Into the heart of Ayodhya Ji, with the Prince, the King, who’d you rather didn’t call him one
There is a particular kind of aura that walks into a room before the man himself does. Yatindra Mishra was born into the royal lineage of Ayodhya, a house that once counted kings among its ancestors and yet he has spent a lifetime resisting the one title that came free with his birth: prince. Ask him, and he’ll steer the conversation toward a couplet, a raga, or a memory of Girija Devi’s riyaz long before he lets you linger on his surname.
That instinct to turn away from the self and toward the other , runs through everything he does. He is, on paper, one of India’s most celebrated biographers, the Swarna Kamal-winning author of Lata: Sur-Gatha and the authorised life of Gulzar Saab. But ask anyone who has watched him work, and they’ll tell you: Yatindra was never really chasing the book. He was chasing the person – the years of sitting quietly across from Lata Mangeshkar, of listening rather than interviewing, as if friendship were the real manuscript and the biography merely its by-product. The pages, in the end, are almost incidental , a courtesy he extends to the reader, so that the intimacy he gathered doesn’t stay locked away in his own memory.
He is also a poet who chronicles culture, a reviewer with a musician’s ear, and a cultural custodian who has curated everything from Prasar Bharati’s programming to the Ram temple’s own devotional concert series , always working just off-stage, in service of someone else’s art. And by near-unanimous testimony of those who’ve visited him, he is one of the most generous hosts Ayodhya has ever produced, forever inviting people to his city, his table, his world, as though hospitality were simply another form of listening.
Today, we sit down with the Prince, the King, who’d rather you didn’t call him one.
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