Context A Man For All Seasons: The Life Of K.M. Panikkar

AN UNFLINCHING LOOK AT ONE OF INDIA’S MOST FASCINATING FIGURES—THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL AND DIPLOMAT WHO HELPED SHAPE A POST-COLONIAL INDIA. K.M. Panikkar was a multifaceted man, one of India’s first public intellectuals as India won its independence. His imprint is all over India’s colonial and post-colonial history: from constitutional reform in the princely states, where he was a strong advocate for India’s current federal model to charting India’s 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 Gandhi’s emissary and the founder of the Hindustan Times. He was independent India’s first and most controversial ambassador to both Nationalist China and the People’s Republic of China. He was Nehru’s man in Cairo and France and a member of the States Reorganisation Commission. He had enemies in the CIA as well as in India’s 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 India’s 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 Panikkar’s 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 Panikkar’s family, Basu presents a vivid, irresistibly engaging portrait of this most enigmatic of India’s 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.