The Man Who Stood Against the Tide of History

Kishan Rana clearly concurs. While the title of his book Churchill and India: Manipulation or Betrayal?
is puzzling (in that the alternatives seem scarcely in contradiction to each other) and preemptively conclusive, its narrative is not, unfolding point by seamless point towards a final set of hypotheses. That the book emerged, as the author says, from the ‘quasi isolation’ during the pandemic may explain its self-interrogatory nature, questions asked, alternative answers offered (although in the end it is ‘reader, you decide’) much in the manner, one imagines, of the discussions and debates in the Yan Jin club of young diplomats of which the author was a member when posted in China in the early sixties. And that solitude may well have contributed also to the leisured lyricism in much of the writing, compelling disagreement with the author’s assertion that ‘presented here in a paraphrased mode, Churchill’s strong, direct words lose their force; such narratives must be read in the original.’ Kishan Rana’s versions soar.

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