusually wide travels. They were so memorable that they are given centre stage.

The author arrived in India in 1946 and the book is incompletely autobiographical for it does not include a large part of her life -- her marriage to Nripendranath Chatterjee, originally a Professor of English, her experiences in a university in UP in which there were caste hostels, and her subsequent involvement in district and village life in Bengal after her husband became one of the first emergency recruits to the newly formed IAS. They were crowded years in which she raised a family and acquired a working knowledge of two languages. So the journey to Gandhi was prepared by what the author had already learnt about India through the years which she has not recorded lest the book become too long. She eventually met a number of senior people who in various ways had a link to Gandhi, or at least, to the Gandhian era. She was well on her way in her journey to Gandhi about whom she has written six books.

MARGARET CHATTERJEE is an internationally renowned scholar and has published several studies on Gandhi's life and thought. Few scholars match her outstanding contribution in this field.

The sketches presented in the following pages are of various types. Sometimes we see outstanding figures in the realms of art and politics. Also, cheek by jowl, there are 'interesting characters' whom I have not forgotten, and so they are included. Some sketches are just unclassifiable. But, looking back, I have been fortunate in the extreme. How impoverished I would have been if I had never known Tan Yun Shan, Nirmal Kumar Bose, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Sankho Chaudhuri, Sisir Kumar Das, Krishna Kripalani, Mulk Raj Anand, and Bimal Prasad himself. I cannot imagine life without them, for even those who are no longer in the visible world are ever with me. I am terrified at the thought that I might never have met them. Circumstances lead us in various directions. But right from my earliest days, and the sketches stress these, there were three things I wanted to do - to teach, to write, and to travel. The romantic dreams that probably most girls have, were never in my mind. But the fates were kind in that my three targets were reached, and now I am confined to the second, writing.

And yet, in India, I found myself almost overnight in a different country, far from the landscape that I loved, especially the sea, and eventually with a host of descendants who would not have existed had I not met the man who would be the father of my family. It was an enormous wrench from Oxford to a country in which I was a novice, and, truth to tell, to begin with, a fish out of water. My two lifelines had always been history and music.