These memoirs of Dr. Sumant Mehta, who went to England to study surgery during the late Victorian age, cover the first decades of his life from 1877 to 1921. It was the most important period in British Indian history during which, those who returned to India imbued by the liberal polity in Britain became the first line of opposition to the colonial rule, then shaped by its incongruent imperial authority. He grew up in the state of Baroda within ethnic Gujarat and, like his father before him, for two decades served as a physician with Maharaja Sayajirao III Gaekwad, nationally famed for his progressive princely rule. This exceptionally candid autobiography narrates the author’s inner struggles in search of ways to serve people in a society shackled by caste customs, bureaucracy and primitive civil apparatus. Concurrently, it traces the evolution of British Rule and the rise of Indian political leaders. Eventually he quit his position as the head of Dufferin Hospital in Baroda and devoted himself to improving public hygiene and education of schoolchildren and needy adults in the state. Memoirs end in a far more enlightened decade with people’s hopes to achieve independence under the leadership of Gandhi and others. The translator is a grandson of a younger brother of the author.

Sumant Batukram Mehta was born in 1877 in Surat in British India and grew up in the princely state of Baroda. He went to Grant Medical College in Mumbai, transferred to Manchester Medical School and returned to Baroda in 1902 as a surgeon after almost five years in Britain. As a physician assigned to Sayajirao Gaekwad he traveled extensively with the maharaja. After retiring from Baroda State service in 1921 he devoted his life to promoting public education and hygiene. In 1929 he moved to Ahmedabad, and two years later was imprisoned for a year by the government for advocating the boycott of foreign goods, prohibition of drinking, and independence. He died in 1968.