By Manish Chand, IANS,
New Delhi : Those 31 bullets pumped into her on the fateful morning of Oct 31, 1984, have perhaps only added to the curiosity about her life and times. Twenty five years on, Indira Gandhi has spawned more biographies than any other Indian leader, including her more illustrious father Jawaharlal Nehru.
At least three dozen biographies of the charismatic prime minister – extolled as goddess Durga after the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971 and demonised as a power-hungry ogress after she imposed internal emergency in 1975 – have been published in the last quarter of a century.
Although she lived and died in pre-Google times, an internet search for Indira Gandhi turns up over two-and-a-half million entries.
“Hard to believe that an entire generation of Indians has grown up without Indira in power,” writes Pranay Gupte, who has published a new revised version of his 1992 tome “Mother India: A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi” this month to mark the 25th anniversary of the assassination of the iconic Indian leader.
Gupte’s book delves deep into the chain of events that transformed the shy reticent Indu – as Indira was fondly called by her family – who was derided by her opponents as ‘gungi gudiya’ (dumb doll) into the mythical “Mother India”, a towering figure who promised to liberate millions of India’s deprived through the populist ‘garibi hatao’ slogan.
In the new edition, Gupte takes a searching retrospective look at some of the darker spots in her chequered career, including the 1975 emergency and her controversial decision to send the army to cleanse the Golden Temple of Sikh separatists that culminated in her assassination Oct 31, 1984.
What makes Indira Gandhi the subject of numerous books and estimates even 25 years after her blood-soaked death? Clearly, it’s the high drama of her life, says veteran journalist Inder Malhotra, who authored a much-acclaimed biography of Gandhi two decades ago.
“Her phenomenal rise to power and popularity was followed by a fantastic fall and then by an even more rapid and remarkable political resurrection less than four years before her assassination in the autumn of 1984,” he writes in the foreword to “Indira Gandhi: A personal and political biography.”
“From the mid-60s to the end of her life, she was the principal point of reference for most Indians, including her bitter opponents and critics. It was usually in relation to her that they defined their positions,” he says.
The competing narratives of Indira Gandhi’s life can be classified into broadly four types: one, personal portraits written by relatives (Nayantara Sehgal, Krishna Hutheesingh Nehru); two, memoirs-cum-biographies by friends (Pupul Jaykar, Dom Moraes); three, appraisals by journalists (Inder Malhotra, Zareer Masani, Krishan Bhatia); and four, foreigners (Katherine Frank, Carol Dommermuth-Costa, Emmanuel Pouchpadass, Dorothy Norman, Benny Aguiar).
Barely half a dozen books stand out amid this glut of books. Besides Malhotra’s book, Masani’s “Indira Gandhi: A Biography”, Pupul Jaykar’s portrait, Gupte’s “Mother India” and Sehgal’s “Her Road to Power” are some of the better written books that stand out for their objectivity, sensitivity and a privileged insight into the inner workings of her mind and style of functioning.
The most controversial account is that of Katherine Frank’s “Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi” published eight years ago. It has ignited controversy in India for its prurient attempt to explore her “problematic” sex life and for mentioning with a touch of scandal that her husband Feroze might have had an affair with her ailing mother, Kamala Nehru, in the 1930s, before their marriage.
The Congress party was predictably upset with the book and wanted to get the book banned and attacked it for packaging gossip as facts without evidence.
(Manish Chand can be contacted at [email protected])