India, Nov. 14 -- There are two DD Kosambis in modern Indian history. Dharmanand Damodar Kosambi, the Buddhist scholar who taught himself Pali and Sanskrit and became the first Indian to hold an academic position at Harvard. And his more famous, and almost unclassifiable, son: Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, the mathematician, historian, numismatist, Sanskritist and Marxist thinker whose scholarship traversed disciplines with casual ease. In his biography of the son, DD Kosambi: One Life, Many Worlds, the distinguished physicist Ram Ramaswamy begins with the father's life and travels, tracing the inheritance that shaped the younger Kosambi. The father took his son with him to the US, a land that exposed the boy to the global production of knowledge. They shared an intellectual curiosity for diverse disciplines, but their lives ended in different circumstances. Dharmanand chose a religious rite of voluntary fast unto death, and was applauded by Mahatma Gandhi. Ramaswamy, however, calls it "the final act of autocracy on Dharmanand's part. to thrust widowhood on Balabai." Ramaswamy's interpretation unsettles the familiar image of a seeker. The son's decline arrived with its own melancholy, an episode that Ramaswamy rightly calls Kosambi's "Waterloo". A life may be seen through the imprints it leaves on the world, and the scars it entails. For much of its 259 pages, Ramaswamy documents the former with thoroughness. Kosambi's intellectual contributions are gathered from archives around the world. However, the wounds and disappointments that complicate the portrait of a great scholar don't get sufficient attention. In his review of Ramaswamy's biography, the Tamil historian AR Venkatachalapathy notes "a few" shortcomings: it lacks anecdotes, and barely addresses the relationship between the father and son. These omissions are more consequential than they might initially appear. A biographical portrait requires more than an account of intellectual accomplishments. It must explore the relationships through which a person inhabits the world, and examine the costs that an extraordinary life may impose on its close ones. The book devotes considerable space to Dharmanand, but stops short of decoding the bond between the two men. Kosambi's other relationships seem similarly dehydrated. The first substantial account of his wife, Nalini, and their troubled marriage appears more than a hundred pages in. Ramaswamy often draws on Kosambi's own lens to reveal his inner world, including the diary he kept since his teenage years. In January 1927, Kosambi declared his ambition in unequivocal terms: "The proper study of mankind being man, and I, the one best available for my study, this book should be of use in my life." The young man, not yet 20, had already come to regard himself as the most promising subject available for enquiry. The volume of letters and diaries Ramaswamy quotes enriches the book. Asked in his application to Harvard's engineering school why he wished to study there, Kosambi explained: "Inasmuch as an Oxford education would be unprofitable from a racial and political point of view. I choose the Harvard Engineering School in preference to the MIT because the former offers better instruction due to a smaller attendance per instructor." The answer reflects a brashness that was to become his signature. The biography describes Kosambi's academic life in detail. He began his career at Banaras Hindu University, where he taught mathematics and German. Between 1933 and 1945, he published more than 30 papers in leading international journals, including two in German. His mathematical achievements alone would have secured him an honourable stature. But the young man wasn't easily satiated. By the late 1930s, he had begun to study coins. His investigations of silver coinage from Taxila, Khandesh, Paila and Amravati helped establish scientific numismatics as a field of enquiry in India. Kosambi's historical investigations also led him to Sanskrit texts and poetry. He believed that India's past could be understood only by bringing disparate sources into conversation. Ramaswamy's account establishes that Kosambi was not merely accumulating expertise in various fields. He wanted to discover the unsuspected relationships among various disciplines. His magnum opus, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, brought together some learnings. It was written while the author also held a position at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). However, the man behind these accomplishments begins to emerge only in the later chapters, when a formidable intellect is undermined by the inability to accept failure. Here, the narrative gains a sudden urgency and the portrait comes alive. In his final decade, Kosambi became convinced that he had found proof of the Riemann hypothesis, a legendary problem of mathematics. He had not. His insistence on the claim damaged his standing as a mathematician and contributed to his unceremonious exit from TIFR. He compounded the damage by adopting a pseudonym, S Ducray, under which he published several insufficiently argued papers on mathematics. Ducray, Ramaswamy reveals in a startling discovery, was a play on the Marathi word dukkar or pig. The spectacle was troubling: an extraordinary scholar resorting to subterfuge at the moment when an acknowledgement of error was most needed. The intellectual audacity that had enabled Kosambi to cross disciplinary boundaries now seemed to have made him oblivious to the limits of his own judgment. When the young Kosambi dismissed Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Surendranath Dasgupta as "near-philosophers, profoundly superficial" in his diary, he offered a glimpse of a temperament that would acquire graver import later. Ramaswamy's biography demonstrates the extraordinary range of his mind and the enduring significance of his contribution. Its limitation lies in the uneven portrayal of the public and private Kosambi. The scholar is present from the beginning; the man emerges fully only when his life begins to unravel. But that's not about this biography alone. It merits a deeper discussion about the genre itself....