The Man Who United India October 30, 2018 10:06 IST Generations of Indians don't quite grasp that there would barely be an India had it not been for the Sardar whose steadfastness and guile stitched together that which had been united only in philosophy and spirituality and sometimes not even then -- for thousands of years. A fascinating excerpt from Hindol Sengupta's The Man Who Saved India, Sardar Patel and His Idea of India . Patel died on 15 December 1950. It was in the ten years between 1940 and 1950 that this 65-year-old man (his age in 1940, but it could well have been more since the exact year of his birth is a bit of an assumption) changed the cartographic destiny of India. Faced with a division of the country that none of the Congress leaders wanted, and Gandhi never agreed to till the end, Patel took it upon himself to save, indeed salvage and rescue, the rest of the country from breaking up into pieces. The journey through these ten years is over a ...