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| Patrick French | |
British historian and biographer Patrick French, whose books include acclaimed accounts of India's march toward independence and the life of the writer V.S. Naipaul, died March 16, the New York Times reported. He was 56. French "made an impression with his first book, published when he was still in his 20s. Titled Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (1994), it examined the life of Francis Edward Younghusband, the British adventurer who explored Tibet and other areas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries."
In 1997, the 50th anniversary of India's independence, French published Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division, "a book rich in archival research that challenged established views of events and the key figures in them, including offering a less than hagiographic portrait of Gandhi," the Times wrote.
Historian William Dalrymple, who had known French since childhood, said, "He was one of the few British writers on imperial Indian history widely loved and respected in India. His modesty, warmth, openness, generosity, deep sympathy with India and profound skepticism and suspicion about the British Empire meant he was able successfully to explain Britain to Indians and India to the British."
French's books include Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land (2003), The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (2008), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography; and India: A Portrait (2011).
Dalrymple described French as "always funny and clever and irreverent and charming, full of enthusiasm and energy, as well as a fabulous raconteur and an even better writer. He had a wonderful sense of humor and an even more acute sense of the absurd that made him a natural skeptic about everything he had grown up with: the army (his father was a soldier), the Catholic Church (the faith of his parents), the British class system (the backbone of the English public school system, where he was educated). He rejected all of it."
In 2003, French was offered the royal honor of Order of the British Empire. He turned it down, telling the Daily Telegraph that he was bothered by the motto of the order, "For God and the Empire," adding that he thought it might be seen as compromising: "If you are a businessman, it's OK, but as a writer on South Asia, I wanted to be seen to have an independent voice."