3 Review(s)

‘Rimbaud stopped writing poetry at nineteen…Jesus was crucified at thirty-three; Jack Kennedy was shot…at forty-six. I am twenty-nine years old. What have I done? What am I capable of doing? Who am I?’ Sasthi Brata burst on the literary scene in the late 1960s with My God Died Young, an autobiography. Its unassuming style and youthful angst spoke to a whole generation and the book was an instant publishing success. In this explicit and irreverent autobiography, Sasthi Brata tells his life story, his increasing sense of alienation from his wealthy and extremely conservative Brahmin family, his traumatic experiences at school where the housemaster’s moral lessons almost made a psychological wreck of him, his intense love affair with a girl whose parents married her off to the man of their choice, and his agonized search for roots which took him to England. Alternately tender and brutal, he lays bare the shams of tradition-bound society in India as well as in the West with his no-holds-barred honesty and astonishing insight and understanding. This new edition, with a new introduction by the author, brings this cult classic to a new generation of readers. The questions Sasthi Brata raises and the issues he addresses—faith and superstition, logic and science, fatalism and the freedom of choice—are as relevant today as they were nearly forty years ago when this classic was first published.