#
Something I go on about all the time is how we take the present for granted when it is
#
Take India for example.
#
We think of India as a fixed geographical entity, almost as something inevitable, something
#
meant to be, and now as something permanent, but we are a recent nation, born out of circumstance
#
and happenstance, maintained perhaps by inertia.
#
When India gained independence in 1947, this India that we now inhabit was anything but
#
In fact, at times it must have seemed so unlikely.
#
It wasn't just a question of holding British India together after splitting it in two.
#
There were almost 600 princely states, all with their own agreements with the British,
#
many of whom wanted to join neither India nor Pakistan, but just to get their independence
#
And since our whole freedom struggle was a battle for independence from the British,
#
who could grudge them this?
#
Some of them, even though they were deep within present-day India, wanted to be part of Pakistan.
#
Using force on these princely states would not have gone down well with the international
#
community, so they had to be persuaded to join India of their own free will.
#
Our founders had a few weeks before independence to accomplish this task, which seemed almost
#
Hundreds of princely states, how do you get them all to sign on the dotted line?
#
How do you even find the time to speak to all of them?
#
How do you accommodate the separate demands, especially when Pakistan is also playing mischief
#
A balkanization of India seemed inevitable, but it did not happen.
#
Step by step, the country we now know as India was politically constructed by a handful of
#
One of them, of course, is Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, but his right-hand man, B.P. Menon,
#
is today a footnote in most history books, despite being arguably as important as Patel
#
in bringing us all together.
#
If B.P. Menon did not exist, we may have been living in a different India.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
My guest today is Narayani Basu, author of the fine book B.P. Menon, The Unsung Architect
#
This is a fitting subject for a show called The Scene and the Unseen, because B.P. Menon
#
really is one of those unseen heroes whose contribution to our history is outsized.
#
Narayani's book is available at your nearest bookstore and by all accounts is already a
#
bestseller and Narayani is right here with me on this show.
#
Before we get to our conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
If you enjoy listening to The Scene and the Unseen, you can play a part in keeping the
#
The Scene and the Unseen has been a labor of love for me.
#
I've enjoyed putting together many stimulating conversations, expanding my brain and my universe
#
and hopefully yours as well.
#
But while the work has been its own reward, I don't actually make much money off the show.
#
Although The Scene and the Unseen has great numbers, advertisers haven't really woken
#
up to the insane engagement level of podcasts.
#
I do many many hours of deep research for each episode, besides all the logistics of
#
producing the show myself, scheduling guests, booking studios, paying technicians, the travel
#
So well, I'm trying a new way of keeping the scene going and that involves you.
#
My proposition for you is this, for every episode of The Scene and the Unseen that you
#
enjoy, buy me a cup of coffee or even a lavish lunch, whatever you feel it's worth.
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You can do this by heading over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contributing an amount of
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This is not a subscription.
#
The Scene and the Unseen will continue to be free on all podcast apps and at sceneunseen.in.
#
This is just a gesture of appreciation.
#
Help keep the thing going.
#
sceneunseen.in slash support.
#
Narayani, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
Thank you for having me.
#
You know, before we get to this fascinating book, that's clearly been a labor of love
#
Tell me a little bit about yourself.
#
You know, what are you, what's your training, what's your education like?
#
So I have basically majored in history.
#
I went to Stevens, I majored in history.
#
I then switched to international relations.
#
I didn't really know what I wanted to do post history.
#
I knew I didn't want to get into conventional academics.
#
I didn't want to do a PhD.
#
I didn't want to teach.
#
I also didn't want to sit for the civil services.
#
But I really enjoyed studying about international relations, about how countries interacted with
#
each other, diplomats interacted with each other.
#
So I switched to international relations.
#
I majored in Chinese foreign policy.
#
I specialized in US-China relations.
#
I completed my academics up to my MPhil.
#
And thereafter, I just, I dropped out of academia 100%.
#
I didn't want to continue to do a PhD.
#
I took up a job as a research analyst with the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies,
#
where I worked for a couple of years as a China research analyst.
#
It wasn't something that gave me a lot of joy because it was not the kind of interaction
#
with international relations that I actually wanted to do.
#
And at that point, I wasn't very clear about what that meant either.
#
I just knew that I wasn't very pleased with what I was doing.
#
I also knew that I wanted to write and research a lot more than the job was actually giving
#
This was about six years ago.
#
I quit my job and I turned to writing full-time and research full-time.
#
And coincidentally, that is also the track that brought me on to writing V.P. Menon because
#
at that point I was reading, I've always been a lover of nonfiction.
#
I've read a lot of political and historical nonfiction, biographies primarily.
#
And I was at that point reading a lot about modern Indian history, about how the transfer
#
of power came about, et cetera.
#
And I would see V.P. Menon's name.
#
And let me just make it clear, I did not know at this point V.P. Menon was my great-grandfather
#
So this is not something that we discussed effusively at all.
#
My mother never, and indeed members of my family didn't ever bring me up to know who
#
There was no constant eulogizing of this was who your great-grandfather was.
#
But we are a family who loves to read and we like to discuss books.
#
I was discussing a particular book, I forget which, on the transfer of power.
#
And I was mentioning V.P. Menon, who was perennially referred to as Mountbatten's able reforms
#
commissioner, et cetera.
#
And at that point, I was in my mid-twenties and my mother looked at me and she said, you
#
do know that he was your great-grandfather.
#
And that was the first time that I'd heard of him.
#
And that completely, it intrigued me a lot because I wanted to immediately know more
#
And I began to try and look him up.
#
And I found nothing apart from his very seminal books, the transfer of power and the story
#
and the integration of the states, but those are written in very academic, very concise
#
They give nothing away about what kind of man this person was.
#
And there was nothing else.
#
There was no biography, there was no autobiography, there was nothing.
#
And I began to become more and more interested in this person and trying to find out what
#
kind of person this was.
#
And that, I have to say, it happened simultaneously with me losing interest in a typical desk
#
So when I dropped out, when I quit my job, this seemed like the natural thing to do,
#
to research who V.P. Menon was and what I wanted to do as far as writing his life was
#
Did I want to write a complete biography, did I want to explore it into more of a political
#
It was the first time that I had actually started playing around with ideas like that.
#
And that gave me a lot of joy, gave me great freedom to think.
#
It gave me a lot of scope to sort of expand my horizons more.
#
And actually how I began writing this book and how I came to this point.
#
And so, you know, you get drawn into the stories of, he's because obviously a lot of the popular
#
books that we read about our history will mention him.
#
He is Mountbatten's Reforms Commissioner.
#
He is, you know, Patel's right hand man in the State's Department.
#
But when you actually decide that you want to write a history of the guy and you also
#
decide that it's going to be a sort of a comprehensive history, not just his political career, it's
#
going to include little things like how he ran away from home and burnt his school when
#
What are the kind of sources that you then look at?
#
Because you have the unique position of not just having access to the family, but his
#
So you've got a unique kind of access there.
#
But apart from that, how do you then go about looking for sources?
#
What kind of access do you need for that?
#
Were there good primary sources left?
#
So in terms of his professional life, there was plenty of access.
#
And this happened in a sort of layered way, because he's left behind a collection of his
#
professional papers, rather, which are housed at Dinmurti.
#
Now these have nothing to do with his personal life.
#
They are just basically his career and government service.
#
And that is the V.P. Menon collection.
#
Apart from that, I also had to go through the professional papers of nearly everyone
#
who was involved in the transfer of power.
#
So Batten, Nehru, Krishna Menon, the Sardar Patel correspondents, because in every one
#
of these people's correspondence, in between the pages, there were different memos, there
#
were letters written by V.P. to these guys.
#
And these guys were corresponding with him in turn, which have merited footnotes in transfer
#
of power narratives, but never really been looked at.
#
So these to me were also a huge insight into how this man was thinking.
#
So that was one source.
#
As far as his personal life was concerned, I hit several roadblocks because he was a
#
very, very fiercely private man.
#
He was not somebody who was an eloquent diarist or an eloquent letter writer.
#
He left behind very few instances of how he felt at a particular point, of how he experienced
#
his own personal, for instance, his arrival in Delhi and stuff like that.
#
They are letters that have been left few and far between.
#
They are letters that were left to his stepdaughter, Meenakshi Anantan.
#
One or two letters have survived that were left to his brother, to whom he was extremely
#
And he was the eldest of seven siblings.
#
So he was very close to one particular younger brother with whom he used to correspond.
#
But he was the oldest boy.
#
He had an elder sister who got married or he had his elder sister is not really talked
#
about because she died long before he was effectively he was the eldest of the family.
#
And these were letters that didn't allow me much insight into the man as such, because
#
he very rarely talked about, for instance, his transition from boyhood to manhood.
#
You know, when he talked about his arrival in Delhi, it was only at a specific point
#
So he wasn't very vocal about things like that, about his emotions, about his feelings.
#
So it was a labor, I have to say a long, long labor, because in the process of this, I've
#
had to connect to members of the Vapala clan, whom I didn't know at all.
#
Because when VP left Kerala, and when he ran away to Kolar and moved to Delhi and similar,
#
he used to return to Kerala, but he never really returned to settle in Kerala.
#
He retired in Bangalore.
#
So his children grew up out of the main Tharabad, which by the way still exists, but nobody
#
ever really returned, at least not from my family.
#
So there was no touch that was maintained between members of his children's families,
#
for instance, his siblings families, there was no contact that was maintained.
#
And this was in the days before emails and telephones and mobiles and stuff like that.
#
So to try and hunt them down was extremely difficult.
#
It was a matter of chance that I actually discovered somebody via Twitter actually who
#
actually led me to look at Kochi and Arunakulam where I discovered his brother's children
#
are still living there.
#
So it brought me home in many ways.
#
It's brought me back to my roots in ways that I didn't think was possible.
#
The entire clan actually pulled together and retrieved old letters or scraps of information,
#
photographs, which are now in the book, which have existed and allowed me to piece together
#
really painstakingly the story of this man from nothing, you know, because he was so
#
completely almost as if he lived in a little bubble in which there was his immediate family
#
And very rarely did he go beyond that.
#
He loved his brother, he adored his mother, but he was not somebody who was very vocal
#
about his emotional life, nor was he someone who was particularly sentimental.
#
So he didn't leave behind any trace of a softer side of VP.
#
In fact, the only soft side that I could find was his great love for his second wife and
#
his immense love for his stepdaughter Meenakshi.
#
And surprisingly, he has been very vocal there.
#
So that was the only soft side of VP that I could find.
#
And it's been a search that's intrigued me a lot because I don't think it's this hard
#
to piece together someone's life and yet it's been incredibly difficult.
#
His first marriage, for instance, there is little to no information that survives about
#
We just have a first name, Sushila.
#
We don't even have a last name.
#
We don't know what family she came from.
#
We know vaguely that she was from the same village.
#
We don't know what she looked like.
#
There are no photographs, there are no letters, there is nothing that survives.
#
We don't know why that marriage broke down.
#
We know that it wasn't a particularly happy marriage and that's about all we know.
#
We know that there were two sons from that marriage.
#
I am descended from her eldest son.
#
And beyond that, we know nothing else.
#
Why this marriage broke down in 1935?
#
Why it broke down, we don't know.
#
We know that there was no attempt to contact her sons after she left.
#
If there was, either those letters were intercepted and then destroyed because nothing survives
#
That to me spoke of a rather ruthless side of VP.
#
It was not a side that I personally identify with.
#
Certainly it was a side that his children never understood.
#
It was also an aspect that impacted his children for years, if not all of their lives, because
#
my grandfather was about nine when the marriage broke apart.
#
His brother was seven and they were young, but I mean, to have this happen at that scale
#
when you're that young or indeed when you're any age is life changing for you.
#
And you know, he never, never remembered his mother.
#
And that's another aspect that I found bizarre because obviously the hurt of his mother's
#
exit impacted him so deeply that he never had any memory of what she was like.
#
So there are no memories.
#
This was at the context, she basically disappeared one day and she never got in touch again.
#
And you have a moving story in your book about how some 30 years later.
#
My mother remembered that story.
#
It was something she never forgot.
#
They were in a busy marketplace and suddenly he said, that's, there's my mother right there.
#
And he ran out of the shop and it was a busy street outside and the woman who had stored
#
some instinct in him who had disappeared.
#
And to me that was incredibly poignant because it spoke of a little boy who never stopped
#
looking for his mother.
#
And it also speaks to me of the kind of hurt parent is capable of inflicting on their children.
#
And I have tried to put down the story in complete full as much as I know it, because
#
I don't believe that if even if you do have a cruel streak, if you have a particularly
#
ruthless streak, that that should be set aside.
#
Because to me it spoke a lot about the fact that this was a man who went on to do wonderful
#
things for this country, but was capable of immense cruelty in his personal life.
#
He was not a very good father to his sons.
#
He was very emotionally distant.
#
They grew up craving his love, his approval.
#
They always wanted his validation.
#
And strangely they called him sir, which again spoke of a very stern formal aspect of the
#
On the other hand, he adored his stepdaughter.
#
She was with him when he died.
#
He wanted everything after he was dead to be left to her and she adored him in turn.
#
So he was obviously a very complex man.
#
So to try and deconstruct that from next to nothing has been hard, very, very hard.
#
And I'd say, you know, when I was reading the book, I thought, okay, there are two sort
#
of challenges in front of you.
#
And one which you've just elaborated upon is when so little is known of his personal
#
life and there's nothing left and he was not really a person who wrote personal letters
#
or stayed in touch with his family, how do you piece a personal life together?
#
But the other challenge is actually with his political and public life, which is a challenge
#
of figuring out with your additional material, what sense to make of the conflicting narratives.
#
Because in a lot of the key moments in history, like for example, his relationship with Mount
#
Batten, Mount Batten was a self-aggrandizing man who took credit for everything.
#
In fact, what is now called the Mount Batten plan, as you have pointed out, was drafted
#
by Menon years before Mount Batten even came to India, it should be called the Menon plan.
#
And you know, so Mount Batten made it a point to try and take credit for everything that
#
was happening in a similar sense.
#
Patel was given a lot of the credit for the behind the scenes work that VP did.
#
There are all kinds of conflicting accounts of what's really going on there because there
#
are the egos of all these big players on the stage and they're all putting forward their
#
Was that a sort of a challenge for you that how do you build a coherent narrative out
#
Because VP has obviously also got his strong points of view when it comes to all of this.
#
And at times they don't match up with the others.
#
So how do you make sense of that?
#
That was something that I found, I initially thought of this as a challenge, right?
#
Because essentially, though he never sat for his ICS examinations, this guy was a bureaucrat.
#
How do you make a bureaucrat stand out political giants?
#
You know, he is walking among legends.
#
He is at a point which is a crossroads in India's modern history.
#
How do you make somebody, and it's so easy to stereotype a bureaucrat, right?
#
You think of them as babu pushing paper.
#
And it was a fascinating aspect for me because when you're talking, when you're talking
#
on independence movement, you don't necessarily like to think of it as paperwork, personnel
#
shortages, transfers of personnel.
#
You don't like to think of it like that because it's generally, it's a boring aspect.
#
You know, revolution generally makes you think of bloodshed and stirring speeches and wonderful
#
You don't think of the civil servants who are actually doing the work behind the scenes.
#
So my greatest fear was how do I pull out VP Menon from the shadows of the kind of history
#
he was involved with, from the kind of people he was involved with, and make him stand out
#
To that end, I found that the 18 hours of interviews that Hodgson did with him in 1965,
#
They've never been looked at in any narrative of the transfer of power.
#
And to me, this was, it was almost criminal because you had his voice, it was him narrating
#
how he had actually worked through from 1918 onwards to 1951.
#
And it brought his story into really vivid life for me, which is why I've allowed his
#
voice to do most of the talking in the biography because for me, there was no other person
#
who could tell it better.
#
It was also a challenge to me to try and understand how he might have felt given the fact that
#
he had just started out in government service when the independence movement was gaining
#
steam and what he must have felt as somebody who's sitting within the walls of the Imperial
#
Secretariat while his countrymen are clamoring to be free of colonial rule.
#
Was there a moral dilemma?
#
Did he ever feel any kind of conflict?
#
And in those tapes, there is my answer because it turns out he did feel that kind of conflict.
#
He genuinely was somebody who believed that, look, I feel like I can work better against
#
the system if I'm within the system.
#
If I can bring about any kind of constitutional progress, that can be my contribution to this
#
country's fight for independence.
#
I don't necessarily have to be out there in public meetings, in protests, which other
#
people are doing already.
#
This is one way in which I can contribute.
#
And it also sidetracked me into wondering whether this was just VP who thought like
#
this or were there other people who thought like this.
#
And it turns out that there were H.V.R. Iyengar, for instance, in his oral histories, which
#
he's left behind at Dinmurti, tells this lovely story of how a lot of people in the civil
#
service, including Iyengar, was so conflicted about how to deal with this conundrum that
#
they went to Sardar Patel and they said, look, are we doing something wrong here?
#
Shouldn't we be also rebelling like our countrymen are?
#
And the Sardar thought about this for a minute and then he said, no, when India finally does
#
become independent, we're going to need people who are trained.
#
We're going to need people who've been there, done that and have experience in administration
#
in the do's and don'ts of governance.
#
So there should be no conundrum.
#
You're doing what is right and will eventually be right for this country because you will
#
be inducted into an independent India civil service.
#
So actually speaking, it wasn't just VP who felt this way.
#
There were other people who felt that way as well.
#
In the course of nearly four decades in government, VP was exposed to egos that were huge, personalities
#
Often they were too huge to be contained around the same table.
#
And for him, as he's telling the story, it is essentially a sort of clash of different
#
personalities and egos at play that is actually going towards making history what it is.
#
You know, you had immensely petty arguments.
#
You had immensely vicious arguments also sometimes, because these were high pressure situations,
#
particularly as the country moved into the 1940s, tempers were high, egos were huge,
#
vanity was perennially getting wounded.
#
And this man had to navigate so many different kinds of personalities.
#
And this was not just during the transfer of power, but in post transfer of power during
#
For me, this was a fascinating sort of tapestry because you had VP actually talking his way
#
around different personalities, for instance, with Mountbatten, he had to present his own
#
plan to make it seem like it was Mountbatten's idea, because he knew that Mountbatten liked
#
to take the credit and liked to be center stage.
#
So he developed a knack for sort of adapting his ideas to those who are in power so that
#
it would seem like their idea, which is, I think, a major reason why his own contribution
#
has been so downplayed, why it's easy to efface VP Menon from the face of modern Indian history.
#
Because of this particular knack, because he found it best often to let others take
#
credit for ideas that potentially were game changers.
#
And that to me was another challenge while I was writing this book, because while in
#
his official narratives, he's allowed people to take the credit.
#
In his oral history, he's very clear about certain things.
#
And in other people's oral histories as well, Alan Gamble Johnson, Mountbatten himself,
#
HVR Iyengar, everyone is equally clear that VP Menon did most of the work.
#
There was no one in power at that point who did not command as much influence as VP.
#
In fact, even when the partition council was set up, Iyengar remembers that every decision
#
He would sign off on it, even though he wasn't necessarily involved in every single committee
#
that was operating under the council.
#
For me, that's been a fascinating eye opener and a great insight into how the wheels of
#
power were actually turning at that point, there was a lot happening.
#
It was not necessarily as black and white as we see it today, because everything was
#
And there were events of momentous scale happening almost simultaneously.
#
So to actually be in boats at once and navigate such different personalities at the same time
#
And he was a doer, let's kind of get back to biography and his childhood was infinitely
#
fascinating to me, because he's growing up in the village and he's a headmaster's son
#
and he's sent to school and all of that.
#
And at some point, this Tamilian headmaster at a future school basically kicks him out.
#
And then you quote his own words, like he's very upset, he goes to the banks of the river,
#
presumably cries a bit, kicks the trees.
#
And then he says, quote, I found an empty liquor bottle on the banks of the river.
#
I didn't bother to think about it or even about the consequences.
#
I just wanted that Tamilian to pay for what he had done.
#
I went to the shop and I told Ahmed, who was the shopkeeper, and I told Ahmed, I wanted
#
some kerosene oil in a matchbox.
#
My mother would send the money later, stop quote.
#
And then he goes and burns down his school.
#
Actually this was a completely sensational reading.
#
I mean, today, the few people who actually remember V.P. Menon, remember the story of
#
a boy who burned down the school.
#
This was Autopalam High School, which is basically the common point for most children to come
#
He actually did set it on fire when I actually asked around, descendants of people who had
#
actually gone to Autopalam High School attested to the fact that V.P. had actually set the
#
It didn't completely burn down, it burned down halfway, but yeah, he did set it on fire.
#
I mean, there are lots of us who have been 13 and have wanted to burn our schools down
#
This boy actually did it.
#
And what was even more interesting to me was that he was so overcome with shame because
#
he'd just been carried away by this rage.
#
And he was then so overcome with horror at what he'd done that he actually ran away from
#
And he actually hitches a ride on a train and it carries him to Kolar.
#
And he begins a life there which is completely alien to the life that he's lived in before.
#
He's been this really pampered little boy.
#
His mother adored him, he adored his mother.
#
He never really did a hard day's work in his life.
#
And here he is suddenly lobbing up in a gold mine to take up the life of a coolie boy.
#
And he never done any such kind of work in his life before.
#
So I mean, he suddenly basically changed his life overnight by this one hot headed act.
#
And his life would never be the same again.
#
He would not go back home until it was time for him to get married.
#
He wanted to actually make something of himself because by this point he's thinking, I have
#
basically set my school on fire.
#
I brought shame to my family.
#
What will my mother think of me?
#
I have to now make something of myself to make up for whatever I've done.
#
And he goes to Kolar and he spends five years of his life, five of the most formative years
#
of any child's life, working in a gold mine.
#
Just as a coolie and then he applies with what I thought was great brazenness for the
#
And to me that spoke right there of somebody who had almost blind ambition and actually
#
really didn't care what anyone might think because I mean, this is a boy who's not completed
#
his formal schooling, right?
#
He's not got an examination certificate, but he has the audacity to go to a supervisor
#
and basically say, look, I want to apply for this post.
#
But the supervisor gives him the post and it's something that actually marks his career,
#
that will mark his career and his personality as the years go by because he's then now prone
#
He will do it again in 1914 when he applies to the registrar of the home department and
#
basically says, look, give me a job in the directorate of statistics, you know, which
#
is a new department that's been set up by the Raj to essentially collect really boring
#
statistical information about things like prop output and demographics and rainfall.
#
And he has worked his way northwards from Kolar by this point.
#
It is five years later.
#
We are getting ahead of ourselves.
#
Can I interrupt you and kind of go back?
#
What I found, you know, you shouldn't, you're the writer of the book, I should say sorry
#
for getting in the way of your narrative.
#
No, what I found interesting even, you know, back at Otapalam, there's a couple of things.
#
One you point out very evocatively, the time that he would be waiting for a strain at
#
Otapalam railway station and all the people would look after him and he's 12 and 13 now
#
And they're giving him little things to eat and drink.
#
And then one day one of them gives him the Madras mail, the newspaper.
#
And from that day, every single day he's reading every single page, he's just sitting there
#
and he's devouring and he's, he's a kid, he's 12 years old, he's 13 years old at the time
#
he burns his school down.
#
And this kind of struck me this hunger to know everything about the world.
#
Of course, if one of them gave him a smartphone with PUBG on it, we don't know what would
#
But no, he's got this hunger for knowledge.
#
The other thing that struck me is on how you point out and then you quote him on this,
#
that as a train, he gets on the train when he's running away from home.
#
And then you quote him saying, quote, that train and forgive my pronunciations, my Maloo
#
friends, I am in spirit one of you, but my pronunciations are not so great.
#
This is VP Menon saying, quote, that train went from Otapalam to Lakkidi and then Parali
#
and then onto Olavakode, we went through a tunnel at Walayar and then we stopped at Pothanoor.
#
And this is, he's remembering this in the 1960s.
#
This is part of his oral, the history that he recorded then.
#
So you know, almost 50 years later, more than 50 years later, he remembers all the stops.
#
What I find that no one's actually pointed this out is that he had an eidetic memory
#
and that is something that would serve him immensely, photographic memories.
#
So basically he never forgot anything and it's something that came in incredibly importantly
#
It would come in recollecting memory.
#
And as you said, he was always characterized by this really strong hunger to learn.
#
It makes you actually wistful thinking of a small boy on a railway platform in the middle
#
of nowhere, actually going through paper after paper, reading about events that he really
#
has no idea what is going on, you know, and he's reading about things like the partition
#
in Bengal and he's reading about, you know, political debates, about international events.
#
And he has no clue who these people are or why it's happening at all because life in
#
rural Kerala is worlds away from whatever might be happening.
#
But it doesn't stop him from thinking about these things, from having questions in his
#
head that obviously no one can answer for him at that point.
#
But to me, sitting, a little boy sitting on a platform with, you know, a cup of tea or
#
coffee and vada and idli and reading the papers and reading about these men who signed pieces
#
of papers to change history and reconnecting the dots years later when he's actually one
#
of those men signing papers and making history.
#
It was as if life had come full circle.
#
But he was always characterized by a strong desire to learn.
#
It was something that he utilized as he grew up.
#
And I saw it more and more as he entered government service, he had this knack for taking watches
#
of knowledge and adapting it to a particular situation, depending on what position in government
#
service he was and also depending on the kind of person he was dealing with.
#
So that is something that he developed very early on because he had such a head for figures,
#
facts for remembering entire pages of information.
#
I remember my mother once telling me that he could read one paragraph in the heaviest
#
constitutional prose and you could ask him that same paragraph a week later and he would
#
recite it word for word.
#
And it's something that I really enjoyed because it's a characteristic that sounds cliched
#
when you actually talk about it.
#
But it was something that was so reflected in how he actually worked his way up and how
#
he utilized that knowledge that I found myself believing it.
#
This was somebody who liked to learn.
#
This was somebody for whom information was, it was pleasure.
#
He liked learning and he liked figures, facts.
#
He wanted to know what made the heart of something tick.
#
He wanted to read around it.
#
He wanted to read about it.
#
It was something that never left him right until the day he died.
#
So yeah, that was very fascinating for me.
#
And yet he wasn't a bookish kid.
#
He was a man of action or a death one decade of action.
#
Like you point out, he burns his school, which is not, by the way, something we recommend
#
to 13 year old listeners of the show, you know, there are, I mean, yeah, that's survivorship
#
He got away with it, but you know, you won't, don't try it at home.
#
And what I'm also struck by is the same night he decides to leave, but he doesn't just leave.
#
He figures out where he's going to go.
#
In his own words, I had heard of the gold fields in Kolar.
#
I knew I needed money to eat.
#
That was the only thought in my head, how to fill my stomach, stop quote.
#
So there's this pampered entitled kid who runs away.
#
And now you've given some perspective on what Kolar is in your book, which I think for the
#
listeners is actually pretty useful.
#
And I'll quote that bit again.
#
How does it feel listening to your words in my voice?
#
Anyway, in a good way, I'll read this bit out again, because I think it's important
#
perspective when you just imagine a 13 year old kid in this place, quote, the legend of
#
Kolar's might was not to be trifled with.
#
In 1897, a deadly rock fallen landslide inside the Mysore mine had killed upwards of 50 workers,
#
injuring hundreds more.
#
In January 1906, the Vicaroo for one of the mining cages caught fire killing six workers
#
and injuring 10 others.
#
Sickness was a constant specter.
#
Cholera, dysentery, malaria, asthma and lung cancer raged through the coolie settlements,
#
picking off those who survived the horrors of the underground.
#
When dusk fell, workers would stumble out of their mines and their workstations and
#
many would turn their faces towards the local liquor shops or gambling dens.
#
Even the wives and children waited for them at home.
#
The sky was perennially contaminated by smoke billowing from the tall brick chimneys that
#
The horizon was marred by a huge contraption with rotating wheels on top.
#
He would later learn that this was a great lift that conveyed men from the surface of
#
the earth to his bowels.
#
The mines rumbled all day long with the occasional explosion, dynamite blasting through rock,
#
shaking the earth and showering the debris and dust on workers in the adjacent narrow
#
Temperatures raged up to 157 degrees Fahrenheit, Stockport and the temperature is of course
#
And what also Stocky, what you pointed out is that the Englishmen that he dealt with
#
at this point in time did not care that he did not have a school leaving certificate
#
They were willing to evaluate him on his own merits and this is exactly a trope that continues
#
for the rest of his life, where he rises to the top of the civil service without giving
#
the ICS examination and at every step it is, you know, even when he's sort of treated badly
#
like when Mountbatten first comes to India and he's a reforms commissioner, but Mountbatten
#
has got his own team and he wants nothing to do with him, but then at some point he
#
doesn't have a choice because VP is simply the best brain out there and he kind of has
#
So you know, so kind of Kolar happens and you point out about how Kolar taught him to
#
be thrifty because he was earning so little and he wanted to send money home and how it
#
taught him to compartmentalize his emotions into separate watertight boxes, which you
#
say will be became a blessing and a curse in later years.
#
So when you say it became a blessing and a curse in later years, I'm presuming you mean
#
it became a blessing in the workspace.
#
It was not a curse at home.
#
It was anything but a blessing at home.
#
So from here, from Kolar, he then this young teenager then lands up in Bombay.
#
For one, I agree when you say he encountered really supportive English supervisors through
#
the rest of his career and his life.
#
And which is why I found Kolar completely fascinating because like I said, they're transformative
#
years for any child's life, but VP they've changed him completely in ways that I think
#
And when we're talking about a pampered privileged kid running off to Kolar, I think it also
#
speaks a lot about kid who was incredibly practical and had a lot of pride as well.
#
He knew that he needed food to eat, but he also knew that he was not going to go home,
#
face his parents and you know, admit to what he'd done.
#
He'd much rather go off, try to do something that makes something of himself and send money
#
That's incredibly self-sufficient.
#
It is a survival tactic.
#
It also speaks of a lot, like I said, a lot of practicality and pride.
#
He is blessed completely when he meets supervisors who don't want a matriculation examination
#
It is the first time that he actually encounters someone who says, it doesn't matter what your
#
credentials are at a piece of paper, don't matter.
#
And that's something that he's going to carry with him for the rest of his life.
#
And we can talk about that later, of course, but you know, when he gets sacked from Kolar,
#
he basically starts working his way northwards.
#
And the information here is incredibly sketchy.
#
There is a point when he's first gone to Bangalore, where he works as a clerk in the Imperial
#
From there, he goes to Indore and these are events that have been pieced together from
#
what he told various other people.
#
So there is a lot of oral history here, but also recollections of what others remembered
#
of VP's childhood as well.
#
So he also went to Indore to try and teach the kid of a landed gentleman English.
#
He then ends up in Bombay and he is selling hand towels outside Victoria Terminus.
#
And again, not a life that he's used to.
#
He's done several menial things along the way by now.
#
Selling towels doesn't seem to be anything different.
#
And he's essentially going through a period of great emotional turmoil, understandably
#
He goes to sleep one day and he wakes up to find that his gold eardrop has been stolen.
#
And he's almost in tears because he's now been away from home for so long.
#
And he's now been on his own for so long and fending for himself for so long that on one
#
hand it's become almost part of his character, on the other hand, he's still a boy who misses
#
home and misses his mother and he doesn't know what he's doing here.
#
And these to me are moments where the boy is becoming a man, but very reluctantly so.
#
There are experiences that are teaching him extremely hard things.
#
He's been cruelly pushed into manhood rather than, I guess, becoming a man.
#
Yeah, it's not a simple transition for him, you know, because...
#
Let me say right now that this was a choice he made when he chose to run away from home.
#
Indeed, when he chose to set a school on fire, it was a choice that he made.
#
This was a choice made for him by whoever left that empty liquor bottle on the, you
#
know, seashore that he had.
#
He just carried the bottle away.
#
The idea might not have stopped.
#
So, I mean, you know, he's essentially...
#
The transition from boyhood to manhood has not been simple so far.
#
He's been kicked out of several jobs.
#
He feels like he's let down his family in more ways than one.
#
By this point, his father's also died.
#
His mother is not doing so well either.
#
And he's plagued by the thought that he might just end up being a nobody from nowhere.
#
And again, fate steps in and he is given...
#
He's chanced upon by this gentleman who...
#
English gentleman who works in the Government of India in the Home Department.
#
Now, who this person is, we don't know.
#
We merely know that he was given a letter of recommendation, which he was instructed
#
And he was basically told that, look, you go to the Government of India and you basically
#
use this letter to apply for a job.
#
And he does that because by this point, he doesn't know what else to do.
#
At this point, he doesn't even know that he has to sit for the ICSE examinations.
#
I think that's a thought that never crossed his head until he was very well within the
#
walls of the Secretariat.
#
And then he only realized when he first arrived in Delhi clutching a letter, he was just a
#
He was thinking of nothing like academic credentials or professional qualifications.
#
He was just looking for a way to survive.
#
And this part of the story is another part that's gone down in the legend that surrounds
#
Because we've heard of how he reaches Delhi and his pocket is picked.
#
And he basically reaches Delhi in the spring of 1914.
#
And he's 21 years old by this point.
#
And he arrives to find that the government of India has essentially packed its bags and
#
gone off to Simla as it does every year, but he wasn't know that.
#
So he was just basically told, please go back, catch another train and go to Simla.
#
And he arrives at the station and finds his wallet has been stolen.
#
Now in legend, it's gone down that it was a kindly Sardarji who gave him the money.
#
Actually what happened was that it was a fellow Mallu who gave him the money.
#
And this fellow Mallu will play a huge role in his life later on, though he's not to know
#
that now, but he's given the money to go off to Simla.
#
He arrives in Simla, goes to Gautam Castle, presents the letter and is told, boss, we
#
don't have any openings.
#
And he's dumbstruck because he was under the rather naive impression that if this gentleman
#
had given him a letter of recommendation, there must be a job.
#
How can there not be a job?
#
And he persists and he says, there must be something you can do.
#
And these guys say, okay, fine, there's this clerk who's gone off on vacation.
#
He's gone for two months.
#
You're free to join for two months, but that's all we can give you.
#
If you want it, you can have it.
#
And it's again, it's a life changing moment for him because it's also a moment that speaks
#
to me of a lot of desperation because there is zero way that he can go back now with nothing.
#
And he's heard about government service.
#
He doesn't know what it entails, but he's heard that once you get into government service,
#
it can give you a good life and a stable life, which is what he's looking for.
#
And at this point, he is just driven by questions of survival.
#
How do you keep your stomach full?
#
And he says, okay, fine, I'll take the job.
#
And in those two months, he's also hunting for more permanent forms of employment.
#
Money is coming along and the directorate of statistics, which I referred to earlier,
#
And he thinks, what the hell, I will just put in a word.
#
I will apply directly to the registrar and see what he can do.
#
And again, it's the same sort of brazen devil may care attitude that supported him earlier.
#
This is somebody who never seemed to care that he had anything to lose.
#
He always went at life like he had nothing to lose.
#
As Dylan once wrote, if you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
#
Which at every stage of his life, he ain't got nothing, so he's just going for it.
#
So he was just going for it.
#
And it's something that I really admired at the outset.
#
You've got no academic credentials.
#
You're a temporary typist.
#
And yet you have the audacity to write a letter and say, look, there's a directorate that's
#
It's going to need manpower.
#
And the registrar, and this file actually still exists in the national archives, right?
#
It's this really ancient brittle file, but it has VP's first letter in 1914.
#
And it has the registrar's reply as well saying that we've considered your application and
#
And he's packing his bags to go from similar to Delhi when the first world war breaks out.
#
Yet again, a game changing moment for VP because once the war breaks out, officials are going
#
They're going to enlist in the war.
#
More spaces are opening up.
#
So he's got a good chance of making this work for the first time.
#
He's still not a confirmed employee of the government of India.
#
And this is something that's going to be true of his career for the next four years.
#
He will not be a confirmed employee.
#
He will be bobbing from department to department.
#
He worked in the directorate of statistics for a while.
#
He would then go on to work as a clerk in Lady Harding's medical college committee.
#
He would do really temporary stuff which sort of stop gap employments, you know, one month,
#
two months, six months.
#
And this was to continue until Edwin Montague became secretary of state for India.
#
And when Montague goes ahead and makes his famous August 20th declaration, which is essentially
#
speaking to the fact that one day, and that day is not specified right now, but one day
#
India will have the right to self-governing institutions.
#
And Montague himself is somebody who's creating a lot of waves for very different reasons
#
in Whitehall because Montague is very mercurial, very temperamental, also loves the limelight
#
as a certain Viceroy will decades later.
#
But Montague is also rather radical in his outlook as far as the colony is concerned.
#
He's somebody who feels that, look, if you're giving Indians a westernized form of education,
#
if you're teaching them to think like us, they will think like us.
#
Why will they not want independence at some point?
#
And VPs heard Montague's speech on the radio and he's completely startled by this.
#
He's never heard this kind of speech before.
#
And in his later years, when he is actually talking to Harry Hodgson about this, he says
#
Montague was somebody I thought was a real visionary.
#
And if he had been allowed to stay, he could have done wonderful things at that point.
#
We all know history didn't go quite that way.
#
But anyway, Edwin Montague is coming out to India in the winter of 1917.
#
And this is when the first sort of germs of the reforms branch are put together.
#
So Montague essentially will need a roving sort of branch to accompany him across the
#
country as he's undertaking a tour.
#
He's going to various provinces.
#
He's going to princely states to basically meet political leaders, princes, et cetera,
#
get their opinions about the ideas that he's got for India.
#
Joining him will be a small team, typists, stenographers, clerks, and it will be headed
#
by somebody called William Maris.
#
Now this wasn't called the reforms branch at this point, it was called the emergency
#
But essentially it was what would become the reforms branch later William Maris was technically
#
India's first reforms commissioner, though that post hadn't been invented yet.
#
Maris and Montague would not get on.
#
But it was a moment that changed VP's career because he has now gone from a minuscule salary
#
to 120 rupees a month, plus two rupees for traveling allowance.
#
He is now for the first time exposed to what goes on behind making laws that can potentially
#
And it's nothing as soul stirring as he probably thought it was.
#
It was essentially a lot of bickering and squabbling over redrafting sentences, over
#
changing the position of a clause, you know, should clause A be clause C instead?
#
Does that give this act more weight?
#
It's stuff that can be mind numbingly boring.
#
And yet, because it was being played out in front of him, he would eventually become Maris's
#
go to person in the sense that he was primary typist that Maris would essentially have in
#
the room to basically take notes.
#
You know, redraft certain pages and phrases.
#
So he was present when Maris and Montague began squabbling, began arguing.
#
And again, this is not something that's found its way into his own official narrative of
#
This is something that lived in his memory.
#
And he spoke about this to Hudson years later after he'd quit government service.
#
And the fights between Maris and Montague actually come alive when VP talks about this.
#
You know, he's basically talking about two different people with two very different perspectives
#
on how this should go for India.
#
Maris didn't agree with a lot of what Montague was saying.
#
Maris had to shut up about it for so long that eventually it began to affect the working
#
of the entire team because Maris would take to sulking and Montague would take to being
#
incredibly irritated and frustrated.
#
And eventually, you know, damns of frustration burst and there would be screaming matches.
#
Montague would be thumping the table and telling Maris that he had been basically hired to
#
do this particular job and if he didn't want to do it, he could get out.
#
And to all of this VP was privy, right?
#
He's now seeing actually what happens behind the scenes for the first time.
#
He's exposed to high pressure situations, to huge egos, to how badly tempers can fray
#
He's also exposed to the real boring aspect of reform.
#
Not all reform is revolutionary.
#
This is the kind of reform that takes years to put together almost.
#
That takes weeks of sleepless nights where you sit up and you basically read the same
#
thing over and over again until it reads better.
#
And that I think impacted his career hugely because most of his career was built on knowledge
#
that he gained firsthand.
#
This wasn't knowledge that you could gain from a book.
#
This wasn't knowledge that you could gain from sitting for any kind of exam.
#
This was knowledge that you got only by being in the same room as the people making the
#
laws, as the people making history.
#
And it involved a lot of stuff that he had expected.
#
He would always remember those moments as being very crucial to how he actually went
#
about the business of making laws and making amendments to various laws because he watched
#
Maris being unable to navigate as far as Montague was concerned.
#
And he realized that, you know what, sometimes you have to navigate through different personalities.
#
You have to be able to sort of slip and slide your way through until you get your point
#
It need not always involve a shouting match.
#
It can, of course, sometimes under high pressure situations.
#
But he basically learned his art of diplomacy.
#
And I don't say this lightly, I think he was the greatest internal diplomat that we've
#
had as well because he was navigating two different parties at one point in his life.
#
He was navigating three different political interests and formulating two different countries
#
at the end of his career, not to mention dealing with independent states.
#
So he received his training 100% on the job.
#
And I think that is something that makes his story unique.
#
It makes his own career and his own life stand apart because this was knowledge that he couldn't
#
have gained from a book.
#
In fact, you know, it struck me while reading your book, and I had a sense of this even
#
before reading your book, because everyone sort of knows VP Menon and I'd read one of
#
his books while prepping for one of my earlier episodes with Srinath Raghavan.
#
And it struck me totally that he is probably our greatest civil servant.
#
I mean, I can't even see how you would make a shortlist at all.
#
I mean, he's just clearly the obvious choice, all the remarkable things he did.
#
And what's interesting and what your book brings out is that his biography prepared
#
him for it, that everything that was happening in his life was almost like an academy for
#
what would happen in the 1940s at that crucial moment our nation was born.
#
For example, in 1914, you've quoted from a letter he's written to his brother where
#
he's saying, God has been very kind to me.
#
I have been given my fair share of second and third chances.
#
I will make this one work.
#
And then the Department of Statistics was very sort of interesting to me.
#
He didn't stay there long.
#
But what you've written about it, and again, I'll quote your words, quote, the modern but
#
dingy offices of the newly established Directorate of Statistics embodied the Rajesh's passion
#
for statistics and recorded information.
#
The size and diversity of India in its population, its geography and agricultural produce made
#
its imperative for its quote unquote masters to keep painstaking records of changes in
#
demography, crop production and prices, rainfall, industrial production, education, sanitation,
#
The Directorate had been established in April 1914 with this ambitious goal in mind.
#
The compilation of this information was probably as crashingly boring as it sounds.
#
But to Wepey, it was eye opening.
#
For the first time in his life, he was given a bird's eye view of the science of India.
#
And what you referred to earlier that, you know, people often think of the, you know,
#
if you're talking about the shaping of a nation, you think of grand speech, great ideas.
#
These are the high principles.
#
But here is someone who 33 years before India actually becomes independent is actually learning
#
the country through statistics, through data, through this mindless log of trying to figure
#
it out, which sounds both to me, fantastically boring and incredibly inspiring.
#
So that's a good note to take a quick commercial break while we figure out which one it is.
#
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Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Narayani Basu about our greatest civil servant, B.P. Menon.
#
If you don't agree with that judgment, kindly tell me who is our greatest civil servant
#
Let's right now come up to the late 1910s, Montague was in town, B.P. is part of what
#
will later become the reforms branch, but is now called something else.
#
And like you pointed out, it's a learning experience from him again, quoting from your
#
book, quote, watching the men, listening to their debates, typing the dictation.
#
He learned how to think around the problem, how to work on contingency solutions, to always
#
have a backup plan and how to factor in positives in order to neutralize a heavily negative
#
And most importantly, as he watched different personalities clash or meld with each other,
#
he began to understand the very real skill that was required to negotiate the choppy
#
waters of the human ego.
#
And what's also interesting here is that there is an event around this time that also affects
#
him deeply and that's Jallianwala Bagh.
#
That's something that I actually found that he'd actually left behind a letter as to that.
#
And he writes, it is in fact an event that actually kickstarts the moral dilemma that
#
I was referring to earlier.
#
Jallianwala Bagh, when it happens and he reads about it in the papers and he is really furious.
#
These are people who on the one hand have been very kind to him, have given him opportunities
#
that he didn't dream were possible.
#
And yet these were the people who were also leading to massacres across the country.
#
And Amritsar really shook him.
#
For the first time questioned what he was doing here within the walls of these, the
#
very government that was carrying out this oppression and carrying out this bloodbath.
#
What was he doing here?
#
And he goes through a period where he is questioning this, but also what is dominating his mind
#
at this point is that he still needs to get a permanent place, he still needs a job.
#
This is still a moment of great, it's actually a moment of even greater conflict because
#
on the one hand you have his incredible need to survive, trying to balance out with a question
#
of what am I doing here?
#
Shouldn't I be out there with these people?
#
These are my countrymen and they are getting slaughtered.
#
And at this point, the reforms department forms in 1922 and that's three years later
#
no doubt, but he's carrying this burden right through.
#
It is only in 1922 that he actually gets a letter confirming him and he no longer has
#
this sort of sword hanging over his head that you are not like a permanent employee, that
#
you can be sacked at any time.
#
That allows him actually some breathing room to think about this properly.
#
I actually found that in the mid 1920s, early to mid 1920s is actually when VP starts thinking
#
about this far more introspectively and he comes to what I feel is a very cold blooded
#
decision because this was a time when the country was actually being swept along on
#
a tidal wave of emotion and nationalism.
#
VP on the other hand has taken this really cool decision, right?
#
It's a very cool brain decision because he's thinking that's great, they're out there
#
What about how to make actual change happen?
#
He had no desire to actively join politics.
#
He'd been given a letter of confirmation, which meant that he was within the system.
#
He may have been a clerk, but he was within the system.
#
Did he think he could move up from there?
#
And this moment is the moment that sparked his actual ambition to start moving upwards,
#
to start climbing the ladder of government service.
#
Until then, it had primarily been driven by how to keep his pockets full and how to not
#
make a greater ass of himself than he already felt he had made.
#
Now it was a more detached decision that he took that this was actually something he could
#
He'd been given a chance to actually work, be in government service and try and change
#
the system from within.
#
And his ambition to actually rise to the top started from now.
#
This is actually the moment that sees VP Menon beginning to work towards rising up in the
#
path that he's chosen for himself.
#
And it ties up beautifully with whatever he's faced before, because he's by this time been
#
exposed to really nitty gritty stuff of administration.
#
He's seen that a country doesn't really run on soul stirring speeches alone.
#
It doesn't run with no vision at all.
#
And even if you have a vision, there are cogs behind that vision that are required for that
#
And he's worked in enough mundane departments and done enough mundane duties by now to know
#
that behind revolution is administration.
#
You need people who can administer, who can actually take care of that aspect.
#
And he feels, for me, it's lovely because he's actually been put through his paces in
#
ways that ICS officials proper would not necessarily have been through the same position.
#
He's actually started right from the bottom and he can now work his way to the top.
#
The advantage of starting right from the bottom.
#
And this is something he would advocate years later.
#
He would always tell his sons that.
#
In fact, he would tell my grandfather that.
#
My grandfather would go on to become director of ITC, but he always told my grandfather,
#
look, you start from the floor of the plant and work your way up so that when you are
#
sitting at the top, you know everything that's happening in the plant.
#
You know how to roll a cigarette even or the science behind it as well.
#
I think that's something that mattered hugely to VP.
#
For him, it was not just administration.
#
It was what went on behind administration as well.
#
Facts and figures may sound boring to many of us and to me as well when I was doing the
#
research for this particular part of his life, it was insanely boring.
#
But it was also immensely crucial.
#
You cannot build a country without knowing almost intimately how it functions.
#
And the director of statistics in that sense, I think gave him for the first time an almost
#
aerial view of A, how vast this country is and B, how many factors you have to take into
#
consideration to actually pull it together as one cohesive unit of governance.
#
So yes, I think it ties in a lot with the point that you raised earlier, like everything
#
was an academy that put him through his spaces.
#
And you know, a couple of things strike me here.
#
One, of course, is that if you're listening to this episode now, you might wonder a little
#
bit about VP's dilemma at working with the British and at the same time feeling a sympathy
#
But that's simply because we've normalized this notion of India as it is today.
#
And we think back on the British as the enemy, but this was not the case at that point in
#
time, the British were administrating the country, there was no India, ideas of India,
#
if at all they existed, were diffused and up in the air.
#
And VP is just trying to figure out, I would guess, within his, you know, the limitations
#
of what he can do and cannot do, that how best can I make a contribution in this.
#
And what's also interesting is that he's actually in the one department of the British Indian
#
government where he can make that difference, he's in the reforms department.
#
This is going to be, this is the place, this is the center, you know.
#
And he is actually drafted in there only because of his experience with Madison Montague, right?
#
Because he was a member of the core team that actually accompanied Montague.
#
He was deemed as somebody who had sufficient experience to carry on into the formalized
#
branch of the reforms department.
#
And he would never actually leave the reforms department, that would be where he stayed
#
throughout his career in government.
#
Till India became independent.
#
And I think, as you say, it was really fitting that he would end up in the one branch that
#
was set up to actually implement reform.
#
It had a very shaky beginning because it would shut down and reopen a couple of times before
#
it reopened for good in the 1930s.
#
And you know, in between then he was drafted to the services of Malcolm Haley and you know,
#
he was working with people independently outside the reforms branch when it closed.
#
So it had a very shaky sort of start, but it was the actual branch that would go on
#
to implement reform that would see to constitutional progress.
#
So he was actually very fortunately in a position to actually make his ambition succeed.
#
And I think that's incredibly unique.
#
And it's also serendipitous, as I said, very few people actually got to do that.
#
No, and it's serendipitous for India also, because you know, you get the nuts and bolts
#
of what is really happening between 47 and 51 as the union kind of comes together.
#
And it almost strikes you that you needed one guy to be there.
#
You know, if he didn't exist, you would have to invent him and you cannot invent people
#
So, you know, it's kind of it's not necessary that we would have come together the way we
#
You know, I feel like when we look at the history of our transfer of power, what we
#
forget very easily is that much of the sweeping changes that were brought about politically,
#
legally, constitutionally, was just done by a handful of men.
#
I mean, the independence, Indian independence bill, for instance, was actually essentially
#
the work for men who had to basically deconstruct three and a half centuries of British rule
#
And VP, of course, is leading that.
#
So you know, I mean, it's very easy to sort of overlook that.
#
And it's easy to let civil servants as an entire class sort of slide under the radar.
#
And it to me, that's something that needs to be focused on more.
#
That's one of the reasons why I wrote this story, because you don't think of a revolution
#
in terms of nuts and bolts.
#
You don't think of a transfer of power in terms of nuts and bolts.
#
And as you said, the formation of the Union of India, the integration of the country itself
#
was something that was at that point carried out almost single handedly by VP Menon.
#
He worked himself almost to death during that point, because he was crisscrossing the country
#
going to 565 princely states.
#
So even in the 1920s, going into the 1930s, it was still really an arduous process because
#
you had all these different ideas of where India was supposed to be going.
#
You know, one idea was being discarded, another was being picked up in accordance with shifting
#
times and shifting political moods.
#
And it was still very difficult to try and pin down what India looked like at that point.
#
In the late 20s and 30s, there were still ideas of a federal India being tossed about.
#
What would a federal India mean?
#
What was the position of the princely states within the federal India?
#
There were questions that nobody had really thought of and were now being almost deconstructed
#
And VP was at the sidelines at this point, he was still a clerk at this point.
#
And yet, it was a curious juxtaposition because even while he was at the sidelines, he was
#
also at the frontline of political reform.
#
So it was a very curious position to be in because he is somebody who is essentially
#
meant to be taking notes, etc. at this point.
#
And yet in 1930, he is told by Hawthorne Lewis, who is his supervisor in the reforms department,
#
look, come with me to London for the first roundtable conference.
#
And again, he's gone as a member of a secretariat.
#
He's essentially sitting there at the sidelines, but he's actually seeing leading figures of
#
the Indian independence movement.
#
He's seeing Gandhi getting out from his car.
#
He's making friends with the Raja of Sarela.
#
In fact, you've pointed out how Hawthorne Lewis told him at this point in time, quote,
#
open your mouth when you have an idea VP, otherwise you'll be lost in the crowd.
#
So, you know, again, another British supervisor taking him under his wing and giving him the
#
courage to actually speak out.
#
And what was kind of interesting and how you point out about how the journey changed him
#
forever was that there's this 1930 roundtable conference in London and he's going on the
#
ship called the SS Multan and everybody's there.
#
Gandhi is there, Jinnah is there, the whole gang is there, and in fact, Jinnah becomes
#
That actually was, it's sort of heartwarming because you, you know, we, when we read about
#
Jinnah today, we know the Jinnah that we associate with in the 40s and the formation of Pakistan.
#
And Jinnah was never someone you can understand even today.
#
I think even his more dedicated biographers were never really able to pin down Jinnah
#
And in 1925 is when VP actually meets Jinnah for the first time.
#
And this is with the Madiman committee, which has basically been set up to sort of investigate
#
the workings of the Government of India Act 1919.
#
And VP is again at the back, in the background.
#
He is the person who's basically filing the papers and putting them back into their boxes
#
and very mundane stuff like that.
#
And this is a room that's filled with the political bigwigs at that time, Tej Bahadur
#
and people of his ilk and Jinnah sort of strolls up to VP and says, have you had lunch yet?
#
And VP is considerably taken aback.
#
And he says, no, I was going to get something from the mess.
#
And Jinnah says, why would you do that?
#
And so they went off to lunch.
#
They went to Cecil Hotel and he still remembered after all those years, he still remembered
#
the kind of looks he got when he entered the hotel with Jinnah.
#
And Jinnah was a rising star in Indian politics at that point.
#
You know, he was brilliant.
#
He was not the twisted man that he became later, but he was very avuncular at that point.
#
This was a very approachable Jinnah.
#
This was some Jinnah who liked to take young men under his wing and sit and chat with them.
#
And that's what he does in 1925.
#
As well as in 1930, VP encounters Jinnah on board the SS Multan and the ship docks in
#
Cairo on the way to London.
#
And Jinnah takes VP basically on a tour of Cairo.
#
And he is basically sitting with Jinnah in the car discussing the history of Egypt, the
#
politics of not only Egypt, but also the world.
#
He's taken by Jinnah to lunch at one of Cairo's finest hotels.
#
He can still remember that that was the first time he ate fresh dates.
#
And it's life changing for VP because at this point, he didn't ever really consider that
#
he would be in contact with people that he just read about.
#
These had once been names on pieces of paper to him and now here they were in the flesh.
#
And not all of them were bad, they were human and they weren't unkind to him.
#
He also remembered at one point when the reforms branch had shut down that he worked very briefly
#
And Malcolm Haley was also somebody that VP remembered very warmly in throughout his life.
#
So he had made friends by this point with people from both sides and he had encountered
#
English supervisors who put a lot of merit into the kind of ideas you gave.
#
They put more merit onto your actual work rather than who you were or where you were
#
from or where you'd studied.
#
He became good friends with most of his supervisors, in fact, with Hawthorne Lee who was quite
#
And Lewis actually recognized VP's talent, as I've said in my book, and he encouraged
#
He insisted that VP open his mouth and speak when he had an idea.
#
He was never somebody who told VP to shut up.
#
And so they go to London and London itself is eye-opening for VP.
#
He's now in the capital of the empire, essentially.
#
He's seeing a different society.
#
He's seeing for the first time that, you know, it's okay if the driver of your car enters
#
the same restaurant and eats at the same restaurant as you are.
#
He's hobnobbing with the leading lights of India's independence.
#
Including all the princes, he will get to know more intimately in the US.
#
The Raja of Sarila became, in fact, quite a good friend at this point.
#
And the Raja of Sarila was a minor state in central India.
#
And Sarila was there representing some of the minor princes for the roundtable conference.
#
And he would become, he as well as his son Narendra, would become very good friends with
#
VP during the course of VP's government career.
#
But the Raja was never somebody who was standoffish or aloof.
#
But he treated VP as an equal.
#
And VP learned more than he ever dreamed that he would.
#
You know, first of all, it was a moment of immense personal achievement.
#
You know, he's gone overseas for the first time.
#
He's standing in the Savoy Hotel.
#
He's standing at what he feels is a milestone in his career and his life, both.
#
He doesn't know whether he'll even come back again.
#
But here he is, and he's determined to make the most of it.
#
He's also exposed to different ideas at this point.
#
So there was a very vocal section of women in England at that point who were demanding
#
equal rights for electoral franchise.
#
And he knows that in India as well, there have been women who have been demanding equal
#
All of them felt that, look, if we are subjects of the empire, we pay our taxes.
#
Why are we not being given the right to vote and have a say in the future of our country?
#
VP himself is from an extremely strong matrilineal background.
#
He likes independent, strong women.
#
And he agrees with this.
#
He feels why should they not be given a chance?
#
But these are, for now, ideas that he will internalize.
#
They will come to play almost seven years later in 1937.
#
But for now, it's just a moment of real discovery for him because he's finding out that nobody,
#
however high a rank they hold, felt it was beneath them to associate with a mere clerk.
#
He was treated as an equal by prince and politician alike.
#
And it was an experience that, again, changed his perspective on what politics was and what
#
And that was a milestone in his career at that point.
#
You know, speaking of your friendship with Jinnah, and of course, you go on to write
#
how in the book, you know, VP would not recognize the Jinnah he would meet in the 40s.
#
But I was sort of reminded of an earlier anecdote, which you briefly mentioned in your book.
#
I mean, firstly, you know, you refer to Jinnah in 25 as a rising star.
#
I would say he was more kind of an eclipse star already.
#
He was a rising star perhaps in the 1910s.
#
And at one point he was, you know, after Gokhale and Feroza Mehta and, you know, those moderates
#
Everyone expected Jinnah to sort of be the next face of the Congress party.
#
And Gandhi was a marginal figure at that time.
#
And then Gandhi took over the Congress party with his, you know, by getting together with
#
the Ali brothers and the whole Khilafat movement.
#
And that's a story in itself.
#
But the anecdote that struck me was where you point out that in 1920 in the Congress
#
session, at one point, Jinnah protests against what the Ali brothers and Gandhi are planning
#
and he says that that is not the constitutional way.
#
And then Muhammad Ali stands up and he tells him the story of how a Tory was once at Piccadilly
#
Square and there was a preacher there who was talking about, who was trying to convert
#
everyone there and saying, this is God's way, come to God's way.
#
And the Tory went and asked the preacher that, tell me, how long have you been following
#
And the guy said 20 years.
#
And he said, in 20 years has got you as far as Piccadilly way.
#
And it's a very telling story because it's also sort of telling Jinnah that, okay, the
#
moderates have failed, you know, that the constitutional way of Nauroji and Ranade and
#
Gokhale and Mehta and to some extent, Motilal Nehru also up till this point.
#
And now Jinnah himself has failed and you need something more radical.
#
And that's the direction of the Khilafat movement and Gandhi, of course, who is a true radical.
#
And it's very interesting because what, and I'm just thinking aloud here, but it strikes
#
me that the department that BP is now part of is pursuing the constitutional way in the
#
sense piecemeal changes.
#
And you know, there is a process, there is a system, nothing radical.
#
And yet at the end of his career, what he then has to do is something quite radical
#
where he has to sort of frame a new system almost by himself.
#
I mean, that whole act of getting all the princes into the union is something that no
#
constitutional way will get you.
#
And I think it's important to remember here that there was no one formula for what the
#
constitutional way was at that point.
#
In the 1920s, 30s, you were just basically figuring it out.
#
You know, you were people who were basically sitting down around a table, you know, coming
#
to several deadlocks along the way, but you were essentially trying to talk it out.
#
And you didn't really know what would happen, you know, because I mean, in the 30s, there
#
was the idea of federal India.
#
By the 40s, the idea of federal India had been thrown out of the window.
#
So events were moving so blindingly fast that essentially you had to adapt your ideas according
#
to the events that were following and the fallout of the events that were following
#
You know, because in the 30s, and I've talked about this in the book as well, where Hawthorne
#
Lewis basically introduces VP to Linlithco.
#
And VP essentially, Linlithco asks Hawthorne Lewis, what is the way forward here?
#
VP for the first time opens his mouth in front of the Viceroy and says, take defense and
#
external affairs from the prince.
#
In fact, I'll read out the quote from your book.
#
What VP says is quote, if we get the princes to agree to hand over defense, foreign affairs
#
and communications to the British government, our path might be smoother.
#
We can leave finances out of the picture for now.
#
They don't need to have any obligations towards the crown at the moment.
#
This is also a point where VP has realized that the princes are now backing away from
#
federation and that if Linlithco doesn't act fast, the whole idea of federation might
#
So it's another example of how VP has taken the knowledge that he's accumulated at a particular
#
point and is using it in an adapted version at a later point in his career.
#
It's also a remarkable statement of great foresight because this essentially will be
#
the foundation of whatever he's prescribing through the years.
#
So he's basically grasped this.
#
And in 1935, which is over a decade before actual independence and 47 for, you know,
#
those listeners who don't know, this is exactly the package that was offered to all the princely
#
states that only hand over defense, foreign affairs and communications.
#
And you know, the view otherwise are in control.
#
And this is like you say, this is 1935.
#
The princes are now backing away from federation.
#
Linlithco is essentially basically arrived in India to try and implement federation as
#
And VP offers him this formula.
#
Linlithco rejects it and it is one of the first times that VP has encountered ingrained
#
racial prejudice as well as ingrained systemic prejudice because Linlithco is somebody who
#
loves protocol and is almost a rabid fan of protocol.
#
He certainly doesn't like an Indian talking to him in this fashion.
#
And it makes matters worse that this is a junior, it is not anyone in a position of
#
Although for all practical purposes, VP is already the right hand man of the reforms
#
commissioner, which is...
#
It doesn't matter to Linlithco.
#
It doesn't matter to Linlithco because he's just seeing a native guy speaking out of turn.
#
Because you know, I mean, VP would go to Linlithco twice during Linlithco's tenure and put forward
#
adapted versions of this in 41, again, he would go to Linlithco and say this again.
#
So he basically put himself out on the limb twice during Linlithco's tenure in India.
#
And it never mattered to Linlithco.
#
It was a point that was of great and abiding resentment for VP because he just felt that
#
Linlithco had basically thrown away chances of putting together Unified India as far as
#
it was possible by ignoring the plan that he had actually put forward.
#
Twice, not once, but twice.
#
But going back to your original point, I think we were just figuring out what was the constitutional
#
Because events were changing so fast, you had to have somebody who was thinking on his
#
feet practically, because that was something that you needed.
#
You needed somebody who had a brain that was agile enough to adapt to the changing circumstances,
#
assess the implications of the circumstances and their consequences and what that could
#
mean for the future of the country and use that to formulate a process of constitutional
#
And I think the fact that VP encountered supportive supervisors like Hawthorne Lewis, like in
#
1941, as he would encounter Harry Hudson, it was incredibly formative and supportive
#
for his career as well.
#
These were men who allowed him to think and allowed him to put forward his ideas and opinions.
#
In fact, in 37, Linlithco would give VP carte blanche to go ahead and form the electoral
#
rolls for the 1937 elections.
#
Whereas you pointed out he included women in the rolls.
#
That was the first time.
#
And again, this was something he'd seen in 30.
#
And in fact, this is the first time I read about it.
#
Has it really been remarked upon that VP introduced women in the rolls?
#
It's one line in The Great Divide by Harry Hudson.
#
And it's never really been remarked upon at all, which is, I think, another really sad
#
fallout of the fact that VP has been allowed to languish in obscurity all this time, because
#
this is a change that continues until today that has had a lasting effect on the way we
#
look at our voting rights.
#
I mean, he would go ahead and give uneducated people the right to vote as well by putting
#
symbols onto ballot papers.
#
So the hand and the jaru and all that is all there because of VP, you know.
#
And his whole idea of that stemmed from his own experience.
#
He never completed his education either, but he didn't see why that should stop you from
#
having a say in the direction in which your country goes.
#
So you know, he would push for provincial governments to lower the average education
#
standard of an average voter, because he kept insisting, how does that matter?
#
Just because you don't have a formal degree or a formal piece of paper that determines
#
your academic credentials doesn't mean that you don't have opinions of where the country
#
is going or where you want your country to go.
#
So why should you not have a say?
#
And I think these are contributions that actually need to be highlighted much more than they
#
And of course, you had rhetoric on these subjects in the political arena, but it took someone
#
to actually sit down and frame these rules like you point out at the time of working
#
on the Government of India Act in 1935, you write quote, VP wondered whether anyone really
#
realized the sheer amount of work that went into making a modern nation.
#
It was all very well to make impassioned speeches about Swaraj, but the tedium and technicality
#
that formed the cogs of these dreams and which would bring them to fruition was stupendous.
#
And yet he clearly enjoyed juggling so many balls.
#
It was in every way why he had persisted with government service.
#
So tell me a bit about this period of time, what is the Government of India Act?
#
What is VP's role on it?
#
And what is its sort of relevance and resonance for future events?
#
So the Government of India Act 1935 was essentially put in place as a result of the ruminations
#
of the roundtable conferences that had come before.
#
The idea was to basically put in place a federal India.
#
We basically wanted a stronger center.
#
We wanted powers to be given to the center and the provinces basically were to exceed
#
to what would become a federal India.
#
The princes were given a choice at that point, but they were essentially told that a united
#
federal India could only succeed if half of the princes of the total number of princes
#
exceeded to what would become the constituent assembly.
#
The Government of India Act would also become the backbone of India's constitutional progress
#
until our own constitution of independent India came into being in 1950.
#
It was the constitution that would remain as a sort of framework for VP's own ideas
#
for the transfer of power later.
#
VP's role here was essentially to a, help in the drafting of the Act and b, supervise
#
the elections that were to follow in 1937 as a result of the Act.
#
That was his mandate which was given to him by Hawthorne Lewis.
#
Lewis was not keeping very well at this point.
#
He was very brilliant, but he was very sickly.
#
And the upshot of that was that a lot of the legwork and paperwork was given to VP.
#
Lewis felt that since he had taken VP to London, VP had actually been there present at the
#
conferences, at the conference in 1930, that VP had enough firsthand knowledge to actually
#
take on a burden of this scale and scope.
#
He would be there in a supervisory capacity, but he said, look, if you can pull this off,
#
we'll think about getting you a promotion.
#
And it also might be remembered at this point that this is not a very easy time for VP personally.
#
35 is also the year in which his first marriage was imploding.
#
So this is a man who is completely torn apart in his personal life, but has been given the
#
task to start the process of constitutional reform actually ruling for India, right?
#
Because the Government of India Act 35 is considered to be one of the more substantial
#
contributions to India's constitutional progress.
#
And VP is not unaware of the hugeness of the task he's been given.
#
He basically throws himself into his work at this point.
#
Much of his work is incredibly tedious.
#
And as I've said, tedium and technicality are two aspects that will define his career,
#
you know, right until the end of government service.
#
Because on the one hand, while it is very exciting to read about this in real time,
#
a lot of it was drafting, redrafting, submitting drafts, sending cables at the dead of night,
#
you know, and these are long, very lengthy cables that went into endless reams of clause
#
A as sub clause A point one, it went on for page after page.
#
And you know, you can get lost if you are a biographer and you're reading this, you
#
can very easily get lost in how completely mind numbing it is.
#
Because essentially, these are the same things that are being cabled to London and coming
#
back from London, but with the addition of one word or the subtraction of one word.
#
So he's got to go through the whole thing.
#
And he's got to go through the whole thing.
#
And this is not Microsoft Word where changes are tracked and all of that, he's got to read
#
He's got to read the whole thing.
#
And this is he's got to then retype the whole thing, right?
#
Because that one word, its presence or its absence is essentially changing language,
#
it's changing implication.
#
So this is a point that A can be seen with a lot of, you can view it as a very boring
#
period in his life, or you can look at it as somebody who has moved on from the small
#
scale to medium scale, right?
#
This is the biggest he's come in his career so far.
#
He has no idea that he's actually going to go to the heights that he does go.
#
I mean, I wouldn't even call it medium scale because it's so mind boggling to me.
#
It's a large scale in itself.
#
Yeah, it's a large scale in itself.
#
But you know, when you look, we know what comes later.
#
So I mean, in retrospect, it is medium scale, but it's, it's also medium scale in terms
#
of sheer hierarchy, right?
#
Because he's superintendent of the reforms office at this point.
#
And he actually has overall charge, but his charge is so it's so technical.
#
And it's so heavily technical that to explain it in simple terms took some doing because
#
you don't necessarily think of it.
#
I mean, right now, when I talk about the fact that he gave women the right to vote, and
#
he gave uneducated people the right to vote, that he pressured governments to lower educational
#
standards, it's actually a very simplistic sort of extraction of what he did to sort
#
of highlight his achievements.
#
But that came mired in so much legalese and so many days where he just a didn't sleep
#
B, he had to read the same thing until he, you know, it was you feel like you're going
#
mad because you're reading the same thing over and over again.
#
So yes, this was a point of immense progress for India.
#
But if you were in VP's position, it was also really tedious task, you know, because you
#
were sitting behind the scenes and you were going through reams and reams of paperwork.
#
And none of that is exciting.
#
And of course, at this point in time, VP doesn't have the responsibility as he would more than
#
a decade later of actually dealing with all the princes at a personal level.
#
But you have a very amusing anecdote about how Linlith Goh decides to throw a sports
#
meet in 1938, where he calls all the princes.
#
Again, I'll quote from your book quote, the result was a spectacular failure.
#
The royals were neither young nor particularly sporty.
#
The ruler of Garali, for instance, tried to relive his youth with a sprinting and extra
#
long run up to bowl and suffered a heart attack in the process.
#
No one wanted to discuss tiresome subjects like the abridgement of princely powers, grouping
#
protocols and the consequences of democracy.
#
The general mood was to finish of the week as fast as possible.
#
So one could resume the usual routine, including the annual New Year's duck shoot at the nearby
#
Isanagar Lake, said to be the best duck shoot in Bundelkhand, stock quote.
#
I apologize if I'm making your book sound really boring, because actually it's full
#
of really entertaining stuff like this, some of which I will also quote later.
#
But let's talk for a moment about, I mean, you could say in this episode, we have been
#
as guilty of ignoring VP's personal life as VP himself was.
#
Tell me a bit about that, like, okay, so he had an arranged marriage with someone in his
#
village called Susheela, and that's all we know of her.
#
And at the same time, what is sort of pertinent to all of this is a gentleman called Kotiath
#
P. Ananthan, who is, rewind here, the gentleman who gave him money for the ticket to Simla
#
when he first came to Delhi after his pockets had been picked and they became close friends
#
later and he became very thick with both Kotiath P. Ananthan and Kotiath's wife, Kanakam,
#
who would later become his wife.
#
Kindly take us through what all is going on in his sort of personal life.
#
So let's rewind, it is 1914, Kotiath Ananthan turns out to be the guy who's helped him
#
Kotiath Ananthan also encounters VP later and in a professional capacity.
#
By later, I mean, a few months later, right, their friendship starts in 1914, which makes
#
it that much easier, I think, when you are an outside spectator to sort of have his personal
#
life imbued with a lot of rather salacious cues, should I say, you know, because you
#
can make jokes about him marrying his mentor's wife and stuff.
#
But what I see here is, and she was only five years older than him, she was only five years
#
VP was not somebody who was very keen to get married.
#
He got married very reluctantly and under immense pressure from his mom and most of
#
us know that story when it comes to us as well, but he succumbed to parental pressure.
#
He went, did the proper thing, got an arranged marriage.
#
This woman's name was Susheela and that is literally all that we know about her.
#
We know that she came from the same village.
#
We know that she came from quite a good family, was from the same caste.
#
It was a marriage that did not work.
#
And she is, of course, your great grandmother.
#
She is my great grandmother.
#
I am descended from Susheela and in fact, if Susheela hadn't gone on to have two children,
#
it might have been like she never existed.
#
I don't know what happened during that marriage or why it imploded.
#
Strangely and even more bizarrely, neither does anyone else.
#
There is no evidence of what happened that she left behind no letters or if she did,
#
She walked out or seemingly walked out again.
#
She left behind two kids and two young kids.
#
Like I said, my grandfather was nine, his brother was seven and you know, she had those
#
It might have been like she didn't exist.
#
He allowed, VP would allow no mention of her ever again.
#
His children asked repeatedly where their mother had gone and he never told them.
#
And they never stopped looking for, they never stopped looking for their mother.
#
They never stopped trying to find her.
#
It impacted their lives for years as understandably it would.
#
What exactly transpired to actually destroy their marriage?
#
Only Mrs. VP Menon that is remembered is Kanakam, right?
#
So he met Kotiath Anantan and Kanakam 14 and they become firm friends, right?
#
Kotiath is years older than VP and together both Kanakam and Kotiath represent the kind
#
of people that VP is trying to be, right?
#
So they are aspirational.
#
They live in circumstances of very comfortable wealth.
#
Kotiath likes his cigars, Kotiath likes his pegs of whiskey, Kotiath is extremely cultured
#
as far as VP is concerned.
#
Kanakam is from a very, very unconventional family.
#
One of her sisters was a fluent Sanskrit scholar, yet another, you know, obtained a license
#
So she's from a really outgoing family that obviously did not mind their daughters being
#
out there in quite a flamboyant way.
#
She has very decided, informed opinions of her own.
#
She has a great sense of humor.
#
She cooks really great food and theirs becomes a house that is sort of a home away from home
#
It's also a very parochial mallu to mallu connection, which always works.
#
He will always call Kanakam mummy.
#
Even after they're married.
#
Even after they're married.
#
That is something that continued all their lives.
#
And again, it's very easy to see why that can give rise to a lot of sort of scandalous
#
gossip because here you have a fellow calling his wife mummy.
#
But in 35, when VP's first marriage implodes, Kanakam is there, right?
#
She's actually moved in to VP's home with her daughter, Meenakshi.
#
Kotiath has died by this point, but here you have VP actually living with his mentor's
#
wife, her daughter, and Sushila.
#
The boys are away at school, tongues are wagging about this very unconventional setup because
#
he's essentially living now with two women.
#
And Sushila disappears.
#
And Sushila now disappears.
#
So you just have VP and Kanakam left.
#
So tongues are wagging even more, right?
#
So this is an aspect of VP's life.
#
He goes ahead and formalizes a wedding in 1941, you know, two years later, but for those
#
two years, he is essentially what we say today, living in sin.
#
In 41 is when he will formalize that marriage.
#
That is a marriage that will last until the end of their lives.
#
However convoluted the dynamic, it was also a very quietly steadfast marriage.
#
It was a marriage that did not rely too much on spoken sentiment, but on almost sort of
#
implicit understanding of who VP was and where he was going.
#
My family's recollections of Kanakam have always been of a woman who was very quiet,
#
but ensured that VP's work was never disturbed in any way.
#
You know, if he brought work home, for instance, she would insist that the house ran very smoothly
#
around him, but he was not to be disturbed.
#
Tea, coffee, food was sent in, he was not disturbed.
#
So she essentially made him the center of life, of the household.
#
And essentially became the anchor that he was very obviously looking for.
#
And I think that's one of the reasons why this was a marriage that worked.
#
It was a marriage that was inevitably shrouded with a lot of scandal, a lot of which has
#
In fact, you know, when Wavell was Viceroy, he noticed that VP would not always, he wouldn't
#
bring Kanakam to official receptions and he wouldn't, he generally just never brought
#
her into public professional life.
#
She remained very much at home.
#
And Wavell would ask VP, why are you doing that?
#
And VP slightly embarrassed that Wavell's noticed this.
#
He tries to cover that up, but he says, okay, fine, if you want me to bring her, I will.
#
And he does bring her to an official reception and Wavell does the immense honor of actually
#
introducing VP and Kanakam first to the guests of honor before proceeding to other equally
#
much more important people in the room.
#
Wavell was a kind man from all accounts.
#
Wavell was a very kind man.
#
And he was no politician, but he was a very kind, just man.
#
VP liked him very much.
#
He felt he was incredibly unsuited to India's political climate and politics, but a very
#
But yes, his personal life has not been easy to write about as well, because you had to
#
basically, I had to basically sit down and look at this man's life incredibly dispassionately.
#
It's not always easy to talk about somebody who's related to you and also dissect instances
#
of emotional cruelty that they're capable of, cruelty slash stuntedness.
#
Especially to his kids who are, you know, one of them is your grandfather.
#
So it's not a subject that you can write about easily or approach easily.
#
But at the same time, it was something that I felt needed to be done because you need
#
to present a portrait of a human being.
#
VP Menon was capable of immense professional greatness, not so much in his private life.
#
And that goes towards contributing one comprehensive human being.
#
And I think both aspects were incredibly important to write about.
#
I mean, the story of our history is a story of incredibly flawed men.
#
And there's a very nice domestic story in your book where you talk about how, you know,
#
he's at this lunch meeting and he's formulated the Menon Plan.
#
And it has to be done in four hours, the draft has to be, you know, sent off.
#
And he hasn't had breakfast and it's lunchtime, but there's no time for lunch.
#
So he takes his cronies and quickly goes home where Kanakam is asked him, do you want to
#
And he says, no, no, I can't.
#
And then she sulks and says, okay, I won't have lunch either.
#
Because this was also a point when VP was getting a lot of hate mail.
#
He is getting hate mail.
#
He's getting hate mail.
#
He's getting death threats.
#
And Kanakam has taken a lot of this in his stride.
#
But this fact, the fact that, you know, he's been held up at work and he's for the first
#
time in years forgotten to phone her up and tell her he won't be home for lunch.
#
And if he will eat or not.
#
Because he has to draft the plan which will change India forever.
#
So, but then she's pissed off, you know, because she thinks, why didn't you call me?
#
And you know, he's standing there and he's wondering, do I go to pacify her or do I write
#
the plan that's going to change history?
#
So he writes a plan that changes history.
#
So let's get back from the personal life now to sort of historical narrative.
#
And let's get into the 1940s.
#
This is where things are really heating up.
#
Britain has gone to war and the Indian politicians are pissed off because Linlith Goh just unilaterally
#
announced that India is at, has joined the Second World War.
#
And the Congress makes a series of blunders here.
#
And what's also happening here and it's also fascinating to see that unfold in the book
#
is that V.P. is getting closer and closer looks at key protagonists of our independence
#
like Nehru and Patel and over time getting to know them a little better at the same time
#
as Jinnah becomes a stranger to him again.
#
And he's not entirely approving of everything that the Congress is doing.
#
Tell me a little bit about this period.
#
I think it's inevitable that he would, during the process that he was going through, get
#
a closer insight into the personalities of the men who are shaping India's politics at
#
And this, he was getting a close look at both sides of the divide, right?
#
So he was getting a close look at the League, at the Congress, as well as the princely states,
#
So the late 1930s is also when he drafts the prototype of the instrument of accession that
#
he and Sudar Patel are going to use a decade later.
#
He is also seeing princes backing away from federation.
#
He is now also watching the Congress threatening to resign its ministries.
#
He doesn't approve of that idea at all.
#
He feels that that's a stupid idea.
#
He is never entirely approving of many of the things that people do on both sides of
#
the divide, whether it's Nehru, whether it's Jinnah.
#
For him, I suppose it's also easy for him to take that judgment because he's watching
#
these men make these decisions as a third party, right?
#
So he's essentially watching huge egos coming to blows with each other and often dominating
#
decisions that need to be taken in a cooler, more pragmatic way.
#
And this is also especially, I guess, reflected in Jinnah and Nehru baiting each other all
#
the time, which makes a sort of an approachment very difficult.
#
It makes an approachment very difficult because essentially every olive branch that either
#
party hands out is struck aside and you are fast approaching a point of deadlock.
#
Where do you go from here?
#
Now Pakistan is now a nascent sort of idea that's sort of floating around.
#
It's not entirely been picked up 100% yet, even though Jinnah has gone ahead and made
#
VP still believes that a unified India can still be pulled off if people can just put
#
aside their egos, if people can stop baiting each other.
#
A lot of his decisions at this point are also, for me, they read almost as acts of political
#
naivete because for someone who's been exposed to egos and exposed to differing personalities,
#
you must have been able to see the writing on the wall a lot earlier than VP did.
#
In 1941, he was still pushing for a unified India.
#
He goes to Linlithco one more time and he says, we can still pull it together and make
#
a unified federal India possible.
#
Again Linlithco doesn't listen to him.
#
And these are points when he is seeing the flaws of the greatest men of Indian politics
#
come more and more glaringly into focus.
#
He is seeing Jinnah transform into the Jinnah of 1946-47 into an increasingly bitter, resentful,
#
He is seeing Nehru make statements that really Nehru shouldn't do that aren't exactly politically
#
And he is, to a large extent, really annoyed because he can see where this is going and
#
yet he doesn't want to believe that it's going in that direction as yet he does not want
#
And I think the greatest example of that was his transfer of power plan in 1941.
#
And we have another example of it as well when we come to 1945 in the Simla conference.
#
And those are two key examples from the mid 1940s of VP Menon believing staunchly that
#
India need not head towards partition of Pakistan.
#
For him, the interplaying of personalities was a key reason why India was greening towards
#
the path that she was heading down.
#
He never entirely and for me, it was entirely subjective.
#
I know today, it's very easy to categorize him as Sardar Patel's right-hand man or as
#
But in the late 1930s, early 1940s, he hadn't yet encountered Sardar Patel.
#
And these were independent assessments that he'd made.
#
These were subjective assessments that he made based on how these men were reacting
#
to propositions for India's political future.
#
They were assessments of human beings.
#
They were assessments of how men could easily wreck or capsize a political boat if they
#
And this is, I think, something that comes across very strongly in the interviews that
#
he did with Hotsip because there he's actually talking about interacting with these personal
#
political legends as men.
#
He's essentially deconstructing them as personalities with flaws, which often blinded them to the
#
greater good of the country.
#
He never agreed with the fact that the Congress resigned from the ministries in 39.
#
And that was something that he would hold right to the end of his government career.
#
In fact, it is a statement that he makes obliquely in transfer of power as well.
#
He's far more colorful about it in his interviews.
#
And it was something he kept his mouth shut about until he absolutely could give free
#
It was important for me to see that he didn't actually hold these people in awe.
#
He was able to see them as men capable of small behavior, insular behavior.
#
And he could rage about this.
#
In fact, when Linlithco sent three emissaries to the princely states in 37, he would get
#
really annoyed with that because he said that's the first step towards actually making federation
#
You are essentially sending these men who are Englishmen to princely states to tell
#
them, look, essentially, your days are numbered here.
#
We are going to be leaving and this is going to be your future.
#
He didn't agree with that at all.
#
He didn't feel like it should have been done.
#
Later on, when the Crips mission failed in 42, Stafford Crips actually meets VP and says
#
Mr. Menon, look, the greatest service you could do for this country is you could make
#
a coalition happen between the Congress and the League.
#
That might be the only way forward here.
#
And those become words that actually push him towards setting up a similar conference.
#
And the letter for that conference actually exists still in the National Archives.
#
And it is to me, yet another example of how VP was learning to navigate different personalities.
#
It is a very long, very elaborate letter, lays out the blueprint for the similar conference.
#
In it, he does not take any credit for putting across this idea.
#
He basically says the Viceroy should get political stakeholders around a common table, have them
#
in the same room, talk about it, and then push forward from there.
#
He is just to be there in a supervisory capacity, the actual discussion has to be done between
#
those who are actively interested in India's political future.
#
But what is clever about this letter is that he's actually giving Wavell, who was sitting
#
Viceroy at that point, the authority to go ahead with this.
#
He was putting it across as if it should be Wavell's idea.
#
It should be Wavell who goes out there and gets this done.
#
At no point does he say, I feel that this should be done.
#
At no point does he push it.
#
In his own official narrative, in fact, he has not taken credit for this at all.
#
It is merely written as Wavell arranged the similar conference.
#
It's only when you actually read that letter that you realize that it was not Wavell.
#
It was actually VP Menon who pushed for the similar conference because at that point,
#
he was still fervently hoping that both parties could actually put aside their differences
#
and sit down and actually look at the future of India.
#
At this point, there were several other factors that were going on behind the scenes.
#
You had people like Robert Moody, who was within the Home Department at that point.
#
He was Home Member and he was also very pro-Pakistan.
#
He was somebody VP suspected of basically poisoning Jinnah's ear, letting him know
#
that the only way out and the only way forward for the Muslim League to actually start catering
#
to Muslim interests was push for Pakistan.
#
This is something that Jinnah tells Durga Das, who is working with the Hindustan Times
#
at that point at the similar conference.
#
He tells Durga Das, he says, why do I need to sit here when Pakistan is being handed
#
Why do I need to listen to these people?
#
He goes ahead and basically puts forward a lot of unreasonable proposals to Wavell and
#
says that basically all Muslim interests will be represented by the League.
#
That's not something Wavell can agree with and it's one of the things that capsizes
#
the similar conference.
#
Yet another thing that capsizes further political interests is later when the cabinet mission
#
In 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru gives a press conference on the 10th of July in which he says that
#
we are not going to support grouping at all.
#
No one here is going to support grouping, so obviously that's going to fall through.
#
VP is livid because he says, why did Nehru have to go and make that kind of a statement?
#
Essentially now Jinnah is going to pull out and this is going to come to nothing and Jinnah
#
is forced to pull out because if Nehru is condemning this, there's no way the League
#
So essentially speaking, VP is at this point sitting now very much at the front lines.
#
His position has subtly changed because in 1943, Harry Hodgson leaves and Harry Hodgson
#
leaves behind a very strong letter of recommendation saying, look, there is no one better qualified
#
to take up the position of Reforms Commissioner than VP Menon.
#
And he is the first non-Englishman to...
#
He is the first non-Englishman to be Reforms Commissioner without having sat with ICS exams.
#
So he has now reached pinnacles of his career that he didn't think were possible.
#
So from 1943 onwards, from 1943, 1944, 1945, and as Reforms Commissioner, he is basically
#
pushing for some kind of agreement that can possibly happen before it's too late.
#
It's only in 45, 46 that he begins to see that it's not possible.
#
From 46, he is absolutely convinced that partition is inevitable, we'll have any plan that we
#
put forward now, we'll have to cater to partition and Pakistan, there is no way we can't.
#
And a large part of that he ascribes to Nehru's press conference of July, 1946.
#
In fact, all of that, all these years, the first half of the 40s are beautifully detailed
#
in your book and a must read.
#
You know, before I go on to the sort of larger questions I want to ask, including about I'm
#
sure what all listeners are waiting for, the Patel versus Nehru relationship and how we
#
But before I get to those larger questions, I also want to, you know, briefly cover the
#
sort of two other big moments in BP's career.
#
And one is, of course, when Mountbatten comes.
#
And you know, BP has been a very important part of the administration till now, he's
#
a Reforms Commissioner and all of that.
#
But Mountbatten has just come with his own guys, some of them incompetent.
#
And in VP's words, when he describes the early part of Mountbatten's tenure in India, quote,
#
I was just there to do donkey's work.
#
If they needed a paper drafted, or if they had no time to do something, then it was understood
#
But if they had to take decisions, then they would hold meetings without me and take those
#
It was a most frustrating situation.
#
And part of it could be ingrained racism and you know, what the natives know and all of
#
But in no time at all, he is absolutely crucial to Mountbatten, the one person that Mountbatten
#
Tell me a little bit about how this shift happened and why it happened.
#
What did VP bring to the table?
#
This was actually a very sort of very complex period in VP's professional life, because
#
backtracking to about the autumn of 1946.
#
This was a, it was a milestone for VP because it is the autumn of 1946 that he encounters
#
Sardar Patel for the first time, and that is something that is going to have a huge
#
impact on his career going forward.
#
Sardar Patel has obviously heard of VP Menon, never met him.
#
But in no time, they forge a relationship that is hugely, that is very professional,
#
but also hugely personal.
#
And it is in December of 46 that VP actually submits yet another transfer of power plan.
#
This time it is based on transfer of power and dominion status to two central governments.
#
It is catering for Pakistan and partition in the most viable way possible.
#
That plan has Sardar Patel's approval, it is submitted to Wavell, it is then sent to
#
Again, it is brushed aside, but it is one of the plans that Mountbatten will look at
#
as part of his briefs for going out to India.
#
Mountbatten comes with a reputation that precedes him.
#
He is incredibly flashy.
#
He loves the limelight.
#
He is somebody who believes that he is basically sent there as somebody who can do this single-handedly.
#
He comes with a hand core group of English officials, whom he feels can basically steer
#
the country towards transfer of power and they can basically see to this in a bloodless
#
way and get out of there as soon as possible.
#
And as yet, it might be remembered that the transfer of power date is still 1948, it's
#
not come up to 1947 as yet.
#
So Mountbatten basically comes out and VP is not consulted about any of this.
#
Mountbatten meets with various political stakeholders, puts together what is now known as Plan Balkan,
#
which was essentially transferring power on a completely voluntary basis.
#
It was essentially leaving the accession to a dominion of India on a voluntary basis and
#
it was leaving the door open for princely states to do as they pleased.
#
So you could have 500 independent countries coming up.
#
You could have 500 independent countries coming up within the country.
#
This was the plan that was sent ahead to Whitehall.
#
This was the plan that VP says was never shown to him.
#
And it was a plan that VP knew was being made.
#
He was just never shown the final draft.
#
And that is one of the last straws for VP.
#
He threatens to resign.
#
Edwina Mountbatten steps in at this point and she calls him up and she says, are you
#
I said to him, you've got a sitting reforms commissioner and a constitutional advisor
#
also in me and I'm not being allowed to do my job.
#
So it might be best if I just step down.
#
So she says, you know what, just relax.
#
I'll speak to Dickie, which is Mountbatten's pet name.
#
And she does speak to Dickie and you know, he's called up, VP is then called up to Simla
#
And it's actually May of 1947 that both the transfer of power movement gets a huge
#
impetus with his presence because it is now that he actually puts forward his own plan
#
for the transfer of power that he's been putting forward so unsuccessfully for the last few
#
He now puts across what will become the Menin Plan.
#
And that is again catering to transfer of power and dominion status.
#
It's dealing with the partition of Bengal and Punjab as well.
#
And it is the plan that has the approval of Sardar.
#
And he didn't outrightly tell Mountbatten that he's got the approval of Sardar, but
#
he basically said that he knew the Congress would carry it through.
#
Mountbatten here says, okay, look, Nehru is coming up with Krishna Menon.
#
Why don't you go and tell him about this plan?
#
See what he has to say.
#
And VP goes to Nehru and this is the point where things become incredibly embarrassing
#
for VP because he knows that a plan has gone ahead to Whitehall.
#
He's been instructed by Mountbatten not to let Nehru know about Plan Balkan.
#
He basically outlines the Menon Plan.
#
Nehru accepts the Menon Plan and VP knew he would accept it because if Sardar had accepted
#
it, there was an excellent chance that Nehru would accept it as well, which Nehru did.
#
The only thing was Nehru didn't know the Plan Balkan had gone ahead.
#
Plan Balkan came back a couple of days later.
#
It had some changes to it.
#
The quality and quantity of those changes remained disputed as to what extent they were
#
But the revised plan was shown to Nehru by Mountbatten because Mountbatten had a hunch
#
that Nehru might not like it.
#
In fact, Nehru freaked out about it.
#
And Nehru was understandably in a complete rage because his Reforms Commissioner and
#
Constitutional Adviser had given him another plan altogether.
#
This was some other plan that was threatening to basically Balkanize India and he didn't
#
know what the hell was going on.
#
So he called VP the next morning and basically lost his temper at VP on a grand scale.
#
And VP is basically standing there having to listen to Nehru rage at him.
#
He doesn't know that Plan Balkan has been shown to Nehru.
#
So he's having to defend something that he knows is untrue.
#
And he knew everything that he was saying would sound untrue.
#
And on his tapes to Harry Hodgson, he says that and his voice is very resigned when he
#
He says, you know, I don't blame Panditji, you know, there he was understandably upset
#
with the Reforms Commissioner who was seeming to not know about any plan that had gone ahead.
#
How could his Reforms Commissioner not know?
#
How is that even possible?
#
So obviously, it looked like I was telling lies when I wasn't, right?
#
So I mean, this was a point when for VP, it started the downturn of his relationship
#
Nehru would never fully 100% trust VP after that.
#
And I think for many reasons, VP didn't really blame Nehru for that particular episode alone,
#
because it was understandable for Jawaharlal Nehru to be completely infuriated by the fact
#
that here were two different plans being shown to him and a Reforms Commissioner who was
#
pretending, it seemed to Nehru, that he didn't know anything about it.
#
And it was a point where, admittedly, VP had submitted what became the Mennon Plan.
#
But it also was a point where his relationship with Nehru took a straight nosedive.
#
So and you know, while reading the book, one very interesting thing struck me that for
#
his entire career, VP is working with the British Empire, right?
#
He's very much part of the British Empire.
#
And at certain points in time, all of these politicians who are our founders and who will
#
be his colleagues later on in time, Nehru, Patel and so on, are almost adversaries in
#
different contexts, depending on how you look at it.
#
And then he switches from sort of working with the Empire, which is the force that they're
#
fighting to actually working with them.
#
And it happens really smoothly.
#
Like, of course, while he's Reforms Commissioner with Babel and later with Mountbatten, he
#
also becomes close to Siddharth Patel and you know, because he admires his practicality
#
and so on and all of that is happening.
#
And here the double role almost becomes formalized when Patel asked him to join the State's Department.
#
And you know, tell me a little bit about, you know, what that was like, because this
#
is now sort of a crazy challenge.
#
In fact, I'll you know, the challenge, of course, is to bring all the princes into the
#
And you have so many colorful things to say about this period that I don't even know which
#
bits to quote, but I'll begin with this quote, the princes of India were a fascinating study
#
They were hedonistic, imperious and flamboyant.
#
Some rule state size of Germany, others lauded it over tiny specks the size of pocket handkerchiefs.
#
The last decade of the Raj was halcyon in their memories.
#
Nearly every ruler remembers armies of retainers, solid gold plates at dinner, chakkas of polo,
#
jewels by Cartier and coffers overflowing with diamonds, rubies, emeralds and gold.
#
They had been for the most part willing vassals of the British, stop quote.
#
And then, of course, you go on to give details about how sort of the British gave them honorifics
#
and some were called highness and you know, the Nizam of Hyderabad was called his exalted
#
highness to elevate him above the mere highnesses.
#
And they had different kinds of gun salutes, which became an ego issue.
#
I particularly like some of them, like Maharaja Vibhuti Narayan Singh of Benares were deeply
#
When he visited the Nawab of Rampur, he insisted that the first object that met his gaze in
#
the morning should be a cow.
#
This put the Nawab, whose guest's apartment were on the first floor, in a quandary.
#
The matter was resolved by borrowing a crane from a nearby sugar factory.
#
Every morning, I have to laugh, every morning, an astonished cow was hoisted up to the windows
#
of the Maharaja's suite, there to dangle until his highness chose to wake up and settle his
#
royal gaze upon the hapless cow, stop quote.
#
And that the book is full of such crazy stuff, which is why it's also in parts and such an
#
I mean the mind boggles, like if the stars was to come in front of me that you have to
#
talk to 585 princely states and get them all to sign, I would just freeze.
#
What is Patel and VP's approach to this and why is VP so important to Patel for this?
#
So like I said, Patel has met VP during the autumn of 46.
#
He has heard of VP's reputation.
#
It doesn't take long for VP to become invaluable to Patel.
#
They would essentially start the day, essentially together, VP would go over to Patel's residence
#
on Aurangzeb road and he would first brief Patel in the mornings.
#
And this is long before he was in the state's ministry.
#
They would meet again in the evenings, there would be a lot of phone calls in between.
#
So it was an almost obsessively close professional relationship that they shared right from the
#
By 47, when VP has submitted the Menon Plan, there are other machinations also in play.
#
So Siddharth Patel has been talking to the princes much before 47.
#
You know, the task of talking to the princes has not been something that the government
#
of India actually ever stopped doing.
#
The Chamber of Princes has been incredibly influential in trying to put across its views
#
to where they wanted their royal houses to be.
#
And these are houses that trace their lineage back to Vedic eras, to the sun and the moon,
#
you know, to various outlandish ideas in order to legitimize their sovereignty.
#
But Patel has been deploying a method of personal diplomacy also.
#
There have been lunches with various princes, there have been dinner receptions, ways in
#
which he could essentially woo them out of official settings.
#
Gopalaswami Iyengar was incredibly influential there as well in the beginning of 47, for
#
instance, when the State's Negotiating Committee, which was the first step towards an official
#
state's ministry, the Negotiating Committee actually sat down between February and March
#
before Clement Attlee's declaration that Mountbatten would be coming out and India would be independent.
#
And the State's Negotiating Committee's job was to sit down with major royal houses and
#
essentially start discussing the way forward once Paramount C lapsed.
#
Now Sardar Patel actually, the transcripts of those are available in the Gopalaswami
#
Iyengar papers in Deenmurti.
#
And it was, it's a fascinating read because essentially speaking, these are acrimonious
#
Some of them, like there was a dinner on 31st of January, 1947 at Bikaner House.
#
And that was a fairly cordial dinner, you know, Nehru was there, Patel, Iyengar, major
#
princes, Bikaner, Biroda, CP Ramaswami Iyer from Travancore.
#
And it was a fairly cordial dinner, princes essentially had a few concerns about where
#
the future was heading, Jawaharlal Nehru was very clear when he said, look, we want to
#
talk to you, we want to essentially listen to what you have to say and then take the
#
future forward as it unfolds.
#
The minutes of the Negotiating Committee read very differently, right?
#
So you have the principal proponents like Hamidullah Khan, who was the Nawab of Bhopal
#
and the sitting Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes.
#
Hamidullah Khan was no fan of the lapse of paramount, see, and he was even less a fan
#
of an idea for a state's ministry.
#
And he actually was trying to prevent a lot of his brethren from joining an independent
#
He felt that they should basically stand independently.
#
So that Patel actually says something that I found quite significant.
#
He says, to the extent to which you hand over your past, there will be no question of taking
#
Which is basically saying, if you don't hand over your past, we'll take it away.
#
Essentially, essentially, right?
#
So he's basically made his intentions very clear.
#
So he's deploying set tactic, personal charm, as well as implicit threats.
#
The carrots and the sticks.
#
The carrot and the sticks.
#
That you come with us, you will get your privy purses, we'll look after you, but you don't
#
Listen, we are moving in any way and you may end up with nothing.
#
So this is this precedent that's already set in motion, right?
#
And technically, what are the choices open under law to the princes now?
#
Technically they can opt for independence or India or Pakistan.
#
So these are the choices open to them, but what India's stand really is that, listen,
#
you better come with us, otherwise, you know, I mean, your initial thing is that you won't
#
be able to survive on your own.
#
So why don't you come with us?
#
But if you don't come with us, you know, it's going to happen anyway.
#
There are several layers here as well, you know, because the British did have independent
#
treaties with these princely states as well, right?
#
So when you were basically moving towards partition and you were moving towards a set
#
transfer of power, you basically had a lot of councils, a lot of committees that were
#
set up to oversee this.
#
One of them was expert committee number nine on foreign relations, which the sole job of
#
which was to deconstruct where British legal treaties with these princely states stood.
#
How many of these clauses would carry over after independence, right?
#
So that was one aspect that was continuing VP Menon's overall aspect, overall task with
#
the ministry of states was the mandate was very different.
#
The mandate was a driving force to basically present independent India as a stable cohesive
#
So there were states that were going to give trouble, which was strategically, for instance,
#
on the borders with Pakistan.
#
There were states that were minerally rich, but also incredibly strategically important
#
as well, like Hyderabad.
#
There were a 500 odd of these states scattered across the country.
#
The driving force for VP would be to not let the country dissolve into complete chaos after
#
transfer of power had been affected and partition had been carried out because you could actually
#
send international perception either way, right?
#
He didn't want, yeah, and this is something that he alludes to quite frequently.
#
If you read the story of the integration of the states, it's a sentence that keeps coming
#
back in every other chapter that they did not want India to be portrayed as anything
#
else other than a stable, solid unit of governance.
#
And for those reasons, integration was very important.
#
Anyway, that was much later in the future.
#
In June 1947, Sildar Patel basically calls VP and says, we're thinking of setting up
#
I'm going to be minister of states.
#
I want you to be my deputy.
#
And this is a shocker for VP because he's been working for years now.
#
He wants to be transferred to Governor of a province where he can earn a bit more money
#
and relax a little bit.
#
But here is Sildar insisting that, look, I want you, I don't want anyone else.
#
And by this point, they are more friends than they are professional allies.
#
VP at this point knows the procedures, knows how to draft law, knows all the princes and
#
knows the real politic of how to talk to whom and to get things done and to get people at
#
a table together to agree on stuff.
#
He's key, which is what Sildar Patel sees.
#
What VP sees, which I found rather touching was the fact that the first thing he thought
#
about apart from being really exhausted was the fact that this would be the first time
#
that he would actually be working with Sildar Patel.
#
He had been Sildar Patel's sort of key man, but this would actually see them working together.
#
And he kept thinking, what if this impaired their friendship, right?
#
And I found that a really refreshingly honest sort of think about it, this juncture, right?
#
You're being handed a position of immense and key power.
#
And that's literally the first thing that comes to your mind.
#
What if it affects our friendship down the line, right?
#
What if we can't work together?
#
What if we are people who have very different ways of functioning and we don't really get
#
And Sildar Patel essentially says, forget all that, just come on board.
#
And so that happens in June, but he can't take over as yet because he's still constitutional
#
He has to see those duties through first.
#
So like I said, he is working currently with three other men, Sir George Spence, KVK Sundaram
#
and SVR Cook to basically put together the Indian independence bill, which will become
#
the Indian independence act.
#
And that is basically it's legalizing partition, it's legalizing the formation of Pakistan.
#
It is essentially the document, though it's only about maybe 20 clauses in total, and
#
it's a fairly tidy little document.
#
It is essentially the document that's going to be central to transfer of power.
#
And like I said earlier, these were four men and they were basically given the task of
#
dismantling British rule in a matter of weeks, right?
#
So he had to first finish this task.
#
In July 1947, he basically, he joins the ministry of states as secretary, he takes over on the
#
And his brain has to automatically shift gears because now you're thinking not just of transfer
#
of power, but you're also thinking of accession, right?
#
This accession is a subject that's like I said, been talked about for a while now.
#
The procedure that Sardar Patel has set in motion has been basically to try and get as
#
many princes on board the constituent assembly as he can, right?
#
So by the 28th of April, a lot of princely houses have seen the light and they have joined
#
the constituent assembly, they're taken care of.
#
There are states that are promising to be troublesome, Travancore, Hyderabad, Junagarh.
#
These are states that aren't willing to be taken down so easily.
#
So there now begins a sort of mental shift in gears because now VP has to see to it that
#
before 15th of August, which is less than one month left, he has to basically see to
#
it that he can get as many more, apart from Travancore, Hyderabad, Junagarh, on board
#
with accession and with signing the instrument of accession as he can before the 15th of
#
After that, it's anybody's guess where anything will go.
#
Here again, I find the role of personalities comes and the role of power play also becomes
#
immensely central to this narrative because the way that VP also utilized power and utilized
#
the usage of power was incredibly fascinating.
#
So for instance, as far as Mountbatten was concerned, both VP and Patel knew that any
#
idea that was given to Mountbatten had to be presented in such a way that Mountbatten
#
thought that it was his idea.
#
So basically on the 25th of July, when the last chamber of princes is held and Mountbatten
#
addresses these guys, it is essentially Mountbatten being sent by VP to talk to the princes, tell
#
them that their days are numbered and it might be best.
#
Mountbatten's come there thinking that it's basically his idea and he's basically doing
#
this and it is one of his last great acts as Viceroy, if he can convince these princes
#
Another really wonderful little anecdote that I had is there is this ball that's given by
#
Mountbatten on the 28th of July, right?
#
And all the princes are present and those that are hesitant to exceed are taken by Mountbatten's
#
ADCs first to Mountbatten and then they are conducted across the room to Sardar Patel
#
And it is almost naked display of the flow chart of power, how power is being distributed
#
and actually who in the room holds power, right?
#
And that is something that VP is quite smug about, right?
#
If you read the story of the integration of the states also, it's quite a smug little
#
sentence where he says that nobody missed how the flow of power was actually being played
#
They basically wanted them to see that and they did.
#
And the Raja of Sarila was present and he said, nobody missed it.
#
Nobody who was there could have failed to notice that these are the men who are in power
#
and apart from the Viceroy, the actual men in the government of India who hold power,
#
Sardar Patel and VP Menon.
#
And you know, your book obviously has a lot of fascinating detail on how they converted
#
the princes and chapters on Junagar, Hyderabad and Kashmir, which I've also dealt with in
#
an excellent episode, which will be linked from the show notes in my episode on Kashmir
#
A thought that kind of struck me as I was reading this was that on the one hand VP Menon
#
shifted from working for the British empire to working for those who were his adversaries.
#
But on the other hand, it almost seemed as if he shifted from one empire to another and
#
from being freedom fighters, what people like Patel, Nehru and so on were now doing was putting
#
together an empire of their own, because these were all sort of princely states.
#
And by hook or by crook, they were sort of being united.
#
It is not as if the will of the people was being asserted anywhere.
#
You were preying on the egos and the weaknesses of individual princes and kings.
#
And one thing that you have pointed out in your book that Patel and Menon were very specific
#
about is that whatever promises we make to these people, whatever agreements we make
#
for why they agreed to join the union, we must honor them.
#
You even point out arguments that Patel had to that effect with Nehru who didn't really
#
And in the end, India did betray them all, didn't it?
#
Decades later, yes, India did.
#
What I really want to point out is that at this point, after independence actually takes
#
place on the 15th of August, we see a shift from accession to integration.
#
And those are two very different processes that VPs are involved with.
#
Now it's no longer about whether or not you get a princess to sign the dotted line, but
#
it just becomes nakedly about they have to sign on the dotted line.
#
And now is when you actually get to see how he uses Sardar Patel's own tactics.
#
He's seen Sardar Patel deploy a mix of personal as well as hard ruthlessness whenever it was
#
These are the same tactics that VP will use later on as well.
#
In fact, the process of actual integration starts with Orissa and Chhattisgarh.
#
And you point out interestingly how VP's tactical plan is he'll go to Orissa first
#
And if he fails, Sardar Patel will come because that's his whole good cop, bad cop kind of
#
And Sardar Patel says, no, no, let's go together.
#
And they somehow make it work.
#
They somehow do make it work.
#
And you see Sardar Patel taking a definite backseat and letting VP do the work, right?
#
Because they have to go to Nagpur the next day and they have a limited amount of time
#
in which they can get a number of princes in that room to be okay with the fact that
#
this is good, that a merger is going to happen.
#
And Sardar Patel is also having health issues.
#
He has literally two heart attacks during this time, one that kind of incapacitates
#
him and the other which eventually.
#
In fact, when VP was basically carrying this out, Sardar Patel was sitting on a train and
#
basically waiting for VP to finish up and join him on board the train.
#
So essentially, these machinations were done by VP, right?
#
So he basically met these princes and they were princes that had bickered among each
#
other for the longest period of time.
#
And he actually had to single out one particular ruler, the Maharaja Dhanakanaal and basically
#
tell him, look, and Dhanakanaal was not a popular ruler.
#
He'd been thrown out of his own state twice and he hadn't been yet reinstated.
#
And VP tells him, look, we'll give you special privileges.
#
In return for that, what you have to go and do is unite your brother rulers, tell them
#
to sign on the dotted line and be okay with this.
#
If you can do that, we'll make this work for you.
#
So it was a sort of, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine, right?
#
But you see the primary motivation for the integration of Orissa and Chhattisgarh was
#
Hyderabad and the trouble that was brewing in Hyderabad.
#
So VP had heard that the Nizam spies were essentially wanting to abduct the boy king
#
of Bastar, which was incredibly mineral rich, but also adjacent between Hyderabad and Orissa
#
And if that happened, then trouble that was simmering in Hyderabad would spill over into
#
Orissa and Chhattisgarh.
#
So basically that becomes a sort of driving factor for him to go to Orissa first before
#
That is why Orissa and Chhattisgarh is chosen.
#
So essentially speaking, a lot of what is driving the integration process is a desire
#
to stitch together the country into one cohesive fabric and do it as strategically as possible.
#
Some of the stuff that I've had to actually leave out in my book because otherwise I can't
#
But what I noticed while I was writing this book was it was driven by that strategy so
#
implicitly that Sardar Patel, for instance, didn't want to at that point, look at states
#
like Tripura or Kuch Bihar.
#
These were smaller states while the threat of Pakistan was certainly imminent, particularly
#
Sardar Patel essentially felt that if these were states where it could be put off until
#
absolutely had to be done, let it simmer for a while.
#
We have to deal with states that constitute the core of the country first and stitch together
#
as much as we can first before dealing with smaller, possibly less significant states.
#
And for much of it, as I've said, Sardar Patel was not doing so well health-wise.
#
Much of the legwork, in fact, all of the legwork was done by VP.
#
And we talk about Kashmir, Hyderabad and Junagarh because they're the easiest to talk about.
#
They're the most controversial to talk about and they're very richly told histories as
#
But essentially speaking, for me, what was fascinating was you had to deal with 500 odd
#
You had to get 500 different houses on board by hook or by crook, as you said.
#
You had to deploy a mixture of charm, ruthlessness, plain threatening, you know, to get them to
#
sign on the dotted line.
#
There were people who refused to see the light.
#
The Maharaja of Indore, for instance, just refused to sign.
#
You know, a delegation of princes went to meet him to tell him, look, you have to sign.
#
There is no way out of this.
#
And he refuses to listen to them.
#
They're sitting in the drawing room in his home and he comes out of an antechamber facing
#
the drawing room and he looks at them and basically goes up the stairs in silence.
#
And he's basically written several letters to VP and Patel demanding to know what Pakistan's
#
terms for accessions are, accessionists.
#
And Patel and VP refused to keep with this and several days later, right before the transfer
#
of power takes place, VP gets a manila envelope in which Holkar has essentially signed the
#
instrument of accession and sent it just with no covering letter, nothing.
#
It's just been sent ahead.
#
And you said VP was damp and fuse for a few hours.
#
He didn't know who this was, where this had come from.
#
This is also very interesting and I won't dwell upon it, I'll just ask listeners to
#
go and buy the book and read about it.
#
But you know, little tactical details of how individuals, princes were bought into sway.
#
For example, Manipur, where the king of Manipur fell in love with this young actress, but
#
So he had her abducted and kept in the palace overnight.
#
And the next day she marches to him, obviously angry that she's just been raped and demands
#
At which point the Maharani gets to hear of it and has hysterics and this becomes a public
#
scandal which suits VP and Sardar Patel very well because then they use it as leverage
#
to make the dude sign and you know, so all these other local factors, what is the timing
#
that you pick and all of that coming into play.
#
I'm, you know, what is also, I mean, we are recording this on February 17th and obviously
#
three, four days ago there was this big controversy that broke about Patel and Nehru and did Nehru
#
sort of include Patel in his first cabinet or not.
#
And you know, so before we get to that specific sort of this thing, tell me a little bit about
#
what was the relationship between Patel and Nehru that VP saw and was VP's telling of
#
it colored by his obvious fondness for Patel.
#
For example, you know, in, you write in the book going all the way back to 1936, you write
#
quote, Javaharlal's public persona was engaging, articulate, charming and sophisticated.
#
But Patel was not alone in deploring Javaharlal's volatile personality.
#
He was too radical, too emotional, too impulsive for the older man's liking.
#
Patel tried his best to see to it that Raja Ji, to his mind an older, more seasoned and
#
far less impulsive candidate, was made president of the Congress in 1936.
#
But Gandhi did not hesitate, Javaharlal was his choice and it was Javaharlal who became
#
president of the Congress top court.
#
And in 1937, Javaharlal insisted that he should stay in the post while it had been shifting
#
And you write quote, the idea that Javaharlal could be so nakedly ambitious shocked the
#
If this continued, it could have some terrible repercussions for the Congress.
#
And a lot of this is also playing out in the 40s where it is in fact Javaharlal's impulsiveness
#
and almost speaking without thinking of the larger consequences that deepens that wedge
#
between him and Jinnah.
#
And the thing is what I am sort of perturbed by is how we look at this relationship today.
#
On the one hand, it is clear to me that Nehru and Patel who was 14 years older than him
#
were very different people with different styles and they had huge differences with
#
And at different points in time and different contexts, I find myself taking one side or
#
On the other hand, it is also clear that they worked incredibly well together, that a lot
#
of how independent India was shaped despite Patel's early death at the end of 1950 was
#
because these two men teamed up and they worked well together.
#
And yet there seems to me to be a tendency to take a hardened position on this today
#
because the dispensation and power today is trying to claim Patel as one of their own
#
and they have always demonized Nehru despite sharing Nehru's centralizing impulses.
#
We are in a situation today where certainly on social media it's Patel goad Nehru bad
#
or the other way around and you cannot make any other argument.
#
And you face a brunt of this when you mentioned in your book how V.P. had related a story
#
about Patel being kept out of his Nehru's first cabinet and then V.P. got word through
#
to Mountbatten that this won't do and Mountbatten had a quiet word with Jawaharlal and Patel
#
And none of this would have been documented.
#
It's all people talking to each other.
#
But V.P. talks about it in the oral history he has left behind and Mountbatten later on
#
when Hudson gets in touch with him says, yeah, I remember something like that.
#
And the evidence against this is supposedly the letter which Nehru wrote to Patel telling
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him you are the giant of my cabinet and blah, blah, blah.
#
And the thing is both of these could be true or you know they could be a bit of truth to
#
both of these and we don't really know and it's all gray.
#
But somehow it almost seems as if we have to take a hard stand against it.
#
And as a recipient of a fair amount of trolling in the last few days yourself what do you
#
I think it's frankly speaking I think it's a shame because honestly speaking it's very
#
easy today given the political times to remember that actually Nehru and Patel were members
#
of the same party at one point right there in fact at all points.
#
Because they had disagreements and who doesn't when you're actually working together and
#
you're working under moments of immense pressure you're working under situations that none
#
of us can understand right because none of us are forging our country that are unique.
#
They are moments in time that demand things of you that you did not expect.
#
Are you liable to have disagreements under that kind of pressure?
#
As you said Nehru and Patel were very different men they had very different perspectives of
#
how India should move forward.
#
Would that also have given rise to disagreement?
#
And yet as you say and I agree both of them worked very well together.
#
I think one personality was necessary to sort of anchor the other and that works across
#
You can't have two volatile personalities in power otherwise there will be a certain
#
Patel was pragmatic Nehru was not so pragmatic.
#
Is that a bad thing to admit?
#
I think and this is a point that I keep trying to make with my research.
#
Human nature is all shades of grey.
#
A lot of the foibles of human nature contribute towards making history.
#
Without those foibles there would be no history.
#
Am I refuting any of the evidence that's been presented?
#
Yes those letters exist of the first and the third of August 1947 but you can interpret
#
They could have been written even after the conversations happened for example.
#
You know VP Menon was somebody we have to remember this was 1947 right VP Menon was
#
somebody who was operating also under immense stress.
#
He was also equally somebody who was very much trusted by all stakeholders.
#
The British, the League as well as the Congress.
#
He had informants in the media.
#
He had informants in politics.
#
He was trusted for the kind of information that he could pick up from his contacts and
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relay which was potentially game changing for politics as it stood at that point and
#
politics at that point was incredibly fluid.
#
Politics at any point is fluid.
#
Backchannel talks take place all the time in diplomacy and politics.
#
Backchannel talks are very rarely documented neatly.
#
Today we have archival evidence is the only way in which we can actually constructively
#
We have no other way of doing it but in doing so I think we shouldn't forget the fact that
#
these were events happening in real time none of which was cleanly documented.
#
If it was there would be no politics involved.
#
There would be no history either right because it would just be very easy to construct one
#
single linear narrative.
#
A lot of the reasons why history remains subjective is because it has a lot of grey areas most
#
of which are contributed to by human nature.
#
I also feel like it's easy today to say that OVP Benan was Sardar Patel's right hand man
#
so you know by the 1960s he had a lot of antipathy towards Nehru.
#
It's very easy to say that and dismiss it.
#
I think that it's wrong to do that because there are others also on record.
#
I have quoted Iyengar whose oral history is left at Dinmurti quoting several incidents
#
in which Nehru was capable of immense pettiness.
#
For instance when Sardar Patel died, Iyengar was Home Secretary at that point and he goes
#
to Nehru and says can I be part of the flight that's going to Bombay and Nehru says no there's
#
In fact Nehru barred VP from attending Sardar Patel's funeral and VP went anyway of course
#
but that's staggeringly petty.
#
That's staggeringly petty.
#
It's also an incident that was recorded in a separate interview I did with SV Raju who
#
told me about this incident also.
#
But you know what it's not a shame to admit that the greatest leaders that India had were
#
also capable of human pettiness and human vice.
#
I think as soon as you forget that and as soon as you take a hard stance on one was
#
good versus one was bad and you can't say anything against any either party.
#
I think that's something that needs to be put aside otherwise it becomes a problem in
#
writing history, it becomes a problem in studying history as well.
#
You can comprehensively change history by taking a hardened stand on any of this.
#
You know just because VP Menon did not leave behind any documents as to this just because
#
there are no documents that today attest to this does not mean that it did not happen.
#
Very rarely is politics so neatly documented.
#
Do we ignore oral histories so much?
#
I think that's something that needs to be looked at more closely.
#
We tend to rely heavily on letters on correspondent diaries.
#
We tend to not take into account oral history.
#
I like oral history simply because when a person is recounting a memory a person is
#
then talking about it completely free of any you know constraints that might be holding
#
They're not crafting a sentence and all of that they're just talking.
#
These are people who've left government service right they've got nothing to prove and nothing
#
to lose and nothing to gain equally right.
#
So their memories will be that much more unadulterated by constraint right.
#
They were speaking freely.
#
It's all right to admit that Nehru had pettiness in spite.
#
It's equally all right to talk about the foibles of any of the great political leaders we've
#
We need to start looking at oral history as an important primary source when we're writing
#
history rather than dismissing it as mere hearsay or gossip or indeed dismissing it
#
A country could be made or broken on the whim of a rumor in those days.
#
Even in these days you hear the slightest rumor at the highest channels.
#
A action will be taken based on the veracity of those rumors and the veracity of the person
#
who's bringing those so-called rumors to you.
#
So information in real time played a key role in politics and still does in politics and
#
I think we shouldn't forget that oral history as well as real time information are both
#
key factors in constructing a history of our past.
#
One of the interesting things to remember is that in all the histories I have read of
#
the period and indeed in your book and the episode I did on Kashmir with Srinath Raghavan,
#
one thing that comes through is that much as a Hindu right today is trying to co-opt
#
Patel into their pantheon, which is funny because he banned the RSS.
#
The thing is on the issue of Kashmir, Patel was the one guy who was actually happy to
#
do a plebiscite there, who was happy to consider the practical option of let the Muslim majority
#
parts including the Valley of Kashmir go to Pakistan.
#
All of those were on the table for him.
#
It was actually Nehru who put his foot down and who prevented sort of that from happening,
#
which your book talks about, which Srinath has spoken about, which is there in the histories.
#
It's there in the histories as well, you know, there's so much that is there in history that
#
has been recorded, the controversy over the date of the signing of the instrument of accession
#
in Kashmir, which is also a subject I've talked about in the book.
#
I have also talked about VP's own stand of what should have happened in Kashmir, where
#
he differed very greatly from what actually happened, right?
#
But he's the man who took the flight, went to Hari Singh, got the, you know, coaxed rather
#
the signature out of him, flew back and then India could send in the...
#
And yet his stand was we didn't give them a plebiscite and we should have.
#
And that's one area in which I think I have great regrets because I feel that we owed
#
We didn't give that to them.
#
And that I think is raw honesty, which should be commended, honestly speaking.
#
And I agree with him on that.
#
So I can't help repeating that it does seem to me that, you know, we quickly cobbled together
#
and empire sort of reassembled the empire of the British empire and made a lot of false
#
promises along the way, including to Kashmir and including to various other princely states.
#
That is something also that VP and Patel have been accused of, that they betrayed the princes,
#
they took their legitimacy, they took away their sovereignty and they basically left
#
It, you know, from whatever I have read from Patel's own letters, which are on record,
#
and he wrote several strong letters on the subject to Nehru, for them, it was a question
#
of they knew the fact, they knew what they were doing.
#
They knew that essentially these were very proud men and by taking away their kingdoms,
#
they were essentially stripping them of a lot of the tangibility to which they tied
#
Patel, for one, was incredibly aware of that, which is why the issue of privy purses became
#
In fact, it became important from 1949 itself, you know, when Nehru basically started looking
#
at ways to slash the privy purse and Patel gets really upset with this and he writes
#
a very strong letter and he says, look, we've taken everything from these guys.
#
Now to for us to renege on even the barest minimum of the promises that we've left,
#
it would be incredibly unfair and if we're thinking of doing that, then I don't think
#
that this is the way forward for an independent country that we are being dishonest here.
#
And it's important to remember that these were men who acted with a view to bringing
#
the country together, yes, but also knew exactly what they were doing when they were interacting
#
with these rulers, they saw them also as humans and they knew that they were stripping them
#
out there of whatever they had been associated with.
#
And Nehru in this regard, you know, going against the core tenet of Gandhianism, according
#
to me was, you know, just thinking of the ends and not the means and, you know, to lie
#
to someone and then to cheat them out of something is not how you sort of build a nation.
#
And yet there was a very concerted movement brought about by Nehru to actually start with
#
the slashing of the privy purses.
#
And this was something that Patel got wind of and Patel didn't like that at all.
#
I think that speaks volumes about both Patel and V.P. that you actually don't merely treat
#
royal houses as, you know, factors to be integrated, you know, pockets of territory, but they're
#
actually also real people.
#
And they're making sacrifices.
#
And these are two men who have no love for the princes, I might add, right, Patel was
#
no great fan of the princes, neither was V.P., right.
#
But in fact, V.P. had been, one of them had pointed a gun at him, Jodhpur had pointed
#
In fact, Jodhpur and V.P. went on to become great friends.
#
Jodhpur offered him a parliamentary seat for the 52 elections.
#
But, you know, these were men who saw both the ends, but never treated the means as simply
#
The means were also humans.
#
It was important to act honorably.
#
It was important to act honorably.
#
Though some could argue that there was a lot of implicit coercion and threats and all that.
#
And in fact, I admitted that as well, there was more than implicit coercion and there
#
was more than implicit manipulation and machination.
#
But at the end of the day, for these guys, this was the job that had to be done.
#
And that was how you basically had to get it done by whatever means were possible.
#
You know, even when it comes to Hyderabad, V.P.'s own words are, you can say whatever
#
you want, but I still think that it was necessary to do what we did in Hyderabad.
#
So these were men for whom the end was very, very clear.
#
But they did not lose sight of the fact that the rulers they were dealing with were also
#
And your book, of course, details all this out very well.
#
And then it goes on to sort of the post Patel career, V.P., where he's first a governor
#
somewhere in Orissa for a couple of months.
#
And then he's part of the finance planning commission.
#
And then he moves on and later he joins the swatantra party and so on and so forth.
#
And then he dies in the mid 60s.
#
I'll just recommend that people read your book because it's an important part of your
#
history and also sort of give me insight into how an individual can carry so much import.
#
Like reading your book, looking at all the things that V.P.
#
Menon did, especially in that period of time where Patel was ill or incapacitated or couldn't
#
It's very hard for me to imagine what this nation would look like today if V.P.
#
Do you believe in the great man theory of history?
#
You know, Carlisle's whole thing that great men shape history or would you say that the
#
currents of history are all sort of going in whatever direction they are and men just
#
happen to be where they are?
#
No, I in fact believe in.
#
I don't know whether it's the great man theory or not, but I do believe that once your basic
#
foibles of your personality have the power to shape history.
#
So basically actions that are driven by your ego or your personality have the power to
#
change the course of events.
#
Nations have gone to war for less, you know.
#
So I, there is one particular sentence in my book where I basically talk about, you
#
know, Patel has died and V.P. is reflecting on the death of Patel and he says that, thank
#
God essentially that integration happened while Sardar was alive, right?
#
I think that is a huge testament to the fact that the integration of this country could
#
not have been possible without Sardar Patel.
#
I think V.P. certainly believed that Sardar Patel was a great man.
#
In doing so, I also feel like that statement gives away a lot of his own tendency to efface
#
himself from that because I also believe that Sardar Patel could not have done this without
#
I think Sardar Patel could have said the same about V.P. Menon.
#
I think the same could be said about V.P. Menon also.
#
And honestly, the task that they did, I cannot imagine someone like Saint Nehru for all his
#
greatness and Nehru built so many institutions, we are secular because of him, thank God Nehru
#
However, Nehru could not have done this.
#
He was a completely different kind of personality.
#
There were men with different abilities and different capacities and I think one tends
#
to lose sight of that in this day and age and it's easy to lose sight of that perhaps
#
in this day and age, but I don't think that that should be done.
#
I mean, Patel and Nehru were very different men with very different capacities, right?
#
Patel was somebody who could unify in different ways, right?
#
Nehru could unify in different ways, Patel could unify in different ways.
#
Patel was incredibly pragmatic.
#
His vision for the future was crystal clear and he knew exactly how to go about it as
#
Nehru was far more emotionally driven.
#
He was somebody who was incredibly sensitive as well.
#
He was erudite, articulate, all of that and certainly India needed somebody who was both
#
eloquent, articulate and erudite given where she was going.
#
But India also needed somebody who was capable of very firm decisions and very cool headed
#
decisions, which Nehru was not capable of, but Sirdar was.
#
In that sense of the word, I think he was a great deputy to have because you need someone
#
like that to balance you out.
#
It does not necessarily mean that it's a bad thing.
#
I think it's a very necessary thing to have somebody to anchor you and hold you down and
#
Siddharth Patel was a very grounded, pragmatic man.
#
We tend to lose sight of that now, you know, because it's easy, as you said, to get lost
#
History was never a binary.
#
For me, it's not a binary.
#
It's a very complex web and it's a very crazy sort of patchwork of intersecting personalities.
#
Yeah, very wise words, especially now today when history is often sought to be weaponized
#
by politicians to serve their own purposes or narratives, whereas, you know, you and
#
I would both agree and I think any sensible person would agree that listen, Nehru and
#
Patel were both great people.
#
We're lucky to have them and indeed VP Menon about whom I think more people should know
#
and they should buy the book.
#
But I will now turn the spotlight on you that now the book is over.
#
Is there a sense of relief?
#
How has your family reacted to it?
#
Because that is VP Menon's family as well.
#
Well, I at the moment feel nothing but absolute exhaustion because this has been the last
#
five years of my life has gone into writing and researching this book.
#
So I feel sort of empty almost like I've actually put out this work out there and now talking
#
about it, which for me, it's always been easier to write rather than actually talk about it.
#
But you know, even when you put down VP Menon's words in the barest of the minimum words,
#
it's still an inspirational story.
#
It's still a story you want to listen to.
#
I mean, this is a kid who dropped out of matriculate and burnt his freaking school at 13 and ran
#
away to work in a coal mine and went from there to sell towels on the streets of Bombay.
#
And then went on to become one of India's highest civil servants, our finest civil servant.
#
I will make a categorical statement even if you won't.
#
He was one of India's finest civil servants.
#
He was India's finest civil servant.
#
My family has been very supportive during the writing of this.
#
I don't think any amount of information was ever hidden.
#
And that especially contributed to writing about his personal life.
#
I think it's very difficult for not just me as a biographer, but for them as his grandchildren
#
to go over aspects of his marital life, about his second marriage, about his foibles as
#
a man, about his emotional coldness, his emotional stuntedness.
#
I think it's difficult to put that down objectively.
#
And they have, they've absolutely been 100% forthcoming with all of his shortcomings.
#
And I can't give them enough credit for that because you need a certain level of honesty
#
and a willingness to actually put it out there.
#
I think the problem with telling history a lot these days is your tendency to sanitize,
#
your tendency to eulogize.
#
My family didn't intend on doing that from the get go.
#
They knew that VP's personal life was complicated.
#
They knew that parts of his professional life was complicated as well with his fallout with
#
They also knew that me putting this out in the public domain was going to be tricky given
#
I received no pushback from my family about any of this.
#
They're very, very willing.
#
And I'm speaking also for family members whom I contacted via Twitter.
#
I met for the first time.
#
There was no reluctance to volunteer information.
#
And honestly, I can't give everyone enough credit for that because it's a rare, rare
#
quality to actually be that open about somebody's shortcomings, somebody's career plummeting,
#
the reasons why that somebody's career plummeted.
#
And this becomes even more complicated because if you read the book, you'll also know that
#
we are also my nanny's sister, brother married, Nehendara Sehgal.
#
So we are also connected to the Nehru family themselves.
#
So it is difficult on both ends, you know, because you're also then talking directly.
#
So you are also an extended part of the Nehru family.
#
Can you take over the Congress someday?
#
No, I would not want to do any such thing.
#
So it's difficult because honestly, I had to keep both aspects in mind.
#
I have not, like I said, held back.
#
And that was completely with the support of the Vapala side of the family, including my
#
own mother and uncle, because we all felt collectively that this was an incredibly important
#
aspect of his career and it shouldn't be hidden, including his personal life.
#
It was a subject that's been raised many times.
#
Although I feel that the objective of a good biography is to try and marry the public and
#
If you can do that and if you can present a good comprehensive or as comprehensive as
#
you can make it, portrait of a personality against the backdrop of the life and times
#
I think then you've succeeded as a biographer and I can only hope I've managed to do that
#
You absolutely managed to do that and I think what a good book of history should also do
#
is deepen one's understanding of both history and human nature and your book certainly does
#
So thank you so much for sparing more than three hours in the studio.
#
This must be another reason you're exhausted, right?
#
First five years of writing and then ready to talk on a podcast for three hours.
#
Well, I've talked on several forums before this, not for three hours, I'll admit, but
#
I have talked a lot about the subject.
#
So getting used to talking about VP, I'm getting kind of excited about talking about VP too.
#
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
#
Thank you for having me.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hop on over to your nearest bookstore online
#
or offline and buy the magnificent biography of VP Menon by Narayani Basu.
#
You can also follow her on Twitter at Narayani underscore Basu.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in and thinkpragati.com.
#
The Scene and the Unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution.
#
Hop on over to takshashila.org.in for more info on their public policy courses.
#
Who knows you could be the next VP Menon.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
#
You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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