Memoirs: 1877-1921

These memoirs by Dr. Sumant Mehta cover the first decades of his life from 1877 to 1921. Toward the end of the Victorian age, at the age of twenty-one he went to the Manchester Medical School in England and returned five years later as a surgeon to his home city of Baroda. It was the most important period in British Indian history during which those who were imbued by the liberal polity in Britain became the first line of opposition to the pervasive colonial rule. For two decades he was associated as a physician with Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, nationally famed for his enlightened rule in Baroda State. The author's narrative is a collage of experiences in India and Europe, his work as a doctor, his quest to promote education, hygiene and social upliftment among the needy, his family, and national politics over which he casts a wide net intertwined with inner struggles against what he calls his "bourgeois" pedigree. It is also a chronicle of the roles of notable social reformers and freedom activists including Mahatma Gandhi he came across, and the transformative undercurrents of yearning for political rights they symbolized.