book is a biography of Rajendra Prasad, India's first president. One of Mahatma Gandhi's most loyal satyagrahis, his success in raising the political consciousness of the masses through his contribution to Gandhi's programme of social reform and rural regeneration was incomparable. Some of the questions he raised, as head of state, about the Indian presidency have continued to resonate in the political scene long after his departure from it.
"Given his standing in the Indian imagination, it is a surprise that a substantial biography has not appeared before this. Fortunately, what has now come is an illuminating and absorbing study. [the author] has an instinctive affinity with, and intimate knowledge, of Rajen Babu's background...we have here an instructive, thorough, and readable account of someone essential to a true understanding of the origins of our republic.
BSM Murty, formerly Professor of English and Linguistics at the universities of Bhagalpur and Magadh (Bihar) and Taiz (Yemen). He is the author of Macbeth: A Study (1995), The Haunted Palace A study of Edgar Poe's Fiction (2012), and Babu Jagjivan Ram (2010) a biography in Hindi.
The first and longest-serving president of our Republic, Rajendra Prasad (1884-1963) shone as a star of the freedom movement in the two decades that preceded his presidency. With Gandhi, who was 15 years older, Prasad served as an enthusiastic and faithful junior - except in the very final phase when almost everyone, including Prasad, stood on one side and an isolated Mahatma on the other. With the other stars of that period - Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, C Rajagopalachari, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Subhas Chandra Bose, to name them in the order of their birth-Prasad's relationship was always of an equal.
Often spoken of as 'simple', 'God's good man' or 'the least disliked', Rajen Babu (the moniker millions used for the tall Bihari) was of course a good deal more than any of that. Intellectually, he was brilliant. As a youth, he topped most exams when Bengalis as well as Biharis were his competitors. When needed, he was tough as in 1949 when Nehru and, for a short while, Patel too, mistakenly thought Prasad would step aside from the nation's first presidency in Rajaji's (C Rajagopalachari) favour.
A notable South Indian intellectual, the late AN Sivaraman, once told me of the impact he had felt in 1936 from Rajen Babu's frank speech at the Lucknow Congress of that year, over which Jawaharlal Nehru had presided. Rajen Babu was also the superb organizer of relief in 1934 when Bihar was hit by a massive earthquake, and an astute politician who never allowed his feet to skid on what, even in his time, was Bihar's slippery ground.
In addition, Prasad's was an outstanding legal mind that presided over the Constituent Assembly from which emerged our constitution, and a scholar who wrote three major books: India Divided (a trenchant 1946 critique of the two-nation theory), Autobiography - composed in Hindi first as Atmakatha- and At the Feet of the Mahatma.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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