He (called Rabi) was born in a family of mixed culture of East and West. He wrote in his autobiography - My life in my words -
"there was something remarkable in our family. it was as if we lived close to the age of pre-Puranic India through our commitment to the Upanishads. As a boy, I grew up reciting slokas from the Upanishads with a clear enunciation. We had no experience of the emotional excesses prevalent in Bengal's religious life. My father's spiritual life was quiet and controlled."
They had a genuinely deep love of English literature. Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott had a strong influence over their family.
There had been several changes, both nationally and internationally, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Rabi noted that a great fight ensued between the more prograssive people of his time and the orthodox, who became 'nervous and angry' when some lover of truth broke open their enclosure and flooded it with the sunshine of thought and life.
Rabi felt proud of having witnessed three revolutionary movements in his family during his father's time.
1. He was proud, for his father was one of the great leaders of the movement, a movement for whose sake he suffered ostracism and braved social indignities.
2. A literary revolution of which Bankim Chandra Chatterjee of Bengal was the pioneer.
3. The third one was the emergence of nationalism. He was proud that the people of his country started asserting their own personality and began to raise their voice against the indignity and the humiliation imposed upon them by the British colonisers.
