On the first page of the preface to his book The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Nirad C. Chaudhuri makes the wish that his autobiographical enterprise should bring about a rupture between the first and second stages of his life:
I want a declaration of faith for myself, because after passing the age of fifty I am faced with the compulsion to write off all the years I have lived and begin life anew. […] These recollections of mine are in no sense des mémoires d’outre-tombe. If anyone so chooses he may call them mémoires d’outre-Manche in a figurative sense, in the sense that, retreating before the panzers of the enemy who has seized my past life, I have …
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