Nehru: The Invention of India
by Shashi Tharoor
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Tharoor, Shashi
NEHRU: The Invention of India
Arcade (304 pp.) $24.95
Nov. 2003
ISBN: 1-55970-697-X |
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The Indian consensus that Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) constructed as the nation's first prime minister, Tharoor writes with unsparing objectivity, "has frayed: democracy endures, secularism is besieged, nonalignment is all but forgotten, and socialism barely clings on." Nehru seems "curiously dated, a relic of another era." His goal of cresting "a just state by just means" has been undermined by the centrifugal forces of Indian religious and cultural divisiveness. Tharoor's short and highly readable life never lacks for pithy phrases and strong opinions. A senior U.N. official, Tharoor (India: From Midnight to the Millennium) writes with shrewd wit end cautious ambivalence about Nehru, whom he admires as the Thomas Jefferson of lndia - a foe of colonialism, a statesman of grace and style and a master of uplifting words -- but whose leadership failed in forcefulness and whose political heirs were without his charm. Nehru's privileged Kashmiri background and Harrow-Cambrldge education left him replete with paradoxes - a reserved aristocrat yet a near Marxist, a demigod (to the masses) and a democrat (to himself), a political prisoner of the British for nine years who was even more a prisoner to his own "vainglory" an idealist with "a moralism that stood somewhere to the left of morality." Tharoor's distant villain is the curmudgeonly Winston Churchill, whose staunch "racist imperialism," particularly toward India, made his "subsequent beatification as on apostle of freedom... all the more preposterous." This engaging short biography is a scrutiny of a major 20th-century leader from his "Little Lord Fauntleroy" beginnings to his transformation into a historic figure wearing a halo in his own lifetime. (Nov.) |
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