A Man for All Seasons : The Life Of K.M. Panikkar – Narayan Basu (Hardcover)

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About the Book: A Man For All Seasons: The Life Of K.M. Panikkar

AN UNFLINCHING LOOK AT ONE OF INDIAS MOST FASCINATING FIGURES—THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL AND DIPLOMAT WHO HELPED SHAPE A POST-COLONIAL INDIA

K.M. Panikkar was a multifaceted man, one of Indias first public intellectuals as India won its independence. His imprint is all over Indias colonial and post-colonial history: from constitutional reform in the princely states, where he was a strong advocate for Indias current federal model to charting Indias maritime policy as a free country. He believed in an essential Hindu culture that held his land together, yet he was a committed secularist. He was Gandhis emissary and the founder of the Hindustan Times. He was independent Indias first and most controversial ambassador to both Nationalist China and the Peoples Republic of China. He was Nehrus man in Cairo and France and a member of the States Reorganisation Commission. He had enemies in the CIA as well as in Indias own Ministry of External Affairs. He frustrated his admirers as much as he provoked their reluctant respect.

From the British Raj to the Constituent Assembly, across two world wars and an ensuing Cold War, K.M. Panikkar was Indias go-to man in all seasons.

Through it all, he never stopped writing—on Indian identity, nationalism, history and foreign policy—material that remains as relevant today as it was seven decades ago.

Yet, about the man himself, strangely little is known. In A Man for All Seasons, Narayani Basu bridges that gap. Drawing on Panikkars formidable body of work, as well as on archival material from India to England, from Paris to China, and from Israel to the United Nations, as well as on first-time interviews with Panikkars family, Basu presents a vivid, irresistibly engaging portrait of this most enigmatic of Indias founding fathers. Featuring a formidable cast of characters—from Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel to Zhou Enlai, Chairman Mao and Gamal Abdel Nasser—A Man for All Seasons is as much a sweeping history of a young India finding its place in the world as it is the story of a man who was impossible to ignore then and remains so now..