Bimal Prasad

Bimal Prasad was a historian of modern India, a professor of South Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and India's ambassador to Nepal from 1991 to 1995. The Dream Of A Revolution was begun by Prasad and completed with his daughter, Sujata Prasad, as a biography of the socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan. Vintage, an imprint of Penguin Random House India, issued the finished biography in 2021. Its account follows Narayan's changing political thought from his American university years through anti-colonial politics, socialism, Gandhian engagement, and opposition during India's Emergency. Bimal Prasad brought unusual proximity to the subject: he had been an associate of Narayan and had edited selections of his writings, speeches, and letters. Sujata Prasad's collaboration turned that accumulated scholarship into a finished biographical study.