विभूतिमूर्ति

 

On Writing a Biography

      No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main…. No man lives without  jostling and being jostled; … To paint a man’s life is to present these things    - John Donne

 There is the teller and the tale. -  Leon Edel

 [This is an extract from the ‘Afterword’ in my biography in English of Dr Rajendra Prasad:First President of India’ shortly to be republished in a revised edition.]

 Autobiography and biography are like the two banks of a river – the river of a life lived on this earth spanned by time and space. The metaphor of the river flowing from some point of origin through a span of space and time is rather apt for a life that can both be viewed and  mapped from its two parallel banks on either side. An extension of the metaphor would easily signify the two sides of the river of life as one seen, as it were, by its internal self and the other apprehended in terms of the external reality. It would not be difficult then to interpret the metaphor comprising of its two aspects – internal and external – one as an autobiography (internal), and the other as biography (external). Both these aspects may also be seen as complementary as well as contrary, again like the two banks of the river of life; touching the life on either side of the river and yet also directly opposite to each other and separate in their connectivity to the flow of life. It can thus be seen both through an internal or personal vision that can be created in the form of an autobiography, or an external or impersonal perception recreated as a biography.

Both these aspects of life-writing, then, to change the metaphor, shall appear as the two sides of the same coin viewed, as it were, from opposite sides. Both would tread through and encompass the same span of life but whereas one gives a representation of that span from an internal or personal angle as an autobiography, the other is the same span viewed and interpreted from an external angle by another person, standing on the other bank of the river, as biography.

‘Granite and Rainbow’ : The binary of life-writing goes further to attain a more vivid and poetic metaphor of ' the granite and the rainbow' created by Virginia Woolf for the genre of literary biography-writing: the 'granite' standing for hard established facts and the 'rainbow' symbolizing the imaginative creativity. In her pioneering essay on ‘The Art of Biography’ she speaks of the genre as dwelling ‘in the indefinite region between art and craft, retaining aspects of both worlds’¹.   Emphasizing the ‘incompatibility of fact and fiction’ in life-writing she suggests a middle path between ‘accepting the mutability of the subject and focusing in transmitting creative and fertile facts that stimulate the imagination of the reader’. For her, it’s all about a balance between ‘truth’ and ‘personality’, and an ‘extremely delicate equilibrium’ between ‘reality and invention’².
 

On the one hand [she says] there is truth; on the other there is personality. And if we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to solve it.³

 

The challenge before the biographer, thus, is enormous. He has to weld together into a ‘seamless whole’ both ‘truth’ and ‘personality’ in his attempt to create a credible and convincing portrait of the subject. He has to focus on all relevant facts of his subject’s life that best transmit his personality as he continues in his toilsome pursuit of striking a balance  between the ‘granite’ facts and the ‘rainbow’ portrait-painting of the personality.

Virginia Woolf’s stipulations on the art of biography, however, pertain more specifically to literary biography closer to the ‘rainbow’ rather than to a political biography tied up with the ‘granite’ world of facts, where the challenges before the biographer become more stringent. The ‘granite’ facts often are not only incontestable but also multi-dimensional and historically controversial. And the portrait-painting ‘rainbow’ aspect of the personality also becomes more constricted and inevitably subjective, particularly in relation to the multi-dimensionality of the facts and the subject’s inter-relationships with the other characters in the historical narrative. In other words, the nature of the historical narrative in the case of a political subject is significantly different from that of a semi-fictional ‘rainbow-ed’ character in a literary biography. There is assuredly more freedom in a literary biography for diverse interpretations of the subject’s personality than in a political biography with more constraints in subjective portrait-painting.

Political biography, therefore, is different, though being in the same genre of life-writing. It tilts closer towards history than to fiction, to facts than to imagination. It must necessarily have more of ‘granite’ than of ‘rainbow’. In fact, political biography is generally to be written under far more constraints than a literary biography even which Woolf finds ‘most restricted of all the arts’. Also, whereas in a literary biography the biographer has more freedom to speculate and imagine and concentrate on the literary works of the writer – essentially more akin to imagination than to facts - in a political biography the primary focus is on the political events and the subject’s personality as it is reflected in the political mirror. A political biography has a national context with its own related historical and socio-cultural parameters. It also has to trapeze forward, as it were, with other equally notable political figures standing close beside its subject, keeping a focused eye on their complex reciprocal interrelationships. It is also obliged to keep its appraisal of the contemporary political issues in relation to the subject fairly objective and persuasive from a perspective relevant to the biographer’s own times. And in its depiction of the subject’s personality, it must be true to the innate character and thought of the person. And for this the biographer must allow his subject ‘to determine the tone and texture of his life story’. In consequence, therefore, a near-living portrait of the subject – convincing enough for the biographer’s generation - must emerge which is fully credible in the midst of all the constraining factors. As Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw’s famous biographer says: ‘Writing a biography has to do with trying to let the person live again, in a different time, for the reader’⁴. For achieving this, the biographer and his subject must ‘move on the same level of history’⁵, through a process of ‘biographical transference’ whereby the biographer must possess the nimbleness to simultaneously remain ‘inside the narrative as well as outside’ and yet ‘create a sense of sequence and coherence’. Another prerequisite is that the new life story must present a fresh version of ‘past history in the generation’s new language’ and follow ‘the curve of a new generation’s curiosity’. Obviously, these and many more such constraints tie the hands of a writer who is attempting to write a political biography. Whatever Virginia Woolf said in her celebrated essay ‘The Art of Biography’, about ‘the marriage of granite and rainbow’, – at best a hazardous union  –  the artful mixing of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’,  has  greater relevance to ‘literary biography’ than to ‘political biography’ which is characterized by the near total supremacy of fact over ‘fiction’ (or an imaginative moulding of the material). All details of historical events and facts have to be carefully selected, sieved and checked for accuracy in full accordance with the character and personality of the political protagonist. Besides, as Holroyd says: ‘all biographies are in a sense group biographies’, created with the protagonist in the centre of the narrative with peripheral presence of the other major players in the political drama. It is ‘like a game of chess’ in which, he continues ‘you can’t just move the pieces where you want’. There is already a larger design of a past period of history in public domain in which the biographical narrative has to be placed so as to subserve the demands of verisimilitude with factual accuracy. The challenge, in fact, is to recreate, without prejudice, authentic history with a feel of ‘living’ history ‘as it was to those vanished people’.⁶ Obviously the political biographer’s job entails more challenges as it demands  more strenuous efforts ‘to mediate between granite and rainbow with consistency and balance’, as Woolf puts it.

A biography is also like a mosaic of facts, observations, comments and the protagonist's asservations all arranged into a natural looking pleasing design, very similar to a musical symphony of sounds from different consonant instruments playing together. The lay reader is soon immersed in its music enjoying the harmony achieved in the effect. It is only the critic, the expert scholar, who looks into the warp and woof of the woven patterns - the precision, authenticity and the aptness of the citations and the events in focus. I must admit that in writing this book⁷ I have had a bias for the lay reader over the scholar. (Critics, of course, are a class apart - to be wooed and cajoled rather than to be over-awed by.) I have tried to make my story as reader-friendly as possible. A biography is best told, I believe - and in keeping with the persona of the protagonist - in the narrator's steady voice  and tone to sound soothing and easy on the 'listening ears' of the reader.

Teller and the Tale : In another sense, a biography is like an afterlife for the subject where the soul incarnates into a new body in the words of a semi-fictional narrative. Even the corporal form recreates itself into a new palpable form, a kind of a painted portrait, an artistic sculpting into a statue bestowing a kind of permanence or immortality. A political biography thus becomes a real-life narrative of a memorable personage who remains a part of the living history of a nation as an inspiration for the posterity. Dr Prasad himself muses in his diary how he could write the story of his life only up to a point in his autobiography and diary notes and the story thenceforward could only be ‘written by somebody; if there is anything worth recording in it’⁸. And then he adds in a sombre tone: ‘We are rather poor in biography writing and poorer still in reading biographies. The result is ignorance of the life story of many who would pass in many countries as heroes….It is a pity that even stalwarts are forgotten no sooner than they have breathed their last.’⁹

Biography writing has several other facets, one of them being the time perspective. There are mainly three possibilities in the time perspective. The first one, of the near variety, written in the subject’s life-time – with or without the scaffolding of an autobiography available at that time - is likely to have lesser durability due to the possibility of later, fuller biographies, though it must have the enviable advantage of having personal conversations with the subject and similar conversations with his/her friends and adversaries, with plenty of new resource materials available for use. But it has the disadvantage of a parallax distortion, being too close in time with the subject. The second possibility, of the far variety, is when the obituaries have been written and read and a final appraisement, possible on the basis of contemporary men and materials, is more easily available as resource. The third possibility, farthest and the last, is when the biography is attempted decades after the protagonist has already been a part of history, with most of their contemporaries gone from the scene, and much of the source materials either already vanished or too difficult to trace. Most of the biographies of Gandhi, Nehru – and even Rajendra Prasad - pertain to the first two categories whereas the present biography of Dr Prasad belongs to the last category. Yet it has an advantage of another kind where the biographer has the rare benefit of a long and close association with the subject for over two-generations as well as the advantage of a time-perspective of decades gone by.

Dr Rajendra Prasad had a long and sustained personal relationship with my father, Shivapoojan Sahay to whom this biography is dedicated with the obituaral observations of Dr Prasad (on my father’s death) written barely weeks before his own death. This long association had begun since the non-cooperation movement and had continued with growing congeniality till the very end, with the latter’s demise preceding the former’s only by a few weeks. Occasional instances - particularly in the post-independence phase - of my father’s presence in this biography, therefore, occur briefly at places.

In any retrospective of the freedom movement where the Gandhian narrative of  independence for India seems clearly to centre round the freedom of the poorest, the most oppressed and the socially marginalized, and runs throughout as a strong undercurrent on a social and moral level, the political narrative seems often to clash with it, even though flowing closely parallel to it all along. The story of the freedom struggle, therefore, runs along like a stream dividing and colliding at many crucial points, and as it nears the delta of the ‘power transfer’ it suddenly appears to be losing all its unity and cohesiveness. The visible physical manifestations  of this ‘falling apart’ is the unfortunate partition of the nation and, as its worst fall-out, the tragic assassination of Gandhi.

The three major protagonists of this great political drama are Gandhi, Nehru and Prasad, though Prasad has never been given the space that he deserves in the central political narrative in any of the biographies of the former two. Right from the Champaran movement, which was a brief rehearsal for the larger political drama of the freedom movement, till the framing of the Indian constitution and its subsequent implementation during the decade and a half of the post-independence era, Prasad’s role remained more momentous and decisive than any of the lesser players in the Congress organization. In fact, the best values of the historic non-violent revolution that sustained the political policies of the Congress throughout the freedom struggle were most comprehensively represented by Dr Prasad, more than anyone else, as he always followed assiduously in the footsteps of Gandhi.

The great Trinity . Looking in retrospect at the great trinity of Gandhi, Nehru and Prasad, it is impossible for any biographer to focus on one of them without widening the circle of focus to include the other two with many other lesser characters looming on the periphery. Gandhi, of course, is the presiding deity in that trinity. And to a large extent, Prasad, the chief protagonist, too, appears as Gandhi’s mirror-image; his alter ego. In the perspective of time, Nehru’s shadows, of course, seem relatively to have lengthened into a realm of uncertainty on various counts. In the first part of this story there is more emphasis on the interrelationship between Gandhi and Prasad, with the former largely remaining in the background. The story begins with the Champaran movement and Prasad thenceforward is foregrounded in a steady pace throughout the following decades as a very strong and decisive presence. In the second post-independence phase, of course, with Gandhi retreating into a nebulous shadow zone,  and Prasad being drawn more and more into an important phase of constitution-making and a subsequent momentous role of the first president of an emergent democratic republic, there is a long uneasy phase of interactions and dissensions between him and Nehru.  Gandhi remains throughout the story as the touchstone on which the two protégés are to be assayed on various issues.

No one, of course, can claim to have understood fully the enigmatic and inscrutable personality of Gandhi who was himself always sceptical about his consistency of thought. The phrase ‘Experiments with Truth’ in the title of his autobiography, perhaps, points to this pragmatism of his recurrent experimentation with the nodal ideas of truth and non-violence as constituents of his political policy. Prasad, too, being Gandhi’s shadow in spirit, was like his master, often inconsistent, self-contradictory, compromising where he should have been resolute, indecisive where he should have been following his instinctive convictions, overly self-abnegating and self-effacing; although his patriotic commitment to national interests, particularly where it related to the rural poor and the downtrodden, was always steadfast and unswerving. The main difference between Gandhi and Prasad, however, was that whereas Gandhi always followed his ‘still small voice’ within, Prasad followed throughout his long political career the dictates of that ‘voice’ expressed in thought and translated into action.

There have been dozens of biographies of Nehru and, perhaps, more than twice that number of Gandhi; the former mostly by Indians and the latter both by Indians and foreign writers. But the same cannot be said of Dr Prasad which has nearly put him into something like a biographical oblivion. In any genuine attempt, therefore, to correct the imbalance, Dr Prasad’s biographer inevitably runs the risk of lapsing into a hagiographic bias. His sterling contribution to the long Congress-led freedom movement and his post-independence presidential role in the initial consolidation of a democratic dispensation must get the emphases it so richly deserves, if only to put the fuller narrative into proper perspective. A negative instance of such hagiographic bias can be seen in S.Gopal’s biography of  his father, Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, where in his eagerness to contrast the two successive  presidents he finds the second president, his father, ‘almost too good to be true’ and ‘always more than an ornamental figurehead’¹⁰. Portraying Dr Radhakrishnan in an uneven contrast with Dr Prasad he insinuates on the former’s special suitability to the high position as against Dr Prasad’s.

In India he [Dr Radhakrishnan] was acceptable to all sections of public opinion and on cordial terms of easy understanding with prime minister [Nehru]. Radhakrishnan was not, therefore, obsessed, as his predecessor, Prasad, had been, with the powers and prerogatives of the president as laid down by the constitution and which, as Rajagopalachari reminded him, in practice added up to nothing. [emphases added]

Such a sneering reference to Dr Prasad’s genuine concern for the truly constitutional functioning of a president in a complexly federal polity, taints Gopal’s biography of unfounded prejudice. Such an observation was equally unfair and unseemly to both the great men who maintained the best of congeniality all along their tenures till the very end.

Seen from such an angle, any biography written in a corrective mode is almost certainly prone to be controversial for different reasons: for the fundamental perspective of the writer vis-a-vis his emotional empathy with the protagonist, or the nature of the protagonist's own relationship with the other players in the drama, or the controversial issues connected with the historical events delineated in the narrative, or for similar other reasons. But these are the necessary hazards that writing of a political biography is inevitably linked with. The retelling of the life-story of a political person in a biography, therefore, cannot escape these hazards and must face them squarely by being, as much as possible, truthful in the retelling as well in the depiction of the protagonist's personality and his intellectual convictions.

The great trinity have each contributed in their own unique and unified ways to the emancipation and re-building of a nation into a modern democratic secular republic notwithstanding the various twists and turns of events and shifting realities during nearly a century-long saga of India’s history. Yet as a chronicler of historical events and facts, no biographer can justifiably claim absolute veracity of portrayal or representation in retelling a story involving such great men and such momentous phases of history. All that the biographer can plausibly assert is a truthful selection and organization of facts sieved through an empathetic portrayal of his subject’s personality even as a part of such a great coeval triad.

Asterisks and Daggers : The proof of a successful biography lies in its reading well. To that extent, it has all the ingredients of fiction – including an empathetic imagination. It has to turn historical events into narrative episodes with a cultivated touch of imaginative verisimilitude. One big hurdle, however, is the unavoidability of quotations and superscripted reference citations sprinkled as numbers or conventional signs like asterisks or daggers all over the page in such narratives having the underpinning of scholarship. That rudely and irritably pricks the illusion of story-telling. Besides, as seen above, political life-writing is always tied down by veracity of facts hampering the possibility of relatively free, imaginative handling of the material. The only recourse, therefore, is to reduce the referential superscriptions to the minimum, if not to a zero. A biography, after all, is a life-story with its own creative compulsions.

Colophon: As one nears the end of the story, it is well to remember Bernard Malamud’s cautionary words on writing a life-story: ‘The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was. Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.’¹¹

References

1, 2 & 3. Tesi di Laurea: Virginia Woolf and Biography, pp. 105, 119, 75

4. Michael Holroyd, The Paris Review :‘The Art of Biography’ (Interview) No. 3, p. 3;

5. Leon Edel, The Paris Review : ‘The Art of Biography’(Interview) No. 1, p. 9

6. David McCullough, The Paris Review :‘The Art of Biography’ (Interview) No. 2, p. 5;

7. Dr BSM Murty, Dr Rajendra Prasad: First President of India, S.Asia Publ, Delhi, 2018

8 & 9. Gyanwati Darbar, Portrait of a President, V.1,p.252; V.2,pp. 80-81

10. Sarvapalli Gopal, Radhakrishnan, pp.307-8

11. Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, OUP, 2004

Text & Photos (C) Dr BSM Murty 

 Photos 1,2 & 4 from top taken by me:  1. Sadaqat Ashram Cottage in which Rajendra Babu lived and 2. the cemented platform in front of his cottage where he used to sit and meet people, and where I had met him. 3. After retirement RP being bestowed 'Bharat Ratna' by President Radhakrishnan. 4. RP at annual function in Patna at Rashtrabhasha Parishad (photo by me).