“A Man For All Seasons: The Life Of K.M. Panikkar” by Narayani Basu
A Man for All Seasons (published by Westland Books) has been a few years in the making. Biographies are not easy to write, especially if you want to stay clear of writing a hagiography. Also, not too dry, by focussing only on facts and step by step details. It could not have been easy to write but it is always interesting to read what a biographer thinks is important vis-a-vis historical details. How do they go back in the past to recreate a life? Is it focussing on the life that the person led in their time or is it to be written from the perspective of present day India with a view on the modern reader’s appetite? Which is it to be? Tough act. Nevertheless, Narayani Basu manages to find the right balance.
Book blurb
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.
Narayani Basu is the bestselling author of V.P. Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India (2020) and Allegiance: Azaadi & the End of Empire (2022). A historian and foreign policy analyst, her current area of interest focuses on the less known but key players in the story of Indian independence. She lives in New Delhi. This is her third book.
27 July 2025
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