The Maker of Eternity

About This Book

At the dawn of the twentieth century, a boy growing up in Bengal could not have imagined the world he would live through: empire and revolution, war and displacement, independence and Partition. In this extraordinary memoir, translated from the original Bengali by his granddaughter, Rajyashree Dutt, Suresh Chandra Guha recounts a life that travelled across continents and crises. From his childhood in rural Bengal and student days in Calcutta, he journeys to colonial Burma as a young professor—only to flee the Japanese invasion during the Second World War. Later, in Rawalpindi, he once again finds himself caught in the violence of 1947 and forced to rebuild his life from nothing. Rich with stories of teachers, revolutionaries, saints, students and travellers, The Maker of Eternity captures the everyday textures of a vanished world while tracing the upheavals that shaped modern South Asia. At once intimate and epic, this is the unforgettable story of an ordinary man who lived an extraordinary century.