The Missing Biography

In The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author, Gordon S Wood, wrote a revealing biography of one of America’s most beloved founding fathers. A writer and inventor, Benjamin Franklin rose from poverty to fame and fortune in 18th century America. Yet, he was an astonishingly flawed figure who owned slaves, neglected his wife and son, and was viewed with much suspicion as a British or French agent during his lifetime. Reading Wood’s retelling of American history through the lens of Franklin’s life today makes one ponder the difficulties of writing a similar biography in India.

Inventor And Gentleman

America could not have won its war of independence against the British without Ben Franklin. He was around seventy years old at the time, the oldest revolutionary – twenty-six years older than George Washington. In 1778, Franklin negotiated a treaty by which France joined the war against the British, the “greatest diplomatic triumph in American history”. By 1783, Franklin ensured that France had lent over 25 million livres to the U.S., without which it could not have continued fighting.

The fifteenth child of a humble candle and soap maker, Franklin received only two years of formal education and then joined his brother’s newspaper as an indentured apprentice, bound by contract not to marry or even leave his master’s premises without permission. At seventeen years of age, Franklin boarded a ship and ran away from home, to Philadelphia where he eventually founded his own newspaper. It was there that Franklin made a vast fortune by publishing an almanac of witty aphorisms under the pseudonym ‘Poor Richard’. Some of the one-liners in the book would be recognisable to us even now, for instance: “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Others are not as familiar, but still instructive, for instance: “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead”.

Franklin became renowned the world over by establishing that lightning was an electrical phenomenon, famously flying a kite in a thunderstorm to prove his point. Harvard College, whose students he had once called “Dunces and Blockheads”, awarded him an honorary M.A. thereafter, and an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews some years later earned him the appellation ‘Dr Franklin’. He founded the only library in America at the time and invented the bifocals.

In examining Franklin’s life, Wood paints a vivid picture of what life was like in 18th century America. The first chapter, for instance, speaks of how Franklin became a gentleman. American society, at that time, was roughly divided into three classes – the “better”, “middling” and “meaner” sort of people as they were called. Gentlemen, the “better” people, were those who did not have to work for a living and enjoyed a life of leisure. They dressed distinctively, wore wigs, ate with forks and knives and had portraits made of themselves. According to Aristotle, it was only such people who could be considered citizens in a polity because they had free time to devote themselves to questions of government. Gentlemen were usually forbidden from writing in pamphlets and newspapers, which is perhaps why the famous ‘Federalist Papers’, pamphlets written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay to convince the American colonies to ratify the new Constitution, were written using pseudonyms.

Slave-Holder And Royalist

Wood’s biography, however, does not see its subject through rose-tinted glasses. Instead, it candidly sheds light on his many flaws. For instance, Franklin was remarkably aloof from his wife, Deborah. He stayed in England away from her for years on end, despite her many requests that he return. Deborah eventually died in 1773 while Franklin was still in London, nine years after she had last seen him. He forced her to look after his illegitimate son, William, whom she disliked. Later, when William refused to give up the Governorship of New Jersey at his bidding, Franklin cut all ties with his son, refusing to intervene even after William was captured and placed in solitary confinement by Washington. Franklin owned slaves for thirty years and became an abolitionist only towards the end of his life. He referred to Germans as “Palatine Boors” and wanted to exclude them from the New World.

Many prominent American leaders in his time, including James Madison, suspected Franklin’s motives, believing him to be beholden either to the British or the French. Indeed, at some point in time or the other, Franklin thought of settling down in England or France and of never returning to America.

In 1773, when the British Tea Act gave the East India Company a monopoly to sell its tea in America, a mob in Massachusetts dumped tea worth 10,000 pounds into the Boston harbor. After this incident – the Boston Tea Party – Franklin offered to pay for the lost tea out of his own pocket. He was celebrated in France but viewed with an eye of suspicion in the U.S. It was only after his death that he became a working-class hero, a symbol of the American dream – the myth that anyone who works hard there can pull himself up from rags to riches.

Hagiography And Anachronism

Fifteen years after Wood wrote his fêted biography of Franklin, one pauses to wonder why a similar biography has not yet been written of figures like KM Munshi, Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar or KT Shah, all leading members of the Constituent Assembly who helped shape India’s Constitution. With eminent exceptions, biographies of Indian subjects often tend to commit the twin errors of hagiography and anachronism. Hagiography is when a biographer is unable to look beyond the ‘greatness’ of his or her subject and critically examine his shortcomings. Anachronism is the tendency to superimpose today’s impressions on the past – something Wood avoided by showing how Ben Franklin became a middling hero in America only after his death.

However, the scholar who embarks upon the task of writing a biography is likely to be met with several difficulties in India. The law of criminal defamation under the Indian Penal Code applies to the dead as well. A writer can therefore be criminally prosecuted for defaming a deceased historical figure. Further, authors might often be afraid of offending sentiments in India by reevaluating the lives of those who have been posthumously vilified or lionised as Franklin was. For instance, anyone who challenges the conventional narrative that Shivaji was a hero or Aurangzeb a villain is likely to be met with abuse and legal troubles, as Audrey Truschke and James Laine found out. Jaswant Singh was expelled from the BJP when he wrote a laudatory biography of Jinnah.

Additionally, Indian biographers can draw on only a handful of archival sources. Indian families tend not to preserve the personal papers of their forefathers. Though there are exceptions – the Nehru Library in Delhi contains a treasure trove of these – the general rule is that the letters, notes, diaries, etc. of the dearly departed are either not maintained or made public. One can venture two guesses about why this may be. Firstly, there are very few libraries which archive and preserve personal papers in India unlike institutions abroad. Secondly, since occupations in India tend very often to be hereditary (with sons following in their father’s footsteps in fields as varied as politics, business, films, and law), the reputation of one’s ancestor often affects one’s present prospects. For instance, revealing Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s personal papers today might affect Rahul Gandhi’s electoral chances, since anything negative about Indira which emerges from those papers could be used by his opponents to attack him. It is here that one of Franklin’s aphorisms comes to mind: “If you would keep your Secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.”

Abhinav Chandrachud is an advocate at the Bombay High Court.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Bloomberg Quint or its editorial team.