Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri, writer and scholar, was born in Kishorganj in East Bengal, which is now in Bangladesh, in an upper-middle-class Kayastha family. His father was a country lawyer with literary interests who taught himself English through dictionaries but worked with Bengali professionally. Nirad’s mother, a housewife, was barely literate yet kept a notebook; she was a strong influence in the family because of her reformist and puritan character. They were a Brahmo Samaj family raised differently than most other Bengali Hindu families in those circumstances. In 1917, the family moved to Calcutta.