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BOOKS
Intimately
Indira
This engrossing biography captures the longings and loneliness
of Mrs G
By S. Prasannarajan
The sense of mythology
was there in the very beginning of Indira Priyadarshini's life: "the
very month you were born," wrote her father on her thirteenth birthday,
"saw the birth of the Russian Revolution thousands of miles away
from India." In Nehru's epistemological celebration of his daughter,
Indira was born in a world of "storm and trouble", and was destined
to grow up in "another revolution". She would, for history was
playing out the script of resistance and liberation as "Indu boy"
began her journey from the privileged loneliness of Anand Bhavan in Allahabad
to the absolute power of 1 Safdarjung Road, Delhi, a journey defined by
India's heartbeats of awe and adoration, of fear and sorrow. Indira's
residency in popular mythology was inevitable.
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INDIRA: THE
LIFE OF INDIRA NEHRU GANDHI
By Katherine Frank
HarperCollins
Price: Rs 595
Pages:545
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It takes a biographer like Katherine Frank to
redeem Mrs G from the "cloud of myth". And as she sets off to
paraphrase the life of one of the 20th century's engrossingly enigmatic
women, what emerges is a multidimensional story of power and paranoia,
of love and longing, of uppressed sighs and unsolicited martyrdom. From
day one, hers wasn't a normal life, and it would remain so till the day
the assassin's bullets put an end to it. Also, nobody-father, mother,
lover, friend or sons-could have fully understood her: she was there as
well as elsewhere; the inaccessible realm of the private gave an aura
of mystery to her out-there public image-Mother India. It's Frank's rare
achievement: she has captured the intimate Indira in a narrative that
has the frisson of a fiction and the realism of a docudrama.
The best parts of this drama are Indira's less
documented formative years, a period of loneliness and illness (those
tuberculosis days in a Swiss sanatorium, some sort of Kamala redux). And
innocent engagement with history. At home, Nehru's below-par daughter
was an intelligent but precocious child, deeply hurt by her mean-spirited
aunt Nan Pandit calling her "ugly and stupid", and assailed
by the painful sight of the mother who was literally withering away. This
world was set against another world dominated by the trinity of Motilal,
Jawaharlal and Gandhi ("the Father, Son and Holy Ghost"), and
here, Indu was an uncredited child artist who played her role in the periphery.
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FROM INDU
BOY TO EMPRESS OF INDIA:
An enduring enigma |
The intimations of the enigma were there: "The
strategy of empowerment she chose was a refusal to speak rather than to
eat. As a small child she chattered incessantly, often inconveniently-piping
up during trials, protesting during arrests and demonstrations, monopolising
jail interviews. But when she became an adolescent she learned how to
gain control of a situation by refusing to respond-verbally or in letters-to
others. In time, this evolved into a legendary genius for silence."
Frank never fails in the art of psychography.
It comes out luminously when she portrays the
triangular relation between Indira, Nehru and Kamala Nehru: a daughter
directed by extraordinary people and extraordinary events, an intellectual-often
didactic-father, and a mother who had never been "one of them".
Indira was both spectator and participant, and her judgements were seldom
pronounced; rather, she internalised the themes of the less-than-normal
moments. Much later, they would come out in bits and pieces, as the remains
of a distant despair. Even in the so-called salaciously scandalous in
the book-Indira's love affairs and her traumatic married life-what stands
apart is her refusal to be emotionally subordinated. Selfishness could
not have been more existential.
It's easy to be carried away by the sensational,
but Indira's lovers-the unreliable and vindictive M.O. Mathai or the exploitative
Dinesh Singh-never possessed her. Though she wanted to possess Feroze,
who, permanently conscious of his outsiderhood in the Nehru universe,
was enacting his X-rated rebellion as a personal allegory. She wrote to
her American friend Dorothy Norman: "I have been and am deeply unhappy
in my domestic life. Now the hurt and unpleasantness don't seem to matter
so much. I'm sorry, though, to have missed the most wonderful thing in
life, having a complete and perfect relationship with another human being;
for only thus, I feel, can one's personality fully develop and blossom."
The blossoming of Mrs G, the headline-catching Empress
of India, is still green in the collective memory of India. And therein
lies a story of dynasty and dictatorship, of overwhelming charisma and national
catharsis. Lohia's "goongi gudiya" (dumb doll) would become the
defiant diva of Indian politics, the Syndicate's pawn would turn out to
be the paranoid matron saint of Congress populism. Frank, brilliant in dramatising
the situation and humanising the dramatis personae, captures those momentous
years in intimate detail, and details define biographies. In this one, they
vary from the trivial to the tantalising, from Motilal's Haig Dimple Scotch
to Morarji's exasperating "chhokri sunti nahin hai"(the girl does
not listen). But detailed Indira in the backdrop of history becomes a Greek
tragedy with an Indian script, an oversized performance in which the action
is onstage as well as in the soul. The tragedy of Indira Priyadarshini will
continue to be renewed in the land that absorbed her blood.
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