It is shown that the quarks and leptons of the standard model, including a right-handed neutrino, can be obtained by gauging the holonomy groups of complex projective spaces of complex dimensions two and three. The spectrum emerges as chiral zero modes of the Dirac operator coupled to gauge fields and the demonstration involves an index theorem analysis on a general complex projective space in the presence of topologically non-trivial SU(n) × U(1) gauge fields. The construction may have applications in type-IIA string theory and non-commutative geometry.