Biography, according to Lytton Strachey, is ‘the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing’. It is also a difficult art particularly when the story told is that of Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who strode the world like ‘a gentle colossus’ until very recently, and whose life was an open one, openly lived almost in ‘the glorious privacy of light’. The task if further compounded by the fact that the character of the hero is a complex mixture of the dreamer and the fighter, the aesthete and the politician, the thinker and the activist, the reformer and the revolutionary and the conformist and the iconoclast—all contained within the trembling general equilibrium of a rounded and integrated personality.
January 1976, volume 1, No 1