Nehru: The Invention of India
by Shashi Tharoor
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| Vol. LXXI, No. 18 / September 15, 2003 |
$25.00 |
KIRKUS REVIEWS |
Tharoor, Shashi
NEHRU: The Invention of India
Arcade (304 pp.) $24.95
Nov. 2003
ISBN: 1-55970-697-X |
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A well-crafted life of the Indian politician and independence-movement
hero.
Like Mao Zedong in China, Jawaharlal Nehru has lost a lot of the stature
he enjoyed in India half a century ago, in much the same way and for
much the same reason. "His mistakes are magnified," writes
novelist (Riot, 2001, etc.) and UN official Tharoor, "his
achievements belittled." The Indian government continues to profess
the four tenets of Nehruvian thought-democratic institution-building,
pan-Indian secularism, socialist economic policies, and a foreign
policy of nonalignment -but, Tharoor adds, "all have been challenged,
and strained to the breaking point, by the developments of recent
years." The author charts the evolution of Nehru's life, showing
how the spoiled only child of a Brahmin Kashmiri family shed his privileged,
anglophilic attitudes as he became ever more aware of the injustices
of British colonial al rule; ironically, Tharoor suggests, he was
radicalized after returning to India from England and realizing that
the "rights of Englishmen could not be his because he was not
English enough to enjoy them," even as he once confessed that
his years at Harrow and Cambridge had made him "as much prejudiced
in favor of England and the English as it was possible for an Indian
to be." Nehru developed into a shrewd practical politician and
editorialist who entered into powerful alliances, notably with Mohandas
Gandhi, but who charted his own course. Gandhi repeatedly chastised
Nehru for his radicalism, and indeed Nehru was not shy of taking up
arms rather than following Gandhi's peaceful example-after independence,
when Nehru ordered the Indian army to seize the Portuguese province
of Goa, John F. Kennedy told the Indian ambassador in Washington "that
India might consider delivering fewer self-righteous sermons on nonviolence."
A thoughtful account, likening Nehru to Thomas Jefferson in ways both
positive and negative.
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