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Spies, Lies and Allies is a thrilling tale about two forgotten revolutionaries who led lives that defy belief. It takes the reader on a wild ride through Kolkata, Hyderabad, London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Mexico City and Moscow. One was Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, the brother of Sarojini Naidu. The other was M.N. Roy, the founder of Indian communism.
Chatto and Roy met spies, dictators, femme fatales, assassins, revolutionaries and bomb-makers. They encountered Lala Lajpat Rai, Veer Savarkar, Vladimir Lenin, Sun Yat-Sen, Chiang Kai-shek, Joseph Stalin, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. They travelled in disguise and survived assassination attempts by the British secret service. They had tumultuous love affairs with suspected Communist spies. They flirted with anarchism, then became communists, and Roy would eventually end up founding his own philosophy: humanism.
Chatto’s sister Sarojini would distance herself from his journey, and his friend Nehru would eventually follow the Gandhian path. Roy would be ignored in newly independent India. But if Chatto and Roy were failures, they were magnificent ones. They battled for their ideas, and their ideas lived on, even if the pair died mostly forgotten. In this compelling dual biography, the bestselling author of Lady Doctors follows the threads of the converging and diverging lives of two extraordinary figures.
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Reviews
Business Standard: Spies, Lies and Allies is more than a biography. Not because it lectures, but because it insists that these men mattered. This extraordinary book reminds us of two extraordinary lives".
India Today: The author of the much-lauded Lady Doctors has pulled off another coup with this dual biography which has no dearth of interesting encounters.
Deccan Herald: This is a work of remarkable depth and narrative fluidity, one that restores these enigmatic figures to their rightful place. She writes with the precision of a historian, yet never allows the weight of analysis to stifle the vitality of her prose.
The Telegraph: Rao carefully stitches the lives of both these revolutionaries and rightfully presents the good, bad and bitter in their lives. Rao has presented them as human beings with flaws just like us.