Word: nehru
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...began talking of Maneka's son by Sanjay, Feroze Veruna, as a future candidate for Prime Minister. The boy is, to be sure, only five years old, but he enjoys what may be the most powerful political qualifications in India: the name of Gandhi and the ancestry of Nehru...
...next year, hardly aware of what was happening, she perched on her grandfather's knee as he and her father were sentenced to prison for opposing British rule in India. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was to spend years in prison while his only child grew into a shy, frail adolescent. He wrote her a long series of laboriously educational prison letters, now widely read in Indian schools, that covered the whole history of the world. "They were the only companionship I had with my father," she later recalled...
When Indira Priyadarshini (the second name means Dear to Behold) was born on Nov. 19, 1917, in Allahabad in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, the Nehru family servants gathered around to pay homage to the master's elaborately swaddled infant, and one of them misguidedly congratulated Nehru on the birth of a son. Perhaps he did wish for a political heir; if so, it had to be Indira, for there were to be no other children...
...mother Kamala was a demure and subservient woman who had been found for Nehru by his father; it was an arranged marriage, and the acquired bride was greatly scorned by Nehru's Westernized female relatives. While the men were in prison, Kamala developed tuberculosis, so she was sent to Switzerland to convalesce. Indira went with her, to two bleak years at a school near Geneva; then, after Kamala's death, she went on to Somerville, a women's college at Oxford. One relief from her loneliness was a penniless but galvanizing Indian student in London, Feroze Gandhi...
...lingered around the house as a friend of the family's. He hardly noticed Indira, who was five years younger than he. But after the two had returned home to India from blitzed and threatened London, Indira announced in 1941 that they wanted to get married. Nehru was dismayed; he needed Indira to run his household. Feroze had no money, no job. "Nobody wanted that marriage, nobody," Indira said later, but she was adamant. Nehru himself wove a pink cotton sari for her to wear as her wedding dress. In 1944, Rajiv was born, and two years after that...