North of New Delhi, in the foothills of the Himalayas, lies the extraordinary city of Chandigarh. Built in the 1950's, it was an almost totally new creation, planned and designed by the French modernist architect Le Corbusier, and strongly promoted by India's first prime minister after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru. Everything about this new state capital had to be a model of rationality: streets and avenues, geometrically laid out, were identified by numbers. Houses, in various standard sizes, were allocated to government workers strictly according to rank. The scale is huge, concrete the favored material. Chandigarh was to be the monument of modern India, free from ancient customs and superstitions, free from the colonial past, free to celebrate a brave new age.

The flaws of Chandigarh are now plain to see. Empty concrete plazas crack in the Indian summer heat. The main government buildings look stranded, like alien monsters plunked in the wrong terrain. The idea of Chandigarh was astounding in its ambition and high hopes, but bound to fail, like all the other modernist utopias that sought to design human life by numbers. Chandigarh, built to express Nehru's vision of India, now stands as a reminder of its limitations.

Vision is at the heart of Shashi Tharoor's short biography, "Nehru: The Invention of India." For Nehru, in this account, was generally stronger on the vision thing than on practicalities. The best part of the book is the concluding chapter, a good summing up of Nehru's triumphs and failures. Nehru's idea of India was very much a product of his own background as an English-educated, upper-class, anti-imperialist, leftist, rationalist intellectual. He created a model of development that was the exact opposite of today's China. Whereas China now has an increasingly liberal economy run by an illiberal state, Nehru's staunchly liberal democratic state was in charge of a closed economy.

As Tharoor rightly says, "Nehru's India put the political cart before the economic horse, shackling it to statist controls that emphasized distributive justice above economic growth, and discouraged free enterprise and foreign investment." Our contemporary partisans against globalization would no doubt approve of this, but it explains why much of India is still stuck in poverty.

Like many intellectuals, Nehru had, as Tharoor says, a "lifelong tendency to affirm principles disconnected from practical consequences." Although born into a family of high-caste Hindus, Nehru was a thoroughly secular man, who wished to keep religious passions far from politics. This might seem farsighted and indeed sensible for a leader who contrived, with remarkable success, to turn a huge continent, containing many languages, faiths and cultures, into a modern democracy. But as happened in the former Soviet empire, which Nehru unwisely admired, frozen-out passions, once the thaw sets in, gather heat with a vengeance.

Democratic politics have to find a way of accommodating communal feelings, and Nehru's lofty disdain for all faiths, except "scientific socialism," helped to provoke the kind of religious extremism that is now causing so much damage. A man who saw religion as nothing more than "senseless and criminal bigotry" was not best placed to understand the concerns of Muslims who feared the domination of Hindus in the struggle for independence. His advice to a Muslim friend that he should read more Bertrand Russell was typical of his own background and taste, but perhaps not the most useful counsel he could have given. And the aggressive secularism of Nehru's Congress Party, though intellectually appealing, was unable to contain the religious chauvinism of a rising Hindu middle class.

Tharoor, a high-ranking official at the United Nations, is sharp on Nehru's flaws. But he also stresses his great achievements. Without Nehru there might not even be an Indian democracy, which may be cracking like Chandigarh's concrete plazas, but is still functioning, despite all the violence and corruption that goes with it. Most great anticolonial leaders in Asia and Africa, though almost invariably given to fine democratic rhetoric, ended up betraying the liberties they fought for, and became worse tyrants than the imperialists they had bravely dislodged. Not Nehru.

He was well aware of the temptation, however. Tharoor quotes from a fascinating article, written in 1937, warning that Nehru "has all the makings of a dictator in him - vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride. . . . He must be checked. We want no Caesars." The pseudonymous author was Nehru himself. He was unique among his postcolonial peers in treating parliamentary politics and procedures seriously and never taking away people's freedom to criticize him. The same cannot be said for Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, who did fall for the temptation of crushing dissent. That she was voted out of office nonetheless showed the resilience of the institutions her father had built.

On the life of Nehru, Tharoor has far less of interest to say. There is nothing wrong with short biographies as a genre. In fact, if done well, they can be both entertaining and illuminating. But there has to be a special angle, a new insight, something to lift it above being just a potted biography. Tharoor fails to add anything much to what we already knew about Nehru and his times: the Amritsar massacre of 1919, Gandhi's march to the salt marshes of Gujarat, Mohammed Ali Jinnah's quarrels with the Congress Party, Winston Churchill's blimpish imperialism.

All these things are familiar to anyone who has seen Richard Attenborough's hagiographic movie about Gandhi. And that is the problem. Tharoor calls his book a "reinterpretation" of his hero's life. But it is not. Instead, like the movie, it is mostly a polished rehash of pious Nehruvian interpretations of modern Indian history. In the conventional Congress Party view, for example, Jinnah was to blame for the partition between India and Pakistan and the terrible bloodshed that followed. Reality was more complicated. Jinnah had good reasons to be suspicious of the Hindu leaders, no matter how secular they were in their views. He may have been maddening at times, but it could be argued that Nehru and his Hindu colleagues did not do enough to accommodate him.

On the independence struggle, Tharoor is equally conventional. To be sure, British governors were often obtuse, and sometimes brutal. Brig. R. E. H. Dyer's order to shoot unarmed civilians in Amritsar was a ghastly crime. But Tharoor describes it as an arbitrary act without provocation. In fact, crowds had run amok in the area, and the civilian government felt it had lost control. Moreover, the British did not whitewash Dyer's actions, as Tharoor would have us believe, but relieved him of his command.

Winston Churchill is rarely mentioned in Tharoor's account without being called "egregious" or some such negative term. To say that Churchill fought tooth and nail against Indian independence is true enough, but to ascribe this purely to Churchill's racist contempt for the Indian people is to miss the point. Churchill, like many others, was convinced that Britain without its empire would no longer be a world power, and he was right. He also realized that the British Empire could not exist without India. One may call this egregious, but the issue is political, not racial.

Still, the life of Nehru is interesting enough to be worth reading, even in a glib, conventional book such as this one. Tharoor's style is smooth and pleasant enough. But those who already know the facts can only look forward to a more solid book, or a true reinterpretation.

Editors Note:  (Published January 18,2004, page A2) The Times Book Review last Sunday carried a review of "Nehru: The Invention of India," by Shashi Tharoor. The reviewer was Ian Buruma. In 1991, Mr. Buruma's novel "Playing the Game" was reviewed by Mr. Tharoor in The Washington Post's Book World Section. The Times does not normally assign authors to review each other's books. It was unaware of the background in this case, and the reviewer was unaware of the policy.