Jon and Rumer Godden were seven and six years old when in 1914 the outbreak of war released them from the circumscribed life of their grandmother's London house to spend five free and untrammelled years with their father and mother in Bengal. Those five years as seen through the eyes of the children are described in TWO UNDER THE INDIAN SUN, a fragment of autobiography which is not only a gay and perceptive account of childhood and the first pangs of growing up but a marvellous evocation of India. 'Even as children,' the author writes, 'we know it was a wonderful land', and the book is permeated with the joy of discovery and release as they explore the countryside round Narayangunj and voyage slowly along the sluggish rivers of Bengal or make the long hot journeys to the Hills for the summer months and the unaccustomed society of other European children. Whether they are describing the daily life of the big Indian house, their journeys to other parts of India, or the tentative development of their own artistic talents, the authors are entirely successful in recreating for the reader what it is like to be a child in India and, if the harsh realities of poverty and famine are kept mainly in the background, this is because to children these things are seen but not emphasized.

To the difficult art of collaboration the sisters have brought the strong and highly individual talents of two established writers and it is a measure of their success that one is never conscious of two hands at work, so perfect is the fusion of phrase and memory. Yet at the same time the characters of the writers as children are sharp and engagingly differentiated, and their family and friends stand out as real people unfaded by time. Throughout is the pervasive sense of India herself, the India that lies below surface changes, almost untouched by the tides of fashion and timeless in a world of haste.

From the dust jacket of the UK Macmillan edition

In November 1914 two small sisters, Jon and Rumer Godden, returned to India. They had spent a year in London being "brought up" by austere aunts, but now the zeppelins were expected, and so they were summoned back to their home in East Bengal. Jon was only seven and a half and Rumer six.

Two Under the Indian Sun, a unique collaboration, is a remembrance of the five years that followed, in the village of Narayangunj—where their father worked as a steamship agent—on a bustling river that feeds the great Brahmaputra. It is an evocation of a few years that will always be timeless for these two, and it is as true an account as memory can accomplish. India, for them, was sunbaked dust between their toes, colored robes in the market place, the chanting of coolies, the deep hoot of steamers on the river, and the smells of thorn trees, mustard, and coconut oil: smells redolent of the sun.

India was also people, people of every kind, each different from the other and bringing a trail of other differences, of place, custom, religion, even of skin. It was not an ordinary life for young girls, and later they agreed that it might have been better had they been raised in the simplicity of their Quaker forebears. "Better," Jon was to say, "but not nearly as interesting."

Above all, those five years were "a time when everything was clear: each thing was itself: joy was joy, hope was hope, fear and sorrow were fear and sorrow." Jon and Rumer have written of that time with a single voice, perhaps because during those years the two sisters grew so close that "between them was a passing of thought, of feeling, of knowing without any need for words."

From the dust jacket of the U.S. edition