She describes how his professional and personal life interacted, usually to the detriment of the latter. I never realised so many Englishmen helped him throughout his career. There are new insights of Menon in every page. She describes his career during the Linlithgow and Wavell viceroyalties. She is fortunate to have the Hodson tapes which enable her to give voice to Menon's thoughts and feelings throughout the narrative. She covers his early years of great hardship, his entry into the government service and his gradual advancement in great detail. Ms Basu has produces a thoroughly-researched, well-written and comprehensive biography.
Drawing from documents-scattered, unread and unresearched until now-and with unprecedented access to Menon’s papers and his taped off-the-record and explosively frank interviews-this remarkable biography of VP Menon not only covers the life and times of a man unjustly consigned to the footnotes of history but also changes our perception of how India, as we know it, came into being.Īs someone who has admired V P Menon for many years and written a modest biography of him, I awaited Ms Basu's biography of him with great anticipation. She takes us through the highs and lows of his career, from his determination to give women the right to vote to his strategy, at once ruthless and subtle, to get the princely states to accede to India to his decision to join forces with the Swatantra Party to his final relegation to relative obscurity.Įqually, the book candidly explores the man behind the public figure- his unconventional personal life and his private conflicts, which made him channel his energy into public service. In this definitive biography, Menon’s great-granddaughter, Narayani Basu, rectifies this travesty. Yet startlingly little is known about this bureaucrat, patriot and visionary.
Menon was unarguably the architect of the modern Indian state. Menon met his stringent deadline, presenting the Menon Plan, which would change the map of the world forever.
With his initial plans for an independent India in tatters, the desperate viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, turned to his seniormost Indian civil servant, Vappala Pangunni Menon-or VP-giving him a single night to devise an alternative, coherent and workable plan for independence.
0 kommentar(er)
