This is the first academic biography of Subimal Dutt, best known as India’s longest serving Foreign Secretary, covering the nearly nine eventful decades of his life. It tells the story how a Bengali village boy without any connections had one of the most distinguished careers of his generation without ever forgetting his roots. Struggling all his life between professional ambition and deep spirituality, Dutt never transformed into one of those ‘brown Englishmen’ so typical of South Asia’s civil servants, but remained a strictly impartial, straightforward and incorruptible officer of – as he formulated it himself – the ‘vernacular type’. Intellect and discipline brought him into the Indian Civil Service and soon to Delhi, where he excelled as an outstanding administrator and moved into the field of foreign relations.