Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful, wrote George Orwell in his essay on Salvador Dali. Perhaps memoirs need merely to reveal the unsuspected.
Ramachandra Guha’s paean to a friendship, The Cooking of Books, reveals unfamiliar aspects of this very public and very private person. No warts, but maybe a few scratches. There are too tributes to teachers, mentors and colleagues in the story of a bond both unforeseen (in college one was a ‘scholar’, the other a ‘sportsman’) and inevitable. This duality exists in the relationship and its expounding by the author of India After Gandhi.
The scholar is Rukun Advani, and Ram (familiarity breeds contraction) says, “Had I not met Rukun Advani, I would probably not have become a published author. Had he not befriended and guided me…my move from social history to biography would surely have been far more tortured and infinitely less satisfying. Had I not had Rukun to instruct and encourage me, I may never have thought of writing books on cricket…”
