A Contemporary View Of Nehru and Patel, Hindustan Times

My home town, Bengaluru, has the country’s best second-hand bookstores. For decades now, they have sustained me in a personal and professional sense, providing materials for my bed-time reading as well as rare documents for my research.

In one of these stores I recently picked up an old book that served both purposes. This was A. S. Iyengar’s All Through the Gandhian Era, published in 1950. As a journalist, Iyengar interviewed every Viceroy from Chelmsford onwards, and knew, often intimately,...