Word: gandhis
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There are politicians and the usual rent-a-mob in India who want Katherine Frank's Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (Houghton Mifflin; 448 pages) banned. It doesn't matter that most haven't read it. They were told it was a scurrilous and offensive biography written by a foreigner. Now they want to keep it off the shelves because they fear its revelations challenge the reputation and status of Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India for 15 years until she was assassinated by her bodyguards in 1984. At stake is the perpetual myth of Indira Gandhi, goddess...
...Indians tend to put their leaders on a pedestal, especially if they come from a political dynasty and die in office. Mrs. Gandhi, moreover, was a living monument to her own formidable political reputation. And even today, nearly 17 years after her death, her faults and the tyranny of the 1975-77 Emergency she imposed are glossed over. She was a great nationalist, almost a demagogue. But she is remembered most of all as an almost mythical heroine who launched a war against Pakistan and won it. In so doing she created the new state of Bangladesh...
...This book does humanize Mrs. Gandhi, shedding light on her joys and tragedies, her achievements and defeats. And for the first time this profoundly complicated person is discussed as a woman, set free from the political hagiography that surrounded her in life and still defines her in death. It is an unusual story and a compulsively readable book?the rise of this weak, unhealthy girl to leadership of the world's largest democracy, a virtual dictator who put order first and democracy second...
...Brought up in austerity, Indira Gandhi was a moody adolescent, highly sensitive to criticism, especially from her family. The Nehru household was divided along linguistic and religious lines. Her grandfather and father (and his sisters) spoke and wrote in English, while her mother and grandmother ate separately in their private quarters and spoke Hindi. The men were agnostic, the women superstitious and devout. Separated for much of her youth from her jailed father, Jawaharlal Nehru, and from her perpetually ill mother, Indira Gandhi was dispatched to a variety of schools across India. As a teenager, she went to Europe, where...
...What has upset the censorious mob are those passages that show the lonely Indira Gandhi to be a woman of deep passion who, as a teenager, fell in love with her future husband Feroze Gandhi. Free from her family, she had an affair with him in Europe that lasted several years before they married, against her family's wishes, back in India. She was further plagued by rumors and gossip about other affairs when her marriage to the womanizing Gandhi fell apart, including an alleged fling with Nehru's private secretary O.M. Mathai. Frank does not give a definitive...