Half - Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India

by Vinay Sitapati

As the biographer Nigel Hamilton puts it, ‘Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.’23 If a leader merely carried out what historical forces made inevitable, it is not the ‘person’ that mattered; it is the moment in ‘time’. Seen this way, Narasimha Rao was simply in the right place at the right moment. It is not his actions that deserve study, it is his historical context.