Nirad Chaudhuri's first volume of autobiography is also a biography of India, "the story of the struggle of a civilisation with a hostile environment" - admirably perceptive, honest and exhaustive.

The son of a Hindu lawyer, Chaudhuri was born in Kishorganj, a village in East Bengal, in 1897, and then spent 50 years under the British Raj. This account of his first 24 years and his country's first 3,000 years was published first in 1951, four years after the declaration of Independence.

It seems impossible that there could be a psychologically and socially more revealing analysis of a young man's attempts to come to terms with a heritage under the influences of a series of foreign cultures.

English occupiers were hated, he writes, but they, in their turn, like the Aryans and Turks before them, invigorated the subcontinent. India, in his well-reasoned judgment, has always needed the stimulating energy of foreigners, because the country and its climate continuously reduce the native proletariat to lethargic passivity.

"There are many geographical regions in the world which are utterly incapable of developing a high civilisation," he points out, "but there is perhaps not one other which so irresistibly draws civilisation to it, and strangles them as irresistibly as does the Indo-Gangetic plain. It is the Vampire of geography, which sucks out all creative energy and leaves its victims as listless shadows".

The oppressive heat and monotonous flatness of the vast plain between the Indus and Ganges are so debilitating that the rule of foreigners in India always depended on continuous reinforcement from their home territories. British domination inevitably ended after two centuries when the Empire that sustained it was weakened by the second World War. However, Chaudhuri, writing half a century ago, when Britain was most enfeebled, went on to predict that the West - a "reorganised and greater Europe" under the leadership of the United States and Britain - would "re-establish and rejuvenate the foreign domination of India".

The book is considerably livelier and more colourful than this drastic summary of its major theme may suggest. Chaudhuri went to university in Calcutta to read history, where he developed an English prose style of Victorian formality, complete with Latin tags, untranslated, which can be rather irritating unless your Latin is still in good working order.

But he retained an Indian sense of humour. It finds expression in the many pages of his personal history. For example, when discussing the importance that Hindus traditionally attach to skin colour as an index of caste, he recalls that a school friend told him, "in great confidence, that all English babies were actually born dark, even as dark as we were, but that immediately after birth they were thrown into a tub filled with wine . . . which bleached their skin white". If they did not bleach as expected, their fathers killed them. "It was only through their alcoholism and cruelty that they got their fair complexion, while we were condemned to remain dark-skinned because we were not given to these vices."

Nirad Chaudhuri himself exhibits no symptoms of xenophobia. After recovering from the snail-like shyness of his early years, he became "a nomad of the industrial age", a journalist, and migrated to England. Admirers of his scholarly Anglo-Indian pontification include V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Doris Lessing.

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