The Mystique of John Matthai

This biography adds flesh and bone but not soul to one of India's early finance ministers

- Rajrishi Singhal

The biographer is a bit like the cat burglar, stealthily climbing up the scaffolding of a person's life, breaking in, surveying the assortment of riches and then leaving with only a few select, precious elements. This sounds easier on paper than in practice. The biographer starts his or her undertaking with an inherent handicap, given the limited access to a subject's life (especially if the subject is long deceased), and is forced to temper vaulting ambition with discretion. It is in the choice of things the author focuses on—the life lived and the circumstances surrounding that life—that determines what makes for a good biography. What finally makes a biography truly stand out is the craft of storytelling, transforming the tedium of chronology into a compelling narrative.

Bakhtiar K. Dadabhoy's biography of John Matthai, Honest John, is an object study of how an author has to perform an intricate balancing act between the different elements of a subject's life: unspooling the various milestones, his professional progression, the contexts (economic, social and political) defining his professional choices and, finally, how the interplay between the subject's personal events, or emotional growth, determine some life choices or professional achievements. John Matthai is, admittedly, an interesting choice—independent India's first railways minister and its second finance minister—though charting his life holds myriad challenges and Dadabhoy's courageous enterprise manages to score on some counts but comes up empty on many others.