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PEOPLE OFTEN REFER TO MY ACCOUNTS of the lives of two of modern India's "founding fathers," M. K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, as "biographies."1 However, I do not see myself as a biographer, or these works as biographies, in the accepted sense of tracking and interpreting a life from the cradle to the grave, and, more problematically, of taking the individual as the only intellectual and analytical center of the argument. Readers who look for that sort of account of the life of these two men will find areas of their lives dealt with in passing rather than in depth, precisely because they do not illuminate the core problems that I investigate. (To take an obvious example, those who want a detailed and sensational account of Nehru's relationship with the wife of the last British viceroy will be disappointed. Quite apart from the constraints of historical evidence, what seems to me more significant than its precise physical character is her role as a sounding board and confidante, mostly in lengthy letters, over the early years of independence and most of his prime ministership, and what this tells us about his isolated position and his major concerns.) I see myself not as a biographer but as a historian of a time and region-South Asia from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries-who uses the medium of