V. P.Menon- The Unsung Architect Of Modern India

With his initial plans for an independent India in tatters, the desperate viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, turned to his seniormost Indian civil servant, Vappala Pangunni Menon-or VP-giving him a single night to devise an alternative, coherent and workable plan for independence. Menon met his stringent deadline, presenting the Menon Plan, which would change the map of the world forever.

Menon was unarguably the architect of the modern Indian state. Yet startlingly little is known about this bureaucrat, patriot and visionary. In this definitive biography, Menon’s great-granddaughter, Narayani Basu, rectifies this travesty. She takes us through the highs and lows of his career, from his determination to give women the right to vote; to his strategy, at once ruthless and subtle, to get the princely states to accede to India; to his decision to join forces with the Swatantra Party; to his final relegation to relative obscurity.

The book candidly explores the man behind the public figure- his unconventional personal life and his private conflicts, which made him channel his energy into public service. Drawing from documents-scattered, unread and unresearched until now-and with unprecedented access to Menon’s papers and his taped off-the-record and explosively frank interviews-this remarkable biography of VP Menon not only covers the life and times of a man unjustly consigned to the footnotes of history but also changes our perception of how India, as we know it, came into being.

Narayani Basu is a historian and foreign policy analyst. A graduate in history and Chinese foreign policy from the University of Delhi, she is the author of The United States and China: Competing Discourses of Regionalism in East Asia and a forthcoming monograph on the history and significance of the Kashgar Consulate in bilateral relations between India and China. She writes extensively on foreign policy for several acclaimed international journals while remaining actively involved with her parent discipline-modern Indian history. She lives in New Delhi.

It's a common mix-up. V.K. Krishna Menon was, obviously, a far more compelling man. He strode into the political limelight as though he was born to it, and his relationship with India was both controversial and very public.

V.P. Menon, on the other hand, merits a furrowed brow and a blank expression. Nobody knows anything about him, and yet, his importance to the Government of India, at a time when India stood on the verge of independence, remains unparalleled. He drafted the Plan that would play midwife to India's birth as a free nation. He was Reforms Commissioner to India's last three Viceroys-Linlithgow, Wavell and Mountbatten. As Secretary, States Ministry, he was Sardar Patel's right-hand man, coaxing, cajoling and coercing Princes across India to accede to the Union of India.

He was my great-grandfather.

That is not why I wrote the book, however. There are countless books and biographies-collections of letters, even-on and about the stalwarts of India's freedom movement. However, deafening silence envelops the man who was responsible for nearly every major document that paved India's path to independence, and for the shaping of the Indian state into the map we know today. As his great-granddaughter, as a student of history myself, that seemed almost painfully unfair. VP's story, I decided six years ago, must be told.

Predictably, that was easier said than done. There are no books or biographies on Vappala Pangunni Menon. He has been allowed to languish on the sidelines of history for over seventy years. There is the odd reverential blog, run almost always by a fellow Malayali, on the man. L.K. Advani was the last public figure, of both influence and power, to have blogged about VP. This biography, then, is the first to be written on VP, and it is constructed, almost entirely on official documents found in archives in Delhi, London and Kerala, and on the letters and papers in my family's possession. I was fortunate enough to discover V.P. Menon's last interviews, recorded by his best friend and boss, Harry Hodson, in 1965. Hodson stayed at "Shelter", the Menon family home in Bangalore, for close to six months while he was researching his own book, The Great Divide. VP was already a very sick man by then, his breath rattling in his lungs as he spoke in his thickly accented voice. The words tumbled out as he told India's story, and though he often paused for breath, it was clear that his mind was still as clear as glass. For those reasons, I have let his voice do most of the talking, especially in the latter half of the book. It is his story, and it is only right that he tell it the way he lived it.

**Contents and Sample Pages**