INDIRA EPUB ED EB

Katherine Frank

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780007259304
• eBook ISBN: 9780007372508
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

The definitive and first non-partisan biography of one of the most formidable political figures of the twentieth century (voted Woman of the Millennium in a BBC poll, 2000)

Indira Gandhi's life, from her birth in 1917, through partition and up to her assassination in 1984, was dominated by the politics of her country. Always directly involved in India's turbulent twentieth-century history, once she accepted the mantle of power, she became one of the world's most powerful and significant women. This biography, the first to be written by an unpartisan, Western woman, will focus on Gandhi's role as a female leader of men in one of the most chauvinistic, complex and politicised cultures in the world.

Comprehensive, yet also personal, Frank's biography will deal with power and how this often isolated woman handled it, alongside her family and her emotional life. It will be the definitive book on one of this century's most powerful and important women.

PART ONE
Indira Gandhi

Home is where one starts from.
As we grow older the world becomes stranger,
The pattern more complicated…
In my end is my beginning.

T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’ from
Four Quartets

ONE
Descent from Kashmir

DAILY NINETY-MINUTE FLIGHTS connect Srinagar, the capital of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, with Delhi. But my letter to the Kashmiri Chief Minister, Farooq Abdullah, took six weeks to reach him, and according to the date of the reply written by his ‘acting assistant principal secretary’, the Chief Minister’s response took another five weeks to get back to me in Delhi. Had our letters languished on some functionary’s desk, in a forgotten mail bag, got lost in the crush of a bustling post office? It was not going to be easy to get to Kashmir. Nevertheless, the Chief Minister’s reply brought good news: Farooq Abdullah would be pleased to talk to me about the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. We could meet either in Delhi or Srinagar, according to my convenience.

Srinagar today – like most of the rest of Kashmir – is no longer an easy place to visit. Once the idyllic pleasure ground of the British Raj and later a tourist resort for Indian, European, American and Australian tourists and backpackers, Kashmir is now a war zone – the disputed territory fought over by two hostile nations that were once one: India and Pakistan. Those writers who go to Kashmir these days are not biographers but journalists covering an internecine conflict that rumbles, flares up, dies down and rumbles on year in and year out.

After decades of obscurity, Kashmir now makes global headlines. Several years ago, Kashmiri separatists kidnapped and murdered a group of Western climbers trekking in the Himalayas. In the spring of 1998 India and Pakistan set off nuclear devices, making Kashmir the likeliest flash point of the next nuclear holocaust. A year later, their armies were at war on the border near Kargil. In the spring of 2000, when President Clinton visited the subcontinent, a village of Sikhs was massacred allegedly by militants – to underscore the fact that the war still raged on.¹

Most of the Srinagar hotels are now boarded up and derelict. Those still operating house security forces. Rows of khaki laundry flap on clothes lines in the hotel gardens. Black-booted soldiers in helmets and flak jackets patrol the streets. The traffic is mainly army jeeps and trucks. Gone are the hawkers, pavement ear-cleaners and street barbers. Ordinary life of a sort goes on here. But the atmosphere in the shops and bazaars is often tense and faces are sullen or downcast.

At the heart of Srinagar lies Dal Lake – sluggish, furry green, congealed with pollutants. From time to time, the lake belches methane gas, releasing a putrid stench into the air. No kingfishers fly overhead because no fish could live in this lake. When Indira Gandhi appointed her cousin B.K. Nehru as Governor of Kashmir in 1982 – at a time when the present conflict might still have been averted – she personally briefed him. She said not one word about the volatile political situation in the state. Instead she spoke with urgency and passion of the need to clean up Dal Lake before it was too late.² Nearly twenty years later, here and there, a rotting houseboat shudders on its stagnant surface.

Kashmir today is not the Kashmir Indira Gandhi knew. Kashmir today is India fouled and polluted – India lacerated – the unhealed and unhealing wound of Partition. In 1947, at independence, when British India was carved into the two sovereign nations of India and Pakistan, Kashmir, the only Muslim majority state in India, acceded to a secular India rather than an Islamic Pakistan. The Hindu Maharaja of Kashmir made this choice for his Muslim majority population. But he made it under duress – and to no one’s satisfaction.

Since 1947 India and Pakistan have fought three full-scale wars over Kashmir, a place of minor material or economic importance to either country.³ But Kashmir possesses enormous significance to Indians’ and Pakistanis’ conflicting, irreconcilable conceptions of the subcontinent. Kashmir has been bitterly and bloodily disputed because it has come to symbolize on the one hand, the ideal of secular democracy to Indians, and on the other, the validity of a Muslim homeland to Pakistanis. Nuclear devices, bloody skirmishes in the mountains of Kargil, village massacres, more bombs and assassinations in Srinagar – these are just the most recent chapters in a story that goes back more than half a century.

But my story – the life of Indira Gandhi – goes back even further. It begins in a remote Himalayan fastness of snow-capped mountains, meadows carpeted with alpine wildflowers, rushing rivers that flow into tear-shaped lakes, and valleys dark with fir and pine forests where the gigantic chinar tree bursts into fiery-red blossoms every autumn until the snows come and extinguish all colour from the land.

This Kashmir – a place of beauty and transcendence – was the bedrock of Indira Gandhi’s life, the thing to which she held fast, which she sought to recover again and again in the course of her long life. Kashmir was a land that nourished and solaced her. ‘We were Kashmiris’, Indira’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru, writes on the first page of his Autobiography. Indira Gandhi embraced this statement and put it into the present tense - ‘I am Kashmiri’. Throughout a rootless, chaotic existence, in which she never had a stable family life or owned a house of her own, Kashmir remained Indira Gandhi’s anchor, her heart’s home.

Her story begins – as it ends – in Kashmir.

It opens in Kashmir – but then almost immediately leaves it. Indira Gandhi’s biography, like all biographies, does not begin abruptly, at the moment of birth, but rather at what seems – to the biographer – a decisive moment long before. And this moment – some two hundred years before Indira was born in November 1917 – was one of banishment – a fall or expulsion from paradise. In the opening chapter of his Autobiography, ‘Descent from Kashmir’, Nehru writes, ‘over two hundred years ago, our ancestors came down from that mountain valley to seek fame and fortune in the … plains below’.⁴ From their lofty, Edenic home in the Himalayas, Indira Gandhi’s forebears were exiled to the hot, arid plains of north-central India.

The particular ancestor Nehru refers to was a Hindu Pandit – one of the Brahmin elite of Kashmir – named Raj Kaul, a Sanskrit and Persian scholar, who left Kashmir around 1716 for Delhi. Here he became a member of the court of the Mughal Emperor Farukhsiyar who granted Raj Kaul a house situated on a canal in the city. Raj Kaul’s descendants came to be known as Kaul-Nehrus after nahar, which means canal, and in time this was shortened to Nehru.

From the beginning, the Nehru family was allied to power. First this was the power of the Mughal Emperor and when his empire declined, the might of the British. Raj Kaul’s great-grandson, Lakshmi Narayan, became one of the first Indian vakils, or lawyers, of the East India Company in Delhi, and his son, Ganga Dar, was a police officer in the city when the Mutiny broke out in 1857. In the upheaval of the 1857 uprising, Ganga Dar fled with his family to Agra. He died four years later and three months after his death his wife gave birth to a posthumous son who was named Motilal.

Motilal Nehru – Indira Gandhi’s grandfather – was raised by his elder brother, Nand Lal, and Motilal, like his brother, trained as a lawyer. Like his brother, too, Motilal married while still in his teens and had a son. But both wife and son died in childbirth before Motilal was twenty. By 1887, the year that Nand Lal died and Motilal assumed responsibility for the family as the eldest surviving son, Motilal had remarried a beautiful young woman, also of Kashmiri extraction, named Swarup Rani. The young couple moved to Allahabad, in the United Provinces (as they were then called) some 500 miles from Delhi, where Motilal pursued what quickly became a brilliant legal career.

Centuries ago Allahabad was known as the ancient city of Prayag. It features in the epic Ramayana and it remains a goal of pilgrimage for Hindus because it is here that the three sacred Indian rivers – the Ganges, the Jumna and the lost, subterranean, Saraswati, converge. Allahabad today is a sleepy, dusty provincial town, but at the end of the nineteenth century it was the capital of the United Provinces, seat of the High Court and home to the most distinguished university in India.

Motilal Nehru prospered both professionally and personally in Allahabad. An astute and successful lawyer, he soon became one of the wealthiest and most socially prominent citizens in the town. Fortune also smiled on him when his first child, a son named Jawaharlal – Indira Gandhi’s father – was born on 14 November 1889. In the first sentence of his autobiography, Nehru states (or rather understates) in his David Copperfield fashion: ‘An only son of prosperous parents is apt to be spoilt, especially in India.’⁵ It is one of life’s ironies – or perhaps one of fate’s congruities – that this most pampered scion of an immensely rich man would grow up to be largely indifferent to and careless of material wealth.

Nehru’s asceticism, however, was slow to develop which is hardly surprising given the environment in which he was raised. In 1900 Motilal Nehru moved his family to a huge, forty-two-room house on 1 Church Road in the Civil Lines (the civilian English sector) of Allahabad. He named his mansion Anand Bhawan – the ‘Abode of Happiness’. It was a manorial estate on English lines and of English proportions, with spacious gardens, an orchard, a tennis court, riding ring and an indoor swimming pool. Shortly after moving in, Motilal installed electricity and running water – the first in Allahabad. After a trip to Europe in 1904, he imported a car – another Allahabad first. It may very well have been the first automobile in all of the United Provinces. Certainly it was the only one driven by an English chauffeur.

By the time Jawaharlal was sent away to public school in Harrow, England, in 1905, he had a little sister named Sarup Kumari, born in 1900. Another sister, Krishna, arrived in 1907. (A second son, born in 1905, survived only a month.) All the Nehru children had a privileged, British-style upbringing. Until he was sent to public school in England, Jawaharlal was educated by a young Irish tutor named Ferdinand T.Brooks. The girls had an English governess named Miss Lillian Hooper who gave English nicknames to all three Nehru children. In the girls’ case, these lasted all their lives. Jawaharlal was ‘Joe’, Sarup Kumari was ‘Nan’, and Krishna ‘Betty’.

But despite its liveried servants, dining table set with Sevres porcelain, crystal glasses and silver cutlery, its grand piano in the sitting room and its huge library of leather-bound books, Anand Bhawan was not merely an elaborate replica of an English country estate. The Nehru household was actually bifurcated between East and West, India and Britain. Motilal Nehru wore expensive suits ordered from Savile Row tailors (though contrary to rumour his linen was not shipped back to Europe to be laundered). He eschewed religion, drank Scotch whisky, ate Western food (including meat) prepared by a Christian cook, and insisted that only English be spoken at his table. He employed British tutors and governesses to educate his children and, after Harrow, sent his son to Cambridge.

But Motilal’s wife, Swarup Rani, was a traditional Kashmiri woman and a devout Hindu. She allowed her daughters to be dressed in French frocks, but she herself never wore anything other than a sari in the Kashmiri fashion. She bathed in the Ganges, performed the Hindu prayer ceremony of puja, was a strict vegetarian, kept her own Kashmiri cook and ate with her fingers, seated on the floor. She understood but did not speak English. The women of Anand Bhawan conversed in Hindi.

Two parallel worlds, then, co-existed but did not really overlap, at Anand Bhawan. This was strikingly revealed in the otherwise mundane arrangements for disposing of human waste. The adults in the family used commodes or ‘thunderboxes’ – European-style toilets on which one sat. The children and servants relieved themselves in the traditional Indian way at ground level. Both methods were perfectly sanitary and Anand Bhawan, like other Indian households, had ‘untouchable’ – or Harijan⁶ -sweepers responsible for cleaning out both types of toilets, though when running water was introduced, the thunderboxes became flushable.

Most of the time, the two worlds of Anand Bhawan – Western and Indian – were respectively male and female realms. But not always. Despite the Hindu injunction against foreign travel (which brought with it a loss of caste), Swarup Rani accompanied her husband and children to Britain and Europe when Jawaharlal first went away to school in 1905. And Motilal Nehru, for all his British thinking, values, habits and attitudes, remained deeply traditional when it came to the choice of his son’s career and wife.

Jawaharlal Nehru had little say in either matter. Apparently without protest, he obeyed his father’s wishes and endured a seven-year exile from his family and India while he was educated in England. Then when Motilal decided that his son should follow in his steps and take up law, Jawaharlal read for the bar in London. These years abroad were not ones of great accomplishment. Jawaharlal’s career at public school and university was undistinguished, and as he says in his autobiography, ‘I got through the bar examinations … with neither glory nor ignominy.’ In London, he ‘was vaguely attracted to the Fabians and socialistic ideas and interested in political movements of the day’. But for the most part he ‘drifted’ and led ‘a soft and pointless existence’. This careless, hedonistic period was the one time in Nehru’s life when he displayed ‘expensive habits’. Often, in fact, he exceeded ‘the handsome allowance’ that Motilal gave him, and had to wire home for more funds.⁷

Jawaharlal entered the legal profession without demur. But he put up something of a struggle before he agreed to marry the woman his father chose for him. By the time he returned to India in 1912, England had transformed Jawaharlal. At Cambridge he mixed with a set who read Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing and considered themselves ‘very sophisticated and talked of sex and morality’, though Nehru adds that ‘in spite of our brave talk, most of us were rather timid where sex was concerned’. His own sexual knowledge, he says, was ‘for many years, till after I left Cambridge … confined to theory’.⁸

But even this theoretical knowledge – and the Western attitudes towards romantic love and marriage associated with it – affected Nehru, and initially he rebelled not so much against his father’s choice of a bride as the notion that Motilal should do the choosing for him. The selection was made before Jawaharlal even returned to India in 1912. Shortly before he was called to the bar in London, Jawaharlal received a letter from his father with the news that Motilal had decided that his son’s future wife should be a twelve-year-old girl named Kamala Kaul. ‘A little beauty [and] … very healthy’, as Motilal described her, Kamala was the daughter of a conservative Kashmiri family who lived in Delhi. The contract between the two families had been drawn up and the dowry agreed on, Motilal informed his son. All Jawaharlal had to do was give his assent.

This was not immediately forthcoming. Jawaharlal responded to his father’s letter with ambivalence. ‘I do not, and cannot possibly, look forward with relish to the idea of marrying a girl whom I do not know,’ he wrote to Motilal. ‘At the same time … [if] you are intent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PART ONE Indira Gandhi
• PART TWO Indira Gandhi
• PART THREE Prime Minister Gandhi
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• GLOSSARY
• Index
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• By the same author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher