A REVIEW: Indira, The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi by Katherine Frank

Indira Gandhi’s birth was as accidental (no pun) as her death was meticulously planned and executed. However, it is in the interim that she left her lasting influence on the politics and history of the Indian sub-continent. Katherine Frank’s biography, Indira, The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi, helps provide a fresh perspective on the first woman Prime Minister of India.

Though Indira is credited with the liberation of Bangladesh (1971), the first Indian nuclear test (1974), abolition of privy purses for erstwhile princely states, integration of Sikkim into the Indian Union (1975), she is more often than not remembered for imposition of the Emergency in 1975, for excesses committed by Sanjay Gandhi during the period and for the disastrous handling of the Punjab crisis, which eventually led to her assassination. Frank attempts a fair appraisal of Indira Gandhi in her work, taking us through her early childhood, adult life and the years as Prime Minister, in all detail possible in a 500-page book.

Snow. Meadow. No rainbow, though

Raised amidst the politically-charged environs of Anand Bhawan in Allahabad, Indira’s first memory is of a bonfire of English clothes on the verandah of Anand Bhawan. Her early years were punctuated by frequent journeys to Europe for Kamala Nehru’s tuberculosis treatment. Jawaharlal Nehru was almost perpetually behind bars. Growing up in such an atmosphere, Indira became sensitive, moody and diffident. Frank tells us how Indira hated striking a match, for it reminded her of the bonfire of foreign goods which consumed her favourite doll. Or how she could not bear thunder and lightning and the sound of high winds in the trees, for it transported her to the Black Forest in Germany where Kamala Nehru lay dying in a sanatorium, with Indira alone beside her.But this was also the time that helped make Indira independent and content in her own company and moulded her as the leader and stateswoman she emerged as decades later.

The Indian Matriarch with the Queen of England

Though Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira had a close relationship, the former was always pedantic with her. Her donning on the mantle of Prime Minster was again a ‘negative decision’ and prompted by her perceived political ‘indistinctness and ambiguity’. In this comprehensive biography put together over six years by Frank, Indira Gandhi comes across not as hawkish and ruthless but as a woman dominated and dictated first by her father, then husband Feroze Gandhi and finally, by son Sanjay Gandhi.

It's raining iron, men..!

And for a major part of her life, victimised by her own family and by political opponents for being an independent and daring woman, who did not hesitate in speaking her mind and taking bold, unpopular decisions. Not for nothing is she called the ‘Iron Lady of India’.

Indira may have had her ups and downs during the decade-long tenure in office. But what remains unimpeachable is her genuine love and concern for the country, revealed through a valedictory note found among her papers after her death. It says, “If I die a violent death…. the violence will be in the thought and action of the assassin, not in my dying – for no hate is dark enough to overshadow the extent of my love for my people and my country; no force is strong enough to divert me from my purpose and my endeavour to take this country forward…”