This book is a biography of Rajendra Prasad, India’s first president. One of Mahatma Gandhi’s most loyal satyagrahis, his success in raising the political consciousness of the masses through his contribution to Gandhi’s programme of social reform and rural regeneration was incomparable. Some of the questions he raised, as head of state, about the Indian presidency have continued to resonate in the political scene long after his departure from it.

‘Given his standing in the Indian imagination, it is a surprise that a substantial biography has not appeared before this. Fortunately, what has now come is an lluminating and absorbing study. [the author] has an instinctive affinity with, and intimate knowledge, of Rajen Babu’s background. …we have here an instructive, thorough, and readable account of someone essential to a true understanding of the origins of our republic.’─From the Foreword.

Dr Mangal Murty has written a lively and very full life of India’s first President, a man who devoted his life to the freedom of India, but who found little but anguish in the tragedies of its achievement. …This is a true “life and times” of an honourable man near the centre of nearly four decades of India’s national story.’ ─Nigel Collett, author of The Butcher of Amritsar:General Reginald Dyer.

BSM Murty, formerly Professor of English and Linguistics at the universities of Bhagalpur and Magadh (Bihar) and Taiz (Yemen). He is the author of Macbeth: A Study (1995), The Haunted Palace : A study of Edgar Poe’s Fiction (2012), and Babu Jagjivan Ram (2010) a biography in Hindi.

ISBN : 978-81-936104-5-9