FC2 in à tête-à-tête with author and Under Secretary-General of the UN, Shashi Tharoor, discussing his book Nehru: The Invention of India, "not a scholarly work... (but) a layman's view of Nehru, written for lay people"...

Each of my books has involved a self-interrogation about some aspect of India, of the forces and ideas that have made India and nearly unmade it. I guess it is fair to say that in this book too, I am still scratching that same itch," says Shashi Tharoor.

Clearly, he counts among these forces, "paradox-ridden" Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister - a moody, idealist intellectual who felt an almost mystical empathy with the toiling peasant masses; an aristocrat, accustomed to privilege, who had passionate socialist convictions; an Anglicized product of Harrow and Cambridge who spent over 10 years in British jails; an agnostic radical who became an unlikely protégé of the saintly Mahatma Gandhi. A man, who, Shashi maintains, was India for the 17 years he ruled after Independence.

Shashi's "short biography", the preface to the book states, is: to examine this great figure of twentieth-century nationalism from the vantage point of the beginning of the twenty-first. Jawaharlal Nehru's life is a fascinating story in it own right, and I have tried to tell it whole, because the privileged child, the unremarkable youth, the posturing young nationalist and the heroic fighter for independence are all inextricable from the unchallengeable Prime Minister and global statesman. At the same time, I have sought to critically analyse the principal pillars of Nehru's legacy to India - democratic institution- building, staunch pan-Indian secularism, socialist economics at home and a foreign policy of non-alignment - all of which were integral to a vision of Indianness that is fundamentally contested today. Jawaharlal Nehru's impact on India is too great not to be reexamined periodically. His legacy is ours, whether we agree with everything he stood for or not. What Indians are today, both for good and for ill, we owe in great measure to one man. "That is why his story is not simply history," Shashi is emphatic. He continues, "Nehru, who became India's first Prime Minister and led the country for its first 17 years of Independence, was the man who ensured, protected and preserved India's democracy. He could easily, like so many other Third World nationalists, have turned into a dictator, arguing that the great challenges of development required an authoritarian hand. Instead, he went out of his way to nurture democracy. Nehru was so unquestionably India's leader - so unchallengeably the personification of its very freedom - that all he needed to do, if anyone opposed him, was to threaten to resign." In the book, he records: Nehru usually got his way. And yet he was a convinced democrat, a man so wary of the risks of autocracy that, at the crest of his rise, he authored an anonymous article warning Indians of the dangers of giving dictatorial temptations to Jawaharlal Nehru... Though he was, in the celebrated metaphor, the immense banyan tree in whose shade no other plant could grow, he made sure that every possible flora flourished in the forest.

Shashi counts Nehru's The Discovery of India as one among the books that inspired him because of its evocation of the Indian spirit, identity and culture. He believes the Nehruvian terms of reference can be applied to contemporary times. "Nehru's idea of India is embodied in our Constitution and in decades of political practice - that of a pluralist society. Nehru defined Indian nationhood through the power of his ideas, in many ways, like Jefferson in the United States, a figure to whom he bears considerable resemblance - a man of great intellect and sweeping vision, a wielder of words without parallel, high-minded and eloquent." However, in Shashi's The Great Indian Novel, Nehru was the blind visionary king, Dhritrashtra, and Shashi sees no contradiction in the parallels he drew. "High-minded and eloquent, yet in many ways, blind to his own faults and those of others around him. So visionary, yes; blind, too, at least sometimes," analyses Shashi. ... Under Nehru, the articulation of foreign policy took the form of an extended, and excessively moralistic, running commentary on world affairs, once again something more understandable in a liberation movement than in a government. Nehru's foreign policy positions were self-justifying emanations of his intellect; to link them to direct benefits to the Indian people was beneath him.

Shashi also locates in Nehru, "a tragic flaw for a leader": an instinctive sense that the ultimate responsibility for decision lay elsewhere than in himself. Knowing that his father, and later the Mahatma, were there encouraged in Jawaharlal a tendency to temporize and vascillate, to indulge in reflection and thinking aloud, and yet not commit to a concrete decision.

Shashi maintains that the book "is not a scholarly work... It is, instead, a reinterpretation - both of an extraordinary life and career and of the inheritance it left behind for every Indian. I read pretty much all of Nehru's published work-books, speeches, correspondence - and many biographies of him, but I spent no time in the archives. It's a layman's view of Nehru, written for lay people."

Asked if he feels that writing accounts of people who have made history is almost like rewriting history, Shashi says, "Writers use words not to 'shape realities' but to shape perceptions of reality. There are far greater dangers in not writing about people who have made history. Look, history is always being rewritten; we understand that intimately in our country, where our great epics were told and retold in so many voices over so many centuries. Indians know that the past is contained in our present; it is our responsibility to be aware of it. A society that is not aware of its past is like a child who does not know its parents; it is an orphan society." Shashi concedes that it "is often the case" that the history children are taught in school, builds a halo around the national struggle and its leaders, but qualifies, "not just in India, by the way. That's one of the reasons I adopted a deliberately irreverent approach to the nationalist struggle in The Great Indian Novel - to show that our great heroes of history were human too. But, history is a potent weapon, and it may be just as well that the 'sanctified' version is taught to schoolchildren - as long as, along with it, they are taught the critical and inquiring spirit that will allow them to come to terms with their history in their own time."

"As one who has struggled to find the time and the 'space' to write", Shashi, finds writing non-fiction easier to handle, "because I can allow my daily work to interrupt it and still find it possible to pick up the threads with less effort than fiction demands." However, as a writer, he enjoys working with both fictional and non-fictional material, "in different ways, though obviously fiction affords you much more freedom, since your imagination is not reined in by something as mundane as the facts! I have also experimented with different narrative styles in each of my novels, a liberty I have not permitted myself in my non-fiction. But, the most important difference is that in fiction, you need not just time to write, but a space inside your head to create an alternative universe and to inhabit it, so that the characters and concerns of that world are as real to you as your own."

(Extracts in italics from Nehru: The Invention of India, Penguin, Rs. 295, available at bookstores)