As a student of Scottish Church College under Calcutta University in 1918, he graduated with honors in history and earned his place in the merit list.

He participated in the Scottish Church College seminar with renowned Indian personality and historian Professor Kalidas Nager.

He is concerned with describing the conditions in which an Indian grew to manhood in the early decades of the century, and as he feels that the basic principle of book is that environment shall have precedence over its product; he describes in affectionate and sensuous detail the three places that had the greatest influence on him: Kishoreganj, the country town in which he lived till he was twelve; Bangram; his ancestral village; and Kalikutch, his mother's village.

Later in the book he talks about Calcutta, the Bengali Renaissance, the beginnings of the nationalist movement, and his experience of the Englishmen in India as opposed to the idyllic pictures of a civilization he considered perhaps the greatest in the world.

To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: "Civis Britannicus sum" Because all that was good and living within us Was made, shaped and quickened By the same British rule.

It is sometimes stated that 'Chaudhuri was hounded out of government service, deprived of his pension, blacklisted as a writer in India and forced to live a life of penury'.

He was not asked to prepare any more talks on a free-lance basis because of severe criticism directed at him by senior figures - like Krishna Menon.

Chaudhuri argued that his critics were not careful-enough readers; "the dedication was really a condemnation of the British rulers for not treating us as equals", he wrote in a 1997 special edition of Granta.