There are devotees and there are biographers. Honest devotees worship sages, while serious biographers study their lives. (Here, we are not including charlatans who pose as godmen or godwomen and their propagandisers.) Devotees and biographers rarely double up, which is a good thing for devotion and also not a bad thing for biography writing. But when devotion and historiography do work together, albeit rarely, the results can be startling. The Light of Asia, Edwin Arnold’s unparalleled portrayal of Buddha’s life in dramatic verse, which appeared in 1879, must head the list of such works, closely followed by Max Mueller’s Ramakrishna: His Life and Teachings (1898). Romain Rolland’s biographies of Ramakrishna (1928) and Vivekananda (1931) and an altogether great study of Ramana Maharshi, A Search in Secret India by the British journalist Paul Brunton (1934), remain irreplaceable. Writing about the sage of Dakshineswar, Christopher Isherwood produced, in Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965), a worthy successor to Rolland’s study of the extraordinary mystic. If Alexander Lipski’s Life and Teachings of Sri Anandamayi Maa (1977) satisfied the extraordinary saint’s numerous adherents, Peter Heehs’ The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (2021) and Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda (2022) by Ruth Harris provoked devotees of both epoch-making figures as much as they pleased biography buffs. “So!” the reader of this review might exclaim, “are all the acclaimed biographies of Indian sages authored by non-Indians?” No, though it must be acknowledged the genre has been led by writers not born in India. Why and how has this happened? India is devout. Thus, Indian biographers have to balance the impulse of devotion with the injunctions of biography writing. The word ‘hagiolatry,’ referring to over-the-top praise for sages, is connected, in fact, to the word ‘sage.’ ‘Foreign’ biographers are less weighed down by the awe of sagacity. And yet, many Indian biographers of sages have given us memorable works. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad wrote a long biographical essay in Urdu, way back in 1910, on Sarmad, the naked mystic of no formal faith who was executed under Aurangzeb Alamgir’s firman for blasphemy, and more practically, for having been a supporter of Aurangzeb’s elder brother, Dara Shukoh. Translated by Syeda Hameed, the essay is brilliant as biography, exemplary as history and sublime as literature. Khushwant Singh’s A History of the Sikhs (1963) also has a memorable biographical section on the life story of Guru Nanak.Among more recent works, Pupul Jayakar’s sensitive appraisal of Jiddu Krishnamurti (1986) comes to mind. As do Ramchandra Gandhi’s essays brought together by Raghurama Raju under the title The Seven Sages (2015). Pavan Varma’s work (2018) on Adi Shankaracharya and Shashi Tharoor’s just-out book on Narayana Guru are as compellingly objective and historically grounded narratives as those written by the non-Indian biographers listed earlier. Atulindra Chaturvedi has recently produced a fine biography of Sri Aurobindo.Hence, M.R. Narayana Swamy’s biography of Chandrasekharendra Saraswati, the venerated head of the Kancheepuram math, has a tough act to follow! Let us see how he goes about his difficult task.God in Kanchi: Life Story of Chandrasekharendra Saraswati 1894-1994, M.R. Narayana Swamy, Konark Publishers.First, the title, God in Kanchi, is witty. It could mean that the paramacharya (supreme spiritual teacher) is the God. It could also imply that the book is about God, God Almighty, as He fares in that holy town. It is smart to make the reader wonder about the title. But Swamy lets that happen for only a little while. By saying that not many in the country realise that the paramacharya was “a virtual God,” he clarifies he was virtually God. So that is that.Next, take the way he refers to his subject. Chandrasekharendra Saraswati is consistently referred to as mahaperiyava, which translates to greatest elder, senior or the acme in supreme hood. Swamy also uses the word periyava, meaning simply, the ultimate. On the few occasions that I have referred to the scholar-sage in conversations, I have only used the word paramacharya, which, despite the param prefix, has a very accessible pedagogical ring. And that is how I will refer to the great man in this review. In opting for mahaperiyava, Swamy makes his position vis-à-vis the sage clear. The biographer is, to put it in my English, which is Tamil English, a devotee out and out. That is clear from the word go. So the reader knows where the book is coming from and where it is headed: unembarrassed, unconcealed devotion; take it or leave it. And I, for one, could not leave it. Am I a devotee ? No. Am I fond of good biographies ? Absolutely, yes. I read the book in two sittings, as rapt as I would be by any absorbing biography.How come? The book is totally honest. Swamy does not try to pass off as an objective biographer. He gives us a ‘life’ in the ‘story,’ and a serialised ‘story’ in the ‘life,’ the two merging seamlessly, buttressing and reinforcing each other. How has Swamy managed that? Without making his narrative anecdotal, and thereby verging on the casual, he lets events in the paramacharya’s life unfold dialogically. He himself is not part of the conversations but narrates them with an immediacy that makes the words come alive. These conversations do not portray verbal games with the paramacharya being the winner, but pass a certain message that goes beyond the immediate. That M.K. Gandhi and the paramacharya had met is well-known (as is the fact that Gandhi and Ramana Maharshi did not). However, I will not spoil the surprise by letting on the details Swamy gives of that meeting, save to say that it reinforced Gandhi in his work to foster Hindu-Muslim harmony. It is through conversations that we learn that the paramacharya forbade any interference with the rhythms of the mosque adjacent to the math and that actions spoke louder than pieties on secularism. Swamy also tells us that the paramacharya “did not celebrate the razing of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992.” One would have guessed this, but it is a relief to be affirmed by this biography.A great plus of the book is the tiny end notes, which are truly gems. A favourite is the one about the paramacharya overhearing a bus conductor say that he should not let himself be carried in a palanquin (as was the custom). The great man reflected upon this and gave up the practice. Would that political pontiffs heard bus conductor wisdoms with the same results! Moreover, the narration of the paramacharya’s interaction with the poet Kannadasan is incredible, as is the one with Subramaniam Swamy. That the paramacharya made his displeasure at the national Emergency known to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is an important takeaway from the book.God in Kanchi is about a great and good man in a seat of immense influence who, helped by the God he worshipped, guided a generation bewildered by the times. It is through its sheer honesty that this much-needed biography will hold its own. And it will do so with grace among the successful biographies of sages. Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former Governor of West Bengal and a former high commissioner to Sri Lanka, is now Distinguished Professor in History and Politics, Ashoka University.