Rajmohan Gandhi was born in New Delhi in 1935. A historian and biographer, he divides his time between India and the United States, where he is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He first wrote on Muhammad Iqbal in Eight Lives: A Study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter (1986). Other books by him include Gandhi: The Man, his People and the Empire (2007), Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten (2013), Patel: A Life (1990) and Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic’s Beginnings (2016). In the 1990s he served as a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament.