Patrick French (1966-2023): ‘A charming man who never bowed to authority’

“That sense of humour was typical of Patrick, he always had an ability to see the absurd and comic everywhere,” says Dalrymple, who witnessed the flight and went to school with the India-based English writer and historian who died Thursday after a long battle with cancer.

Born in 1966, French was an irreverent giant of the field, penning acclaimed works like Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (1994) – a portrait of India’s freedom struggle recontextualised through the triumphs and follies of Churchill, Mountbatten, Jinnah and Gandhi – and The World Is What It Is (2008) – an authoritative biography of Trinidadian-British writer VS Naipaul, extracted from exhaustive notes delivered by the author himself with the explicit request to not censor anything. The last won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hawthornden Prize. He also won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award.

“He was a charming man who never bowed to authority,” says Dalrymple, “and the humour of his youth also gave way to a serious side as he grew older.”

French, who was married to former Penguin Random House editor-in-chief Meru Gokhale, was the founding Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University (AU). He stepped down in 2022 after a tenure of five years, turning his attention to a biography of Nobel Prize-winning writer Doris Lessing, slated to be published next year.

“Anchored in a love of literature and of India, our friendship developed over recent years through Ahmedabad University, where Patrick was the founding Dean of Arts and Sciences, and to which he invited me as a visiting professor. The vitality of that institution owes so much to him and stands as tribute every bit as much as his books. We frequently did workshops and other events together and each time I came away staggered by the range of Patrick’s curiosity, depth of thought, and sheer intelligence and erudition. It’s rare enough to meet people who are as impressive on as off the page, or who excel in literary and academic settings. Patrick was in a class of his own,” said academic and historian Maya Jasanoff.

“He was very passionate about his work at Ahmedabad University and deeply engaged in finding the right people to teach there,” says Chiki Sarkar, co-founder of Juggernaut Books.

“And it was as a biographer that he found his calling. When Naipaul gave him all his correspondences, he was told to write as he saw fit without censoring anything, and that generosity bestows a great burden on a biographer. Reading Naipaul’s wife’s letters, a brutish side to the writer came out, and to put that down skillfully is very hard. It requires a certain personality – which Patrick had.”

In the obituary that he wrote for Naipaul in The Indian Express Sunday magazine in 2018, French wrote, “On learning that the shrewd French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord had died, Prince Metternich is said to have enquired: ‘What did he mean by that?’ I had a similar thought a fortnight ago when news came of VS Naipaul’s passing, a few days short of his 86th birthday. The feeling of enduring permanence that Vidia Naipaul evoked, I realised later, came from the extent to which his mind was ever present in his books. For a lifetime, he had hedged against extinction; like Mr Biswas when he got his house, he laid claim to his portion of the earth.”

For readers of his work, the news of the writer and historian’s passing, too, came with a similar sense of disbelief Thursday, despite the knowledge of his four-year-long battle with cancer.

“Writers and artists, particularly men, can be egotistical and vain and make it all about themselves. But Patrick was quite the opposite. In fact you could say, unlike Naipaul, on whom his work will stand on its own for years to come, Patrick was a perfect example of compassion, care and human decency, especially to those younger to him. He was a man of great talent – a superb writer and biographer, a fabulous mimic – but he was an even better human being. It truly is a great loss. I was looking forward to his biography on Doris Lessing because she was a counterpoint to Naipaul – woman, Left, White – and if anyone could do justice to it, it would be Patrick,” said historian Ramachandra Guha.

“We met a few times and he was just the most warm and affectionate man. He was extremely generous, someone who loved to give his time and attention,” said writer Mirza Waheed.

Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor, in a Twitter post, said, “Profoundly saddened by the news of the passing of Patrick French today. Have just spoken with his mother-in-law Namita Gokhale to express my condolences. My heart goes out to Meru Gokhale and their four-year-old son Krishna. We have lost an outstanding writer and a fine human being. Rest in peace.”

Writer Aatish Taseer, who became acquainted with French after the publication of the Naipaul biography, said, “I met him soon after things had soured with the Naipauls over the biography. I found him kind and wonderfully good-humoured. His impressions of Naipaul – the triple repetition, the shocking things he could say – had me splitting my sides. I inhaled his biography of Naipaul. It was incredibly acute. He captured all the grandeur and pettiness that are so much part of the contradictions of many great writers. That line in which he describes Naipaul’s role as a subject, as being at ‘once an act of narcissism and humility,’ will endure as ‘a total social fact’ about the man as a whole. It’s a tragedy for Indian intellectual life to have lost Patrick so young. I will miss him as a friend, but also as a reader – miss all those books he had yet to write.”