Biographies as a historiographical genre are enjoying continuous popularity, yet rarely do civil servants stand at the center of attention. However, as Amit Das Gupta’s book suggests, there is much to gain from the political biography of a civil servant like Subimal Dutt. Based on Dutt’s private papers and memoirs and on extensive documentation from archives in India, Pakistan, Great Britain, Canada, Russia, and Germany, his biographer paints the picture of a man whose life and experiences were shaped by some of the key developments in South Asian and international history in the twentieth century, and who contributed to shaping them in his many functions.

Born in a small village near Chittagong in Bengal Province in 1903, Subimal Dutt, like many members of the Bengali and Indian middle classes, opted for the career path that was considered the most promising at the time: the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Following the First World War, and as a reaction to Indian demands for greater autonomy, chances for Indians to join the ICS improved slightly, yet even for Dutt’s generation it remained difficult to enter the service despite excellent academic qualifications. Studying in Great Britain was inevitable to increase one’s chances to be accepted into the service. The years spent abroad were also supposed to transform Indian candidates into Englishmen, and, at least implicitly, to imbue them with the logic of the imperial system they would soon be part of. In Subimal Dutt’s case, this rationale functioned perfectly. He passed the entrance exams in 1928 and returned to India with a distinct sense of Britishness.

From Dutt’s first posts onward, his professional experiences provided a mirror image of the history of the British empire in South Asia in the 1930s and 1940s: As a junior civil servant in Bengal, Dutt dealt with land, agricultural, and food issues (most notably, and most dramatically, the Bengal Famine), which were at the heart of the political and economic problems in India at the time and would remain high on India’s political agenda after independence. Similarly, Dutt’s role as Indian agent in Malaya, which was a center of large-scale Indian and Chinese labor migration, brought him into contact with labor questions, inter-ethnic conflicts, and intra-imperial relations, which, together, characterized the late imperial period in the region.

Interestingly, while increasingly critical of colonialism, Dutt in those years did not question his loyalty to the ICS which, in many ways, was a tool of colonial rule. In his self-understanding, he was a servant to the system in place – in his biographer’s words, “a man of the apparatus, not a homo politicus” (p. 149). This position went hand in hand with an attitude the biographer describes as immensely strict and reserved, financially and morally incorruptible, yet privately often insecure and sometimes even desperate. Only in later years, following his wife’s and later his son’s deaths, did Dutt, who had been deeply spiritual for much of his life, grant private life more room vis-à-vis his official tasks.

The height of his career coincided with India’s independence and the establishment of India as a leading power in Asia. As Commonwealth Secretary and then as Acting Foreign Secretary in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Dutt dealt with a variety of problems the country was facing, among them the recovery of women who had been abducted in the context of Partition, relations with Pakistan, and the situation of Indian migrants who were living abroad at the time of independence. From 1952 to 1954, Dutt served as Ambassador to West Germany, where he was confronted with Bonn’s efforts to isolate the German Democratic Republic, a goal for which India’s behavior was considered crucial. A year after his return to India, in 1955, he became Foreign Secretary, a position he maintained until 1961 and in which he was involved in a number of events and decisions of major importance to India and the world: He represented India in the Suez Crisis, was involved in the preparations of the Bandung Conference, negotiated with the United States, especially regarding their relations with and assistance to Pakistan, dealt with the GDR’s efforts to improve its international standing, received Khrushchev and Bulganin, who were trying (unsuccessfully) to move India closer to the socialist camp, and, following the Sino-Indian war, devised a strategy vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China. In all of these affairs, Dutt “stood for a school of realist thinking in Indian foreign policy” (p. 586) but did not opt for grand initiatives. True to his self-understanding as a civil servant, he remained in the background and focused on improving the administrative structures in order to ensure that India’s political interests could be realized in the best possible way.

The final stages of Dutt’s career brought him more visibility. He served as Indian ambassador to Moscow from 1961 to 1962, a function which, as an ardent anti-communist, he did not particularly treasure. Upon his return to New Delhi, he became Secretary to the President, then Central Vigilance Commissioner and, finally, in 1972, Indian High Commissioner in Bangladesh, former East Pakistan. Bangladesh had declared its independence from Pakistan following the civil war in 1971, and the Indian government was keen to use the opportunity to improve its position in the region. As a Bengali by origin and a respected senior civil servant, Dutt was a natural choice for this task and proved capable of moderating between the different sides, finally embracing a more pro-active diplomatic role.

In many ways, Dutt’s life provides a guide through the history of India and South Asia in the twentieth century. The biographer skillfully explains the different political settings in which Dutt found himself in and the many events he witnessed. The broader phenomena and processes they were part of – British imperialism and colonialism, the subcontinent’s partition and India’s independence, the process of decolonization and nation-building, South Asian geopolitics, and the global Cold War – are depicted through the lens of Dutt’s personal experiences and descriptions. This approach has advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes the accounts of internal negotiations and correspondence are overly detailed, and occasionally one would have wished for more context. On the other hand, the book convincingly shows how the mindset Dutt had acquired in late colonial India continued to shape his behavior and his interpretation of politics throughout his career, and how he used his professional skills to position independent India in the world. Dutt’s political biography suggests that it is immensely valuable for historians to pay closer attention to less visible but not necessarily less important historical actors. Nehru, for all his abilities and charisma, could not carry out Indian politics entirely on his own; he relied on individuals like Dutt to realize his goals, and they were more than mere translators of pre-defined agendas. In this sense, Amit Das Gupta’s important book can serve as an inspiration to other historians interested in offering fresh perspectives on established historical topics and improving our understanding of the complexity of international politics.