In Suresh Balakrishnan, a barrister who practises at the Madras High Court, Norton has a biographer par excellence. The two volumes are a product of stupendous research. The writer provides footnotes where necessary and writes good prose. The object of the work holds lessons for the lawyers of today who are not likely to learn.

On receiving the two volumes of Eardley Norton: A Biography I, not unnaturally perhaps, wondered what had led Suresh Balakrishnan to embark on this thousand page plus project. Norton today would be barely known outside a small set with knowledge about the history of the legal profession in Chennai. Evidently this erasure of memory is what spurred the author, himself an advocate in Chennai, to dig deep and spread a wide net to resurrect the life and times of Norton. The result is a biography, which succeeds in this aim very ably and has returned to public knowledge a remarkable lawyer of colonial India.

For Suresh Balakrishnan, this classic biography of Eardley Norton, a well-known advocate of Madras, is an extension of his highly informative book Famous Judges and Lawyers of Madras, published in 2012 for the 150th anniversary of the Madras High Court. In the monumental volumes under review, Balakrishnan, who practises in the Madras High Court, has not only delved deeper into the life and times of “a barrister and champion of India’s rights and liberties,” but has also traced the Norton family tree and in the process linked the birth of the nation to its legal history.

Suresh Balakrishnan's meticulously and painstakingly researched two volumes, "Eardley Norton - A Biography, The Life and Times of a Famous Barrister and Champion of India's Rights and Liberties-"is thus much more than a detailed biography. It comes as an important contribution to the ways of reassessing contemporary Indian history in the modern period. Equally important, it warns us against any reductionism in the social sciences, as a man's life, as much as the life of the society it mirrors at any point of time, has, complex, multiple strands and cannot be judged by just one facet, as today's culture guardians are prone to.