“I started this translation as part of my project of putting together the oral history of my family. But not even halfway through, I realised this was a treasure trove.”-Rajyashree Dutt (Translator- The Maker of Eternity)

Team Kitaab is in conversation with writer and editor, Rajyashree Dutt who translated The Maker of Eternity- A Memoir Across Empire, War and Home (Speaking Tiger, 2026)

Rajyashree Dutt is a writer, editor and theatre practitioner based in Goa. She has worked in the non-fiction sector for over three decades and has edited Chicken Soup for the Indian Couple’s Soul. Her short fiction has appeared in titles from the Chicken Soup series, and she is a two-time prize-winner at the Fundação Oriente Short Stories Competition. She writes plays for her work as a theatre teacher and is currently developing a handbook of original scripts. She has also translated Upendrakishore Roychowdhury’s Toontooni stories.

She recently translated The Maker of Eternity- A Memoir Across Empire, War and Home, her grandfather, Suresh Chandra Guha’s memoir on growing up in Bengal and witnessing empire and revolution, war and displacement, independence and Partition.

Suresh Chandra Guha (b. 1899) grew up in Bengal and Assam and studied at Cotton College, Gauhati, and Presidency College, Calcutta, where he completed a master’s degree in organic chemistry. He taught at Judson College, Rangoon (1923–41), and Gordon College, Rawalpindi (1942–47), before joining St Edmund’s College, Shillong, where he remained until his retirement in 1964. He later settled in Krishnanagar, West Bengal.

About the Book

A rare, first-hand memoir that moves across Bengal, Burma, Punjab and the Northeast, offering an intimate, ground-level account of the seismic events that shaped twentieth-century South Asia—told with clarity, wit and deep human insight.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, a boy growing up in Bengal could not have imagined the world he would live through: empire and revolution, war and displacement, independence and Partition.

In this extraordinary memoir, translated from the original Bengali by his granddaughter, Rajyashree Dutt, Suresh Chandra Guha recounts a life that travelled across continents and crises. From his childhood in rural Bengal and student days in Calcutta, he journeys to colonial Burma as a young professor—only to flee the Japanese invasion during the Second World War. Later, in Rawalpindi, he once again finds himself caught in the violence of 1947 and forced to rebuild his life from nothing.

Rich with stories of teachers, revolutionaries, saints, students and travellers, The Maker of Eternity captures the everyday textures of a vanished world while tracing the upheavals that shaped modern South Asia.

At once intimate and epic, this is the unforgettable story of an ordinary man who lived an extraordinary century.

Team Kitaab spoke to her about reliving her grandfather’s experiences while working on the translation and how it impacted her.

Team Kitaab: The Maker of Eternity spans some of the defining upheavals of twentieth-century South Asia, yet the voice remains strikingly calm, observant and humane. As a translator, how did you preserve that tonal balance without making the narrative sound either overly nostalgic or historically distant?

Rajyashree Dutt: I was determined, throughout this translation, that I would preserve my grandfather’s voice. He was a man with gravitas, not given to hyperbole or overt emotion. I could not change that. In the first round of translation, I converted every phrase and sentence to Bengali. It was in subsequent rounds that I worked on grammar and syntax so it would read well in English. At no point did I add anything extra that would alter the substance or the tone.