跨学科历史杂志, xl:3 (冬天, 2010), 399–412.

BIOGRAPHY AS HISTORY

Stanley Wolpert
Biography as History: A Personal Reºection His-
tory has illuminated every ªeld of human endeavor—science as
well as the arts—embracing countless modern disciplines, expand-
ing its focus on change over time to comprehend entire nations,
cultures, and civilizations, each far more complex than any indi-
vidual life. But at its best, biography is the ªnest form of history.
The story of individuals, their actions—heroic or tragic—and the
impact of their ideas, has always fascinated me. 因此, my doctoral
dissertation, “Tilak and Gokhale,” focused on the lives of the two
most important leaders of India’s Nationalist Movement prior to
Mahatma Gandhi, as prototypes of that movement’s “Revolu-
tion” and “Reform” mainstreams.1

tilak and gokhale
Lokamanya (Friend of the People) Bal Gan-
gadhar Tilak was Maharashtra’s most popular journalist and cul-
tural nationalist. His ªrebrand editorials inspired the ªrst Hindu
Brahman assassins of Poona (now Pune), where Kesari (Lion), 他的
Marathi-language newspaper was published. To understand Tilak,
I had to learn Marathi, reading through the Kesari archives. Mara-
thi was the mother tongue of both Tilak and Gokhale, but Gok-
hale wrote primarily in English, whereas all of Tilak’s most impor-
tant works were in Marathi.

Mahatma (Great Soul] Gopal Krishna Gokhale, like Tilak, 曾是
a Chitpavan Brahman, born a decade later, learning from his bril-
liant guru, Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade, to appreciate the
“gifts” and beneªts of English education and British justice. Gok-
hale emerged as Tilak’s primary nationalist opponent, repelled by
Tilak’s Brahmanic Hindu orthodoxy as well as his violent opposi-
tion to all things British. Young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi,
who ªrst met both men in Poona, compared Tilak to the “dark

Stanley Wolpert is Emeritus Professor of History, 加州大学, 天使们. 他是
the author of A New History of India (纽约, 2008; orig. 酒吧 1977); Shameful Flight: 这
Last Years of the British Empire in India (纽约, 2006), as well as of the six biographies dis-
cussed in this article.

1 Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (伯克利,
1962).

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400 | STANLEY WOLPERT

waters” (kala pani) of “the ocean,” which were always anathema to
Hindus. But Gandhi loved Gokhale as “the Ganges,” which “in-
vited one to its bosom.” He wrote of Gokhale as “my political
guru,” calling him “Mahatma,” which troubled Erikson enough
to comment in his Gandhi’s Truth, “Why should Wolpert call his
Gokhale my Gandhi’s ‘guru’ and why should that bother me so
much?” Before completing my dissertation I lived in India for al-
most a year, mostly in Poona, interviewing many people who had
known or worked with Tilak or Gokhale or were related to them.
Imbibing the culture and environment in which one’s subjects
lived and worked is essential to the biographer–historian, as im-
portant as learning their language and understanding their view-
points.2

jinnah, gandhi, and morley A scholarly historical biography
requires full access to the personal archives of its subject and the
public papers or documents of any national ªgure, should the bi-
ographer choose to write about an important public leader. 我们
can ªnd a paucity of letters, 文件, or documents in the archives
for one chosen subject, or a daunting superºuity in the archives
for another. I was faced with the paucity problem in writing my
biography of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, 和
the opposite one when tackling my life of Gandhi. Scrupulously
careful person and brilliant lawyer that he was, Jinnah committed
nothing to writing that he would not be ready to defend in a
courtroom. He kept no diary, wrote no autobiography, 和
penned virtually no “private” letters that survive. Were it not for
my good fortune in meeting several of Jinnah’s closest barrister
friends in London, before ºying out to Pakistan, I could never
have written my Jinnah of Pakistan. That work required many
more years of research, and several more trips to Pakistan than ex-
pected, before I ªnally located and gained access to all the Jinnah
papers that exist. Studying Jinnah, I often felt like a cryptographer
in a dark room, spending long hours analyzing photos of him for
clues to his personality and repeatedly interviewing those who had
known him best, each time asking them some of the same ques-
系统蒸发散, almost as though I were giving them polygraphs.3

Gandhi Everything that Gandhi wrote has been preserved in

2 Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (纽约, 1969).
3 Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (纽约, 1984).

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BIOGRAPHY AS HISTORY | 401

triplicate at the library of his Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat, much
of which was published in his Collected Works (德里, 1958), 和
more biographies have been written about him than of any other
Indian. But Gandhi’s unexpected death, not his life, was what ig-
nited my fascination with Indian history and the complexity of
that human sage called Bapu (“Little Father”) by his disciples, 和
Mahatma by the rest of the world.

My ªrst passage to India early in 1948, at the age of twenty,
brought me to Bombay on the very day when Gandhi’s ashes were
immersed in the waters of Back Bay. I had never seen so many
people before, all mourning for their Mahatma. Gandhi was assas-
sinated by a Brahman named Nathuram Godse, who believed that
India’s saintly father was a “Muslim-loving” traitor to his Hindu
信仰. The indelible impact of that day, and the tragic irony of the
Mahatma’s murderer being a “devout Hindu,” not only inspired
me to study Indian history but also to write a ªctional account of
the last day of Gandhi’s life. Not for another forty years was I
ready to attempt Gandhi’s biography. My novel, Nine Hours To
Rama, was published by Random House, then ªlmed in India,
where the censors banned it after Jawaharlal Nehru and his cabinet
watched its only screening there.4

I was never ofªcially told why my novel or the ªlm made
from it was banned, though many kind Indian friends in the cabi-
net have tried their best for half a century to persuade the Home
Ministry to lift its embargo. Some said that the reason was the fear
of possible riots being incited by the re-creation of Gandhi’s
shooting, or something that I wrote about Home Minister Sardar
Patel’s failure properly to protect him. Jamie Hamilton, who re-
published my novel for U.K. and Commonwealth distribution
(later to be impounded by Indian censors in the port of Bombay),
invited me to dine with the retired Parsi director general of Bom-
bay’s Criminal Investigation Division at the time of Gandhi’s as-
sassination. The director general warmly shook my hand and said,
“If I hadn’t myself sealed the record of our investigation into that
assassination and wrote on the outer envelope, ‘Not to be opened
for Fifty Years,’ I should have sworn you read all those docu-
评论!” I had not seen any of them, 实际上, but having lived in
Poona while working on “Tilak and Gokhale,” I absorbed the his-
toric environment that had nurtured Gandhi’s assassin and his co-

Idem, Nine Hours To Rama (纽约, 1962).

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402 | STANLEY WOLPERT

conspirators, and since my ªrst visit to Bombay, I had read every-
thing possible about Gandhi himself and his philosophy. My edu-
cated “guesses” in the ªctional account proved to be reasonably
close to, as Theodor Mommsen’s classic deªnition of history
would put it, Gandhi’s assassination “as it actually happened!”
尽管如此, my novel and its ªlm version both remain banned,
though my biography, Gandhi’s Passion: The Life and Legacy of Ma-
hatma Gandhi (纽约, 2001), has never been banned. 反式-
lated into six foreign languages, it is still widely read in India in its
paperback edition.

Jinnah This is not to say that scholarly biographies are im-
mune to censorship. My ªrst full-length biography, Jinnah of Paki-
斯坦, was banned by General Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s Islamic martial
dictator, for reasons that were immediately revealed to me by Zia’s
orthodox Islamic cultural minister, who ºew to Los Angeles to try
to persuade me to delete “just a few sentences” from it. What I re-
ported of Jinnah’s taste for ham sandwiches and pork sausages, 他
争论, must have been “wrong,” since “no good Muslim could
possibly like those things.” He also naively insisted that Jinnah
never drank whiskey or wine, because alcoholic beverages were
forbidden by Pakistan’s dictator. I explained that I wrote only
what I believed to be true, based on at least two impeccable pri-
mary sources for each fact—Jinnah’s legal assistants and his closest
朋友们. Before he gave up, the old minister tried in vain to bribe
我, promising that if I agreed to his deletions, 100,000 copies of a
new edition of my book would be published by Pakistan’s Armed
Services Press. I told him I had never approved of censorship of
任何一种, especially not of my own works.

Despite Pakistan’s fundamentalist Islamic objections to my
书, I soon heard that my Jinnah was being illicitly published
throughout Pakistan, without accountability to the Oxford Uni-
versity Press or any royalties to me, by private “pirates” in most of
the big cities. 一次, after the ban had ªnally been lifted, 我曾是
shocked to ªnd a pirated copy in the gift shop of Karachi’s Shera-
ton Hotel. I asked the salesman where he had obtained that clearly
illegal product, which fell apart when I opened it: “哦, sir, every-
body is wanting to read this book—best book on our Quaid!” I later
learned from a friend in The U.S. State Department that Zia him-
self kept an impounded box of my Jinnah books under his desk in
the event that a foreign dignitary were to ask him why “no good

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BIOGRAPHY AS HISTORY | 403

history of Pakistan” had yet been published. He could then take
one of the books out and hand it across his desk, saying “Read
这!” My startled friend had asked the general, “But why can’t I
buy this in any book store?”

Morley Literary ªgures are always tempting subjects for bi-
ographers, but the only one that I ever wrote about was John
Morley—a brilliant writer and a truly enlightened man. My focus,
然而, was Morley’s impact on India during his tenure as In-
dia’s secretary of state from 1906 到 1910. Although he was deserv-
ing of a complete biography, I could never get permission to use
his unpublished personal papers, which were kept under lock and
key by a zealous Oxford don, who wrote nothing himself but
whose control of those documents was enough to dissuade me
from pursuing the secrets of Morley’s life any further.5

brodie and biographical history My dear
friend Fawn
Brodie, a great biographer–historian, was almost denied a full pro-
fessorship in ucla’s history department by several now-departed
professors who considered her biographies nothing more than
“ªction” or “fatuous gossip.” Brodie’s remarkable books on
托马斯·杰斐逊, Joseph Smith, Richard Burton, and Richard
Nixon need no defenders today. She was a scrupulous scholar,
probing every available source to enrich her works with true,
though often troubling, facts, long-ignored or viewed as too dan-
gerous to publish by less courageous historians. Her brilliant biog-
raphy of Smith, No Man Knows My History, was denounced by the
Mormon Church, from which Brodie was excommunicated. 她
revelations about Jefferson’s thirty-year romance and common-
law marriage to Sally Hemmings, initially denounced by Jefferso-
nian guardians of his “purity” in Virginia, have now been proved
beyond any doubt by dna testing of their descendants. Brodie’s
profound understanding of Nixon’s insecurities help to explain
much about his otherwise frequently puzzling behavior.6

Brodie and I often discussed the lives of individuals that we
were writing about, and she introduced the ªrst course in biogra-

Idem, Morley and India, 1906–1910 (伯克利, 1967).

5
6 Fawn Brodie, 托马斯·杰斐逊, an Intimate History (纽约, 1974); idem, No Man Knows
My History: The Life Of Joseph Smith, The Mormon Prophet (纽约, 1945); idem, The Devil
Drives; A Life of Sir Richard Burton (纽约, 1967); idem, Richard Nixon, The Shaping of His
Character (纽约, 11).

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404 | STANLEY WOLPERT
phy ever offered by ucla’s history department, while I was its
chair, attracting some of our best graduate students. She was hard
at work on “The White House Years,” which would have been
the second volume of her biography about her “nemesis” Nixon,
when she tragically died of cancer. 然而, two of the department’s
oldest, though hardly wisest, historians—one an American Civil
Warrior and the other our British Imperialist—both tried their
worst to convince the rest of us, “She’s no historian. Biography is
much closer to ªction than history. She belongs in our English
Department, if they’ll have her!” Both of these scholars devoutly
believed that they were protecting history’s turf from biographical
invaders, once again trying in vain a year later to keep Clio’s gates
closed against a psychoanalytical historian that we had the good
fortune to hire despite their narrow-minded opposition.

interviews Biographies are often enriched by interviews, 埃斯佩-
cially of old friends and close relatives, though sometimes they
prove fruitless. I have been tempted at times to ignore the leads of
peripheral ªgures but quickly learned the value of diligently purs-
ing every name and address, gaining some of my best insights from
apparently obscure sources. Regretfully, I never managed to meet
with Jinnah’s only child, his daughter Dina, who lived in New
约克. I called her several times from Los Angeles, and she ªnally
agreed to see me in New York, inviting me for “tea.” When I
ªnally arrived at her Madison Avenue building, 然而, I over-
heard her say to the doorman through the intercom, “Tell him
that I am not at home.” English friends had warned me of how
“reclusive” she was, but I still regret never having met her.

By no means does every interview, even of close friends or
relatives, necessarily prove useful to a biographer, as I had learned
from interviewing several of Tilak’s and Gokhale’s dearest friends
in Poona. One of these people, from whom I had expected pro-
found insights and unique reminiscences, simply shook his trem-
bling head, whispering, “He was a very . . . 非常 . . . great man!”
But one of Gandhi’s old friends, his physician and disciple, happily
surprised me at how sharp her ninety-year-old mind remained and
how clearly she was able to recall intimate details and accurate
dates.

bhutto While I was still working on my life of Jinnah, I became
fascinated by the subject of my second biographical history of Pa-

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BIOGRAPHY AS HISTORY | 405

kistan, Zulªkar Ali Bhutto. Like Jinnah, Bhutto was a barrister,
but his ºamboyant populist political personality was in many ways
the opposite of Jinnah’s austere, Anglophile style. Piloo Mody, 一个
Indian friend of mine, contributed to my interest in Bhutto, hav-
ing attended a posh school in Bombay with him and having writ-
ten a brief personal memoir about him, Zulª, My Friend (德里,
1973). I was also stimulated to write the life of Pakistan’s most be-
loved and hated political leader when I learned that he left Bom-
bay to attend the University of Southern California the same year
that I departed for Bombay. 此外, while Bhutto was in
天使们, he dated a woman who later became a good friend of
mine, and after transferring to the University of California, Berke-
ley, he shared a dormitory room with another of my good friends.
But I could not begin to tackle Bhutto’s life until after the demise
of Zia ul-Haq, the dictator who hanged him in 1979. When Zia’s
plane went down mysteriously in ºames, Zulª’s talented daughter,
Benazir, ºew home to Pakistan from London to lead her father’s
Pakistan People’s Party to victory in that year’s (1988) 选举,
and to govern Pakistan as its ªrst female prime minister. Having
met Benazir shortly before that time, I wrote to ask her if I might
have unfettered access to her father’s papers for a biography. 她
kindly agreed, as did her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, who still lived in
their Karachi home at 70 Clifton.7

I had met Prime Minister Zulªkar Ali Bhutto only once, 在
1973, when he came to Washington to inaugurate the American
Association of Pakistan Studies, chaired by Ralph Braibanti of
杜克大学, WHO, with Hafeez Malik of Villanova, invited
me to join their board. Bhutto’s dark pinstriped suit, bright red silk
tie, and matching handkerchief seemed the perfect outªt for his
ºamboyant personality. His speech was less fascinating than the
dark image that he kept doodling in pencil on a scratch pad while
Briabanti introduced him. His sketch looked like an ominously
black missile on a launch pad, which I later recalled when he
vowed to “eat grass” rather than cut Pakistan’s nuclear arms bud-
get, over which he presided with particular pride. Even then, 长的
before I understood his bipolar personality, he seemed a curious
mixture of conºicting forces, at once arrogantly self-assured and
yet too eager to please, his sensuously thick lips blowing words al-
most as if he were throwing kisses. He was a tragic ªgure—Paki-

7 Wolpert, Zulª Bhutto of Pakistan: His Life and Times (纽约, 1973).

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406 | STANLEY WOLPERT

stan’s most talented, best loved leader, who wasted all of his re-
markable advantages with reckless abandon, turning his closest
colleagues and former allies into bitter enemies, destroyed by his
own uncontrollable passions and fatally intoxicated judgment.

nehru Before I ever considered trying to write the life of
Nehru, I had impulsively requested, and surprisingly received,
permission to interview him in New Delhi, where my wife and I
had just ºown to complete my research on “Tilak and Gokhale”
在 1958. I had not really expected Nehru to agree to the interview,
knowing how many more important matters that he had to ad-
裙子. To my delighted surprise, 然而, I was invited within the
week to see him in his ofªce at Parliament. Nehru’s charismatic
brilliance and charm thoroughly captivated me during that ªrst
hour’s meeting, but I had to teach Indian history for thirty years
before I dared to delve into his enormous archive of papers and
private letters. I had read his inspiring autobiography, Toward Free-
多姆 (纽约, 1981), as well as his other published works dur-
ing my graduate studies in Indian history, but never appreciated
how complex he was until I dug much more deeply into his thou-
sands of long letters and the many works written about him by
close contemporaries.8

Regretfully, I was denied permission to read an important
cache of letters exchanged between Nehru and Edwina Lady
Mountbatten. Those still remain ofªcially “closed,” although two
complete sets exist—one in England and one in India. The set in
England is under the control of Lord (路易斯) Mountbatten’s
Broadlands Trust. Lord Romsey, Mountbatten’s young grandson,
graciously invited my wife and me to Broadlands when we visited
南安普敦, but he could not let me see the letters without the
agreement of Sonia Gandhi, who owned the other set in Delhi.
Seeing how disappointed I was, he added with a smile, “The fam-
ily line is that they (Nehru and Lady Edwina) were simply good
friends.” A few years later, when I ºew to India, I managed to
meet with Congress President Sonia Gandhi, Nehru’s grand-
daughter-in-law, but I failed to persuade her to allow me to read
the letters. “I think I must keep them for my daughter,“ 她说
vaguely at the end of our long meeting.

Idem, Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny (纽约, 1996).

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BIOGRAPHY AS HISTORY | 407

I am not sure whether the Nehru–Edwina letters would have
taught me anything that I had not already learned about Nehru or
added anything to our historical knowledge of the period, but hu-
man curiosity is part of what impels biographical historians to keep
试, especially when we know of a cache of primary source ma-
terial assiduously kept under wraps. After leaving Madame Gan-
dhi’s ofªce, I felt much the same way as I did when I ªrst saw a li-
brary of beautiful leather-bound books in a medieval monastery,
chained and locked away from curious minds behind thick steel
bars. I have always admired the wisdom of our nation’s founding
fathers in drafting the ªrst amendment to our Constitution, ªnd-
ing all censorship repulsive and counterproductive. I was amazed
and ºattered to ªnd my own banned Nine Hours To Rama in a
glass-enclosed library case in Mani Bhavan—the house in Bombay
where Mahatma Gandhi stayed whenever he visited that great
city—shelved next to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I regret only
that neither of the books appears ever to have been opened.

在 1958, during my second visit to India, a few nights after we
had ªrst met Nehru in his ofªce, my wife and I sat behind him and
Lady Edwina at the opening of the Lalit Kala Akademi in Delhi.
They looked like young and happy lovers, holding hands, laugh-
英, and enjoying one another’s company at least as much as they
did the classical dancing and music. I am sure that their letters
would have made for good reading, not only because of the felic-
ity of Nehru’s writing, prevalent in many other letters that he
wrote—especially those to Indira, his daughter, and to his sisters—
but also because that otherwise singularly private person might
have been more frank in what he revealed to Edwina than to any-
one else. She adored her brilliantly powerful “Jawaha,” as she lov-
ingly called him. Nehru’s wife, Kamala, had died of tuberculosis
after many years in Indian and Swiss sanatoriums, and their mar-
里亚格, arranged by his father, had always lacked the romantic magic
and poignance of Nehru’s geographically remote relationship with
his “Darling Edwina.”

The night that Edwina died alone and asleep in British North
婆罗洲, she had re-read Nehru’s letters, found on the ºoor near
her bedside, where they’d fallen from her ªngers. Mountbatten
had wanted his wife buried in their family crypt in Romsey, 但
Edwina’s will requested that her remains be “set free” in the open
sea. Nehru sent an Indian frigate, Trishul, to follow the British

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408 | STANLEY WOLPERT

navy’s Wakeful, which bore her cofªn from Portsmouth, 并
drop a golden garland of Indian marigolds as a farewell gift to
adorn Edwina’s tiny body as it slipped into the sea.

Though my life of Nehru was not actually banned by India,
all copies of it mysteriously disappeared from every book store in
Delhi immediately after the Nehru family’s Lucknow newspaper,
National Herald, ran a page one editorial attacking it under the
black banner headline “BLASPHEMY!” What a strange word to
使用, I thought. Secular rationalist and agnostic, if not outright
atheist, that Nehru was, he never hesitated to attack and vigor-
ously repudiate all religious dogma and intellectually restrictive
doctrine, whether Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. In my re-
buttal letter, I reminded the National Herald’s editor of how open-
minded Nehru had always been, and how I had written nothing
about him in my biography that was not directly quoted from, 或者
inspired by, his own vast archive of primary work. But by then I
was well aware that nothing was more bitterly resented or vio-
lently attacked in any biography than the truth. So though my
Trysts were not replaced on Delhi’s bookstore shelves, I had
learned to accept with equanimity the harshest criticism of my
工作, no matter how offensive, since it was usually a reaction to
my truthful revelations of a subject’s darkest secrets.

the last years of the raj and the partition My most recent
书, Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India
(纽约, 2006), though not literally a biographical work, fo-
cuses on the historic roles that the leaders of India, 巴基斯坦, Great
英国, and the United States played in that crucial era. Gandhi,
Jinnah, Nehru, Patel, Stafford Cripps, 温斯顿·丘吉尔, Frank-
lin Roosevelt, Lord Wavell, and Mountbatten, each played a part,
heroic or ignoble, foolish or tragic, brave or cowardly, accelerat-
ing or retarding the decline and fall of that once mightiest Empire
of modern times.

多于 10 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were
terriªed into ºeeing their ancestral homes during that last most
tragic year of the Raj, following Mountbatten’s foolishly hasty de-
cision to partition South Asia. Among those many exiles were
1 million innocents who never lived to reach a safe haven in their
new lands, the dominions of India and Pakistan. Several critics of
my book felt that I was “too harsh” in blaming Mountbatten for

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BIOGRAPHY AS HISTORY | 409

halving the time allotted to him by Prime Minister Clement
Attlee’s cabinet to resolve, 如果可能的话, the differences between
Congress and League leaders. Had Mountbatten opted not for
Partition and Pakistan but for a unitary federal transfer of power to
印度, I believe that countless lives could have been saved along
the new, recklessly drawn borders that divided Punjab and Bengal,
and that incalculable violence and damage to India and Pakistan
could have been avoided during the next half-century. Perhaps he
was too ignorant of India, too young, too royal, and too egotistical
to worry about the impoverished refugees whose fate was con-
signed to his hands. Perhaps it was Attlee’s fault for choosing him
and Churchill’s for suggesting him to his Labour successor as
prime minister. There are always many “excuses” for failure, 许多
“reasons” for stupid, brutal, and inept actions, but biographers
must never “neutralize” the moral consequences of their subjects’
决定.

I met Lord Mountbatten once, when I was working on
Jinnah’s life, interviewing him in London, at his pied-a-terre be-
hind Harrod’s, in what would be the last year of his life. 他是
personally charming, but confessed that he could not understand
why I should waste so much of my time working on the life of a
man as “humorless as Jinnah.” He suggested instead that I should
focus on “my [Mountbatten’s] life and the role I [Mountbatten]
played in strengthening and redesigning the Commonwealth.
There’s a lot to be written about that!” Then he smiled, 添加,
“Alan can help you,” and then instructing his private secretary to
give me the home phone and address of Alan Campbell-Johnson
(author of Mission With Mountbatten [伦敦, 1951]) to help me
“get to work on that.” I explained that I was committed to
ªnishing my book on Jinnah, and never regretted having done so.

biography, 历史, and truth This incident raises the ques-
tion of how a biographer’s choice of subject might either enhance
or diminish the value of his or her work. Biographers should al-
ways question their own biases when selecting a subject, 和骗局-
tinue to challenge their prejudices at every stage of their research
and writing. I was acutely conscious of the potential danger of
such prejudice when I started writing about Tilak and Gokhale,
because I felt a decided initial preference for the “revolutionary”
Tilak and a radical student’s distrust of the “conservative” Anglo-

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410 | STANLEY WOLPERT

phile Gokhale. I am not exactly sure when my view reversed, 但
I know that it happened during the year of my primary-source re-
search in India. At one point, I was suddenly surprised to realize
that I had come to admire Gokhale’s secular humanitarian sagacity
far more than Tilak’s traditional Hindu religiosity and advocacy of
政治暴力. I never again changed my feelings about them,
but I tried to maintain an open mind regarding everything that I
discovered about their actions or wrote about their historical
signiªcance in my published work.

Hagiography is probably the most common potential pitfall
for any biographer, since all of us probably choose our subjects be-
cause we admire them. I admired Nehru more than any of the
other subjects that I have studied, at least at the start of my com-
mitment to write his life. His Discovery of India (纽约, 1946)
and Toward Freedom inºuenced me to learn all that I could about
Indian history. He struck me then as a brilliant writer, a fearless
revolutionary, and the most charismatic ªgure of recent times, 和
when ªrst I met him in New Delhi, he did not disappoint. 这
longer that I worked on his life, 然而, the more disillusioned I
became—ªrst, because of the many inaccuracies and doctrinaire
Marxist tendencies in his Discovery of India and later because of his
failures as India’s leader, refusing to open its economy and to free
enterprise investments that could have helped to extricate the
lower half of India’s populace from its abject poverty. Nehru al-
ways said the right things, especially in articulating his socialist hu-
manitarian values, but he rarely introduced the vigorous measures
required to achieve his goals. His Hamlet-like intellect and
reºective vacillation may have contributed to his personal charm,
but it also inhibited India’s development, as did his love of power,
despite his claims to the contrary. His tragic ºaw was his insatiable
dynastic ambition for Indira, his daughter, and her two sons, 全部
three of whom met violent premature deaths.

Students have often asked me when did I know that I was
ready to write about a biographical subject. At times I would an-
swer, “When I started dreaming about them.” Once I decide to
write a life, it usually takes me at least a year of primary-source re-
搜索, and often two or more years before I feel sufªciently at
home with my subject to dive into the writing—which, strangely
足够的, is sometimes the point at which I have a dream about him
or her. I intended to try writing several women’s lives, Indira

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BIOGRAPHY AS HISTORY | 411

Gandhi’s being the ªrst and Annie Besant’s the second, but in
both cases, my work was preempted by well-written biographies
published within a year of my initial research. Much later, 当我
had nearly ªnished my life of Bhutto, Benazir asked me to return
to Karachi for a year to write about her. I never regretted not do-
ing so but hardly expected the tragic end to her life to come as
swiftly as it did.

Each of my biographies has helped me to understand and por-
tray South Asian history more accurately than would have been
possible had I chosen to focus exclusively on economic, 种族的, 或者
cultural data. Since all of my biographies are of Indians, Pakistanis,
or British ofªcials of the Raj, I have been able to revisit many of
the same historic events—eras of glorious nationalist success or
tragic failure—from diverse points of view, often diametrically op-
摆出姿势. When I ªrst started work on Jinnah’s life, some of my clos-
est Indian colleagues and friends questioned the wisdom or value
of my choice, as had Mountbatten, though they took greater in-
terest in reviewing it after it was banned in Pakistan. Two years
前, to my delight, my Jinnah, which had long since been re-
published in Urdu, Arabic, and Russian translations, was ªnally
published in Hindi by Popular Prakashan Press, the ªrst of my bi-
ographies currently available to India’s vast non-English reading
民众. I hope that my Gandhi and Nehru biographies will even-
tually be published in Urdu for a Pakistani audience.

For millions of readers, biography is a high road to history. 我
like to think that if as many Pakistanis were able to read as much
about Gandhi and Nehru as ordinary Indians can now read about
Jinnah, they would be less dismissive of India’s greatest leaders, 较少的
swift to react violently against India, and more appreciative of the
two countries’ common historic roots.

Despite the more than sixty years of tragic conºict about
Kashmir that have plagued India and Pakistan since the Partition, 我
remain optimistic about the prospects for a permanent peace in
South Asia before too long. The epidemic of global terror that has
proliferated since Al-Qaeda’s monstrous attacks on the United
States in September 2001, the most recent deadly reincarnation of
which devastated Mumbai in November 2008, makes the study
of history and biography an urgently useful preoccupation for all
我们. The better we understand human motives and aspirations,
the closer we will come to realizing peaceful coexistence, friend-

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412 | STANLEY WOLPERT

船, and cooperation in our daily lives, ideals that most of us
分享. South Asia’s Association for Regional Cooperation (saarc),
which originated in 1985, provides a frame on which this region’s
seven nations, and more than one-and-a quarter billion people,
can build healthier relations. Economic and educational coopera-
tion with India would certainly help to extricate Pakistan from the
depths of fundamentalist-Islamic and medieval-tribal ignorance
and brutality.

Mahatma Gandhi believed that Truth (Satya) and Love
(Ahimsa) were “God” and that ªrm adherence to both could
“move the world” and conquer the dreadful forces of darkness and
falsehood. Jinnah believed that “Justice” and “Fair play” were the
polestars of politics, cautioning his nation, in his stirring address of
十月 1947 to its Constituent Assembly, “The ªrst duty of a
government is to maintain law and order, so that the life, 财产,
and religious beliefs of its subjects are fully protected by the State.”
Both of those great men begged Mountbatten not to divide
Punjab and Bengal—Gandhi calling this mad scheme “the vivisec-
tion of [Mother] India.” Yet Gandhi’s assassin, and millions of ig-
norant Hindus who admired Godse’s “devotion to Hinduism,”
falsely believed that Gandhi was behind Mountbatten’s decision.
At least as many Pakistanis have falsely maligned Jinnah for a ha-
tred of Hindus, Parsis, Christians, and Jews, virtually all of whom
were forced out of Karachi, Lahore, and Peshawar by fanatical
Muslim terrorists, several of whom tried twice to assassinate
Jinnah.

The most effective antidote to malicious historical falsehoods, 我们的
gravest “errors of judgment,” is the light of truth embodied in bio-
graphical history. To that end, the Sanskrit national motto of In-
dia, Satyam-eva jayate, “Truth alone conquers,” has much the same
meaning as the Western homily, “Truth shall make you free.”
Biographical history may yet prove our most popular and effective
high road to a clearer, sharper understanding of the past, 哪个, 作为
we all know, is “prologue.” Learning about the roots of mistakes
and errors of judgment in history may someday teach us to avoid
repeating them. What greater reward could any biographical his-
torian hope to reap from a lifetime of labor?

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