Krishna menon autobiography of a face

It’s an extraordinary return for the prodigal son of the Indian Independence era, VK Krishna Menon.

In this monumental biography, Jairam Ramesh has not just resurrected the man and his times but brought into life a magnificent cast of personalities through their speeches, letters and conflicting versions of the same events. Ramesh has accessed hundreds of documents that include recently made available archival material and juxtaposed them with a close re-reading of the manifold existing biographies and historical accounts made by earlier writers.

The effect is of a mosaic of tiny fragments of information that he has managed to deploy with a seemingly effortless gaze into a portrait of an age.

Ramesh describes himself as an archival biographer. Presumably it indicates many hours spent poring over manuscripts and selecting those that seem relevant. Quite apart from the extent of h