New Delhi, Oct. 2 -- Over the last year, I have been researching the life story of a minister who played a part in Indian politics between the 1920s and 1940s, and went on to serve in India's first cabinet. He was also a businessman, a patron of the arts, an orator and a voracious reader. His personal library was said to hold a few thousand volumes. On his passing, it was left to his brothers with instructions that it be donated to a school started by the family trust. Seventy-three years later, I am trying to track this library, to meet the person behind the public persona from the books he read, the inscriptions the books may hold, their binding and language, in titles more dog-eared than others, and even in books unread.

For as long a...