How to judge a biography?

pages and therefore not very easy to read because of its sheer weight. But having read all his 25 or so books, I managed to read around 75 per cent of it.

Mr Le Carré went to Eton and Oxford. He worked for the secret services of the UK and developed a deep contempt for them. He quit and adopted a slightly left-of-centre, pro-ordinary people approach.

His major characters were an amalgam of the people he had met while in service. George Smiley, for instance, was based on a man called Bingham, who was No 2 in MI 6, and another fellow. But, neither was a cuckold like Smiley was.

And so on, all quite fascinating if you like that kind of thing. Not many people do. A good biography? But the book has left me wondering about how to judge a biography. By its length or its style? Its research or its new information? Or its novel interpretation?

Just how do you decide that one biography is better than the other? It’s so much easier in the case of autobiographies.

Until recently, Indian politicians were unwilling to write about their glorious achievements and their deep wisdom. But, the coming of foreign publishers with their deep pockets and large advances has unleashed a veritable barrage of autobiographies, from even hitherto reticent Reserve Bank of India governors.

But not so in the case of biographies, which have been few. Last year, Manmohan Singh’s daughter wrote one of her father, but she ended it in 1996.

This year, Vinay Sitapati, who is a journalist, lawyer, academic and PhD candidate, has written a long overdue biography of P V Narasimha Rao. It’s quite good.

Plus, it is only 325 pages long. The rest of the 75 pages are notes, references etc. A thin crop India does rather poorly in respect of political biographies. Although it has had 13 prime ministers before Narendra Modi, most of the biographies are of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Mr Singh have merited just one biography each, at least in English. Even Rajiv Gandhi has chalked up only four or five, including one by his wife, which is not a biography at all.

Indeed, nor are most of the others biographies, because Indian biographers don’t seem to know the difference between a hagiography and a proper biography. A proper biography is perhaps best written by professional historians. They sift the evidence to reach a conclusion, rather than look for evidence to prove a conclusion.

There is also the problem of material. Indian politicians rarely keep records. That includes prime ministers. This means the biographer has to rely on official material which is not always available.

Even when private papers are available, families are reluctant to hand them over. We also don’t have the American tradition of presidential libraries. All in all, therefore, it is a hard task, made harder by the paucity of skill.

Writing about another man or woman, never mind that he or she was a prime minister, requires a special kind of detachment. Indians have yet to demonstrate it.

There is also the problem of coverage. How much space should a political biography devote to family, school and college? I think about five per cent – 20 pages in a 400 page book – is about right, say Chapter One.

How much should the book devote to friends? This can be around 10 per cent or 40 pages, because friends make a huge difference to the person’s politics and approach to life. The topic can also liven up the book. Daman Singh recounts how her father’s friends threw him into a pond when he was a kid.

That leaves 300 pages or 90,000 words for the rest of it – party work, the hard climb up the greased pole, the triumphs and the heartbreak – and, of course, as Rao chronicles in his novel The Insider, the treachery.

Ah, yes, the treachery. It is rare for political biographies to describe this aspect, except in a “poor chap, he had no choice”, sort of thing.

The central character must, at all times, be portrayed as a demigod whereas everyone knows, almost by definition, that a prime minister is the prime minister only because he or she operates on a different moral plane whose chief characteristic is amorality.

If he doesn’t, well, like Desai and Rajiv Gandhi, he soon becomes exprime minister.