The young historian Kalidas Nag (1891-1966) met the Nobel prize winning French thinker, novelist, dramatist, musiocologist and biographer Romain Rolland (1866-1944) in Paris in April 1922, and soon became his most trusted Indian friend and 'intellectual lieutenant'. Not a simple complement from a man who had friends and correspondents such as Tolstoy, Maxim Gorki, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, Hermann Hesse, Sigmund Freud, Einstein...

In this correspondence Rolland talks about Tagore and Gandhi, his dream project of a weltbibliothek, the Tagore-Mussolini controversy, the hypocrisy of the French intelligentsia, his personal anguish, Rolland's passionate interest in Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, the rise of Hitler, the squabbles over The Golden Book of Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Chandra Bose's visits to Villeneuve and so on.

Rolland reveals for the first time why he did not come to India. This book contains an intensely personal bio-data of Rolland. He also reveals why he was castigated in France...and why he regretted nothing. A burning document about India and the world, translated by one of India's leading French scholars.