New Delhi, Sept. 16 -- A Man for All Seasons: The Life of K.M. Panikkar is the new book by author and historian Narayani Basu. It documents the life and times of one of modern India's most fascinating characters. Panikkar defies simple description. He was a journalist who founded the Hindustan Times; a bureaucrat who advised India's princely states; a poet, a philosopher, and an international relations scholar. He served as India's ambassador to China and to Egypt. And he helped develop a critical plan to reorganise India's states on linguistic lines. Basu spoke about her book on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and HT. The popular audio programme kicked off its 14th season this month. Basu is also the best-selling author of VP Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India and Allegiance: Azaadi & the End of Empire. Her latest book brings Panikkar out of the shadows and, in so doing, sheds as much light on this enigmatic figure as it does on India's quest to find its place in the world. On the podcast, she spoke with host Milan Vaishnav about Panikkar's family circumstances, his surprising path to Oxford, his prolific writings, and his lifelong relationships with Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. They also discussed his intimate relations with India's princely states and the lessons his work holds for contemporary India. Basu noted that much of Panikkar's thinking was shaped by his time spent in Europe at the start of the 20th century as World War I gets underway. "In the midst of this, you have Pannikkar beginning to write. And writing becomes one of the strongest things that he ever does. He began writing in 1914. He never stops till he dies in 1963," she said. "Everyone's debating what nationalism means for their own individual countries. What impact will the war have for their individual countries? What does it mean? And some of these conversations are pretty heated. Some of them descend into outright arguments, but it's a source of great intellectual stimulation for Panikkar, and I think some of his richest output comes when he is at university." During this time, Panikkar wrote on everything from citizenship to immigration to international relations and economics. Despite his young age, Basu said Panikkar's breadth reflected the fact that he was extremely aware of the unique time he was living through and what that time would mean for India. Remarkably for his time, Panikkar was extremely prescient in terms of the global role he thought India should play after 1947. "When he is in Europe in the 1920s.he comes into contact with so many different dissidents from so many far flung colonies of the empire. He begins to realise that when you zoom out historically and geographically, India is present in an entire region of Southeast Asia, and that each of these regions are witnessing their own responses to the empire, to imperialism, to fascism," Basu said, adding that Panikkar was seized by the importance of recognizing that the end of colonialism must incorporate Asia and Africa. In the 1940s, Panikkar also authored an important tract of an independent maritime policy. "He's done so because he's watched Japan transform itself into this juggernaut that's blazing across the Pacific, that's at our doorsteps in the Northeast," she explained. In response, he called for India to remember that historically and geographically it has a very strong seaboard that it should utilise. In fact, Basu noted, he even called for a regional order in the Indian Ocean with Great Britain, South Africa, Australia -- all in important positions in that regional order. This was, in many ways, a harbinger of India's current policy toward the Indo-Pacific....