My father didn’t hesitate, remembers Lakshman.Īnantan and his driver, taking turns, drove 780 kilometres that day, crossing Hyderabad and through to Jabalpur, without food or water-stopping only to go to the loo.

My uncle recalls how his mother took the phone from Meenakshi’s hand, If you want to see your father alive, she told her husband crisply, drop everything and come here right away. There’s no change, she said as much to reassure herself as to reassure him. His stepsister, Meenakshi, answered the phone. The next morning, my grandfather, Anantan-VP’s eldest son-telephoned, as he did every day, to ask after his father’s health.

As she sat there, he spoke, painfully and raspingly, Do you know, Precious, he said, the only thing in life that’s free is air-and I can’t even get a lungful of it. It was clear to both of them that he was dying. Premilla Menon-my grandmother and VP’s daughter-in-law-sat by his bed. Menon was, by then emaciated and ashen-faced, with the veins on his neck and temples thick with the constant effort of breathing. One evening, recalls my uncle, Lakshman, my mother went to check on him. It was in this room that he half-sat, half-lay in bed, propped up against a wall of cushions and pillows positioned to help him breathe, at least a little and a little more comfortably. He was confined to just a bedroom in his step-daughter’s house. 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. 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.Įqually, 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. In this definitive biography, Menon’s great-granddaughter, Narayani Basu, rectifies this travesty. Yet startlingly little is known about this bureaucrat, patriot and visionary. Menon was unarguably the architect of the modern Indian state. Menon met his stringent deadline, presenting the Menon Plan, which would change the map of the world forever. 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.

V.P.Menon by Narayani Basu