Darbar Gopaldas Desai was a man whose attitude towards minorities was something unheard of. And this was passed on to his children too. During the 2002 riots, in Vaso, as angry mobs approached, Mahendradas Desai, then 90 years old, sat by his father’s memorial, known as the Darbar Gopaldas Desai tower and emphatically stated that anybody wanting to kill Muslims will have to pass through him and kill him first.
Biographies have always been a literary genre that has been overlooked, unacknowledged. This story is from Rajmohan Gandhi’s The Prince of Gujarat:The Extraordinary Story of Prince Gopaldas Desai . Speaking at a panel titled ‘The Lives of Others’ at The Hindu Lit for Life 2015, Gandhi and Charles Allen in conversation with Jonathan Gil Harris attempted to create an understanding of what it is like to write a biography.
Charles Allen, the biographer of Kipling, says, “I stumbled into it. I was working as a youngster in BBC broadcasting and was asked to be an interviewer. That was when Plain Tales From The Raj began — a radio show. We would meet people who were then 60 or 70 years old, who were survivors of the Raj. When you interview people, you tend to identify with them. You form a bond.” But one hears only one side of the story. “You only hear what that person tells you. That’s always going to be there.”
While Gandhi has been one of the foremost biographers of Indian freedom fighters, he maintains that only those with “a fire in them should initiate the writing of a biography”, and not “wait for publishers to commission them.”
The other issue with writing biographies is the source material available. “I came to the emperor Ashoka after a long journey. When you take Mahatma Gandhi (whom Rajmohan Gandhi has written a biography of), there is such a vast corpus of material available on a national politician and saint. He has living relatives, people who still remember him. There is almost nothing on Ashoka. But Ashoka was quite important. He was the first to respect all religions, to say ‘love thy neighbour’, even though his edicts never even mentioned religion. He said he wouldn’t conquer a neighbouring kingdom by force, but instead by his ideas,” says Allen, who while writing Ashoka: The Search For India’s Lost Emperor realised that “Ashoka had not been understood well by India.”
The journey that one takes to reach a point where a person inspires one so much that a biography needs to be written is also slow. For Rajmohan, Gopaldas Desai was almost a lifelong process. “I first heard about him from my father. It was just a throwaway line, but I was hooked. Then, a few years back, I had the chance of meeting Gopaldas’ youngest son in the United States. He told me so much about his father, so many little stories that I just had to write this book. He had been forgotten by Gujarat.”
Biographies have come a long way from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives , and if one ignores hagiographies, when writing about famous people, the biographer requires a certain objectivity, distance from the subject. The life of an ‘other’ is then not the only thing that attracts the biographer, but also the ‘others’ to that ‘other’. “Gopaldas’ wife, Bhakti Lakshmidevi, called Bhaktiba in Gujarat was a fascinating person,” says Rajmohan. “For one thing, she was still remembered by the people because she lived well into her nineties, while Gopaldas died relatively young. And she was a champion of women’s liberation, a tireless worker for the eradication of untouchability. I think she deserves her own book.” The gender angle too plays an important role. “We have read and heard about how women have been written out of history. And here we are, men sitting and talking about books on other men,” remarks Allen. “There are women, too, who take up biographies of women; but in all, this seems to be a male-dominated genre.”
Being a biographer requires not only inspiration from certain famous people, but also an innate need to document as many people as possible. Each biographer has a number of people he or she wants to record, even if a lifetime doesn’t permit it. “I have always wanted to write a biography on Paul Gallico, especially after reading The Snow Goose ,” says Rajmohan. “I want someone to do a decent biography of Dr. Ambedkar,” says Allen. “I think he has been marginalised by historians, but he deserves a mainstream biography.”
What about less famous people? Rajmohan says, “Less famous people get their biographies as characters in novels.”
