Mrs Unknown Indian

"What function do the better halves of writers perform?" asks Ashok Patnaik in The Pioneer, going on to discuss the relationship between Nirad and Amiya Chaudhuri: "They tied the knot on April 21, 1932 when he was 34 years and five months old, she 12 years younger."

Interestingly enough: “Nirad Babu never saw his sweetheart before marriage, and when asked by his elder brother to accompany the ‘inspection’ team, the eligible bachelor had this moral lesson to offer: ‘What I considered brutal and utterly without justification was for a young man to go and look at a girl for the purpose of marriage, and then choose or reject her for her looks. What should I feel, I asked, if a girl comes to have a look at me in the same way and refused to marry me for not being handsome enough? I would feel compelled to marry the first girl I saw. So it did not matter if I saw anyone or did not.’ ”

Years later, “the writer observed that his wife could have easily escaped from a husband who by ‘normal worldly standards was as impossible as I showed myself to be. But she did not. I cannot say whether that was due to her acceptance of the Hindu doctrine that marriage was a sacrament. But with me my marriage has certainly been something like that. It conferred regeneracy on me, and gave me a sense of purpose’.”

A book on traditional Indian cooking apart, Amiya Chaudhuri’s “Didimar Jug O Jiban (A Grandmother's Life and Times) was published in 1992 and Probashini Didima (Grandmother outside Bengal) in 1994 are the two autobiographical volumes which evoked immense interest in Bengal.”