Audrey Sanyal

A rare account of a woman from Lancashire, England in love with India and its people. Audrey met her Indian husband in Sheffield where they were students at the University. She travelled to India for the first time and lived there for 14 years after which she and her husband returned to the West. She lived in England and the USA with her husband for the rest of her life. It takes a remarkable personality to be able to travel halfway across the world to start a newly married life. It takes an even more remarkable one to be able to adapt to new surroundings, learn a new language and be accepted and loved by a family with a completely different cultural heritage. Despite being immersed in a culture and ways foreign to her, Audrey kept her individuality and British heritage very much alive. She was an avid reader and accomplished actress, and more recently a writer, having authored two books with the unfulfilled plan for a trilogy. Her unfinished autobiography provides a vivid picture of her life and times with glimpses into the now bygone world of the forties to seventies in England. Her delectable sense of humour makes the writing all the more palatable. Also, the cross-cultural insights into her family life in India and later in England and America constitute a shining beacon of racial and cultural harmony and unity, so much lacking in the world today. Throughout this the figure of Audrey emerges as a sincere and loving paragon of womanhood and motherhood - an ideal that may well be held up as a worthy role model for women today.