Nine Hours to Rama

by Stanley Wolpert

"This is a terrifying, yet inspiring novel. As the nine fateful hours pass & the brutal, ruthless moment of the cataclysm draws nearer, the reader cannot help but associate himself with each character in turn. He knows what the end will be, but is still a profound & searing shock when these tragically ironic events reach their historic climax."--back flap

Genres: Banned Books, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literature

376 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1962

About the author

Stanley A. Wolpert is an American academic, Indologist, and author considered one of the world's foremost authorities on the political and intellectual history of modern India and Pakistan and has written fiction and nonfiction books on the topics. He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1959-2002.

Reviews

[Sandhya Rao · Rating 3 out of 5]

26/52 - a banned book

my book challenge called for a banned book so i dug out Stanley Wolpert's *Nine Hours to Rama*, on the hours Jan 29-30, 1948, leading up to Nathuram Godse's assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. It's written like a racy thriller but I was puzzled by the depiction of Godse as a womanizer and a man with an intense personality. So I went back to the other book I'd read about him, Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins' *Freedom at Midnight*, which talks about Godse's famous "monk-like" lifestyle. I'll be following up both with Gopal Godse's book *Why I Killed Gandhi* (contains Nathuram's court statement) and Manohar Malgaonkar's recreation *The Men Who Killed Gandhi*. Such disparity!

update
Finished 9 Hours to Rama. It's heavily fictionalized and only key names and incidents are factual. This leaves the writer free to imagine the lives and motivations of the people involved. We meet Gandhiji only at the end. Till then he is presented through the perspectives of a senior politician (Patel?) for whom he is a nuisance, and should be sent away to the Himalayas; of the militants for whom he is a traitor; and a police officer for whom his is "the most precious life in India." The narrative makes it clear all key people - including Gandhiji himself - knew what would happen at the prayer meeting. The narrator shares with us Gandhiji's thoughts of himself as a failure, of his words not being able to convey his message and meaning. The last section was moving; I had tears in my eyes.

Overall 3/5. The chapters of romance and sex involving Godse and various women were redundant in my opinion and merely hold up the narrative. Some characters receive a full background in the beginning and just become part of the furniture at the end. It's written in a fast moving style, rather like a thriller whose end you know already know. It was interesting to read about Gandhiji from the militants' perspective and left me with the question what is a Hindu "atheist"?

[J · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is described as fictionalized narrative of the assassination of Gandhi, his killer, and their last few days. In reality, this book is so far from the truth that it's laughable.

In this book, Nathuram is painted as a womanizer, which is the opposite of the truth. Nathuram was a known celibate, unmarried, with a lifestyle of a semi-ascetic. This is just one of the hundreds of such instances that are made up about not only Nathuram but his associates as well and Gandhi himself! Another example--even something as simple as a date when Gandhi visited London and met Savarkar has been botched up and given as almost 10 years after the actual event.

This book is ridiculous and should be marketed as pure fiction. I can't imagine how real names were allowed to be used in this book! If anyone wants to read true accounts of Gandhi or Nathuram there are many other better books available including a couple of biographies written by Anup Sardesai on the Nathuram's life and some written by Gopal Godse, just to name a couple.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novelization of the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi by an Indologist, read after seeing the movie based upon it as a child.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book a long time ago as a teenager and believe I read it because I saw the movie on TV at the time. Enjoyed both the movie and the book, as it has stuck in my memory when I came across the copy recently. It is fictional history, but from the perspective of the West at the time, conveys the drama and horror felt by the world when Gandhi was assassinated on January 30, 1948. Yes, it is written as a thriller and yes, the assassin is made into a more disreputable character beyond the mores of the culture in which he actually existed. This is a historical novel where liberties were taken to convey the story crafted from an actual event. It was not intended to be and should not be read as history. It is an historical thriller. The fact that it is banned in India today is appalling. This is the same attitude toward a book as would be reflected in viewing Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" as history, versus what it was, a thriller based on French origin stories of the Merovingian Kings, created to stir interest and make the author a livelihood. Read banned books! Books should never be banned.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stanley Wolpert's Nine Hours to Rama is something of an oddity: a novel about the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, written by an American scholar of India, which makes a pretense towards realism while also playing fast and loose with the historical record. Wolpert adopts a thriller structure (handy for the lay reader, or the Hollywood screenwriter) offering parallel plot lines: the assassin, Nathuram Godse, making his preparations for the assassination; the police inspector, trying to persuade Gandhi to cancel a public meeting and, failing that, to catch the conspirators; Godse's Hindu nationalist cell, who views him as a pawn and hopes to use the Mahatma's death to stoke a civil war; and the reaction of Indian authorities, still reeling from the agonies of partition, to the plot. Wolpert's book is commendable in some ways, less so than others. He succeeds at portraying Gandhi himself as a complex figure, whose stubborn virtue strikes some as righteous and others as self-aggrandizing; certainly it affords the authorities no end of headaches, even before the assassination. Similarly, his portrait of Godse and his confederates affords a believable recreation of nationalist fanaticism, along with the cynical calculations of Indian government officials. If Wolpert's is a foreigner's perspective on India, it's also refreshingly free of condescension or judgment (that, for instance, a contemporary English writer might have provided). Strange then that, at the novel's center, is a portrait of Godse that's completely at odds with the historical figure. A stern, self-imposed aesthetic in real life, in this novel Godse agonizes over a traumatic family life, racist snubs in childhood, several failed romances and a fondness for alcohol, making him a charismatic, but overly familiar neurotic anti-hero. As fiction, Rama is certainly readable and interesting, but it's not reliable history; the informed reader may judge for themselves how much that's a demerit. Adapted into a 1963 film with Horst Buchholz, Jose Ferrer, Robert Morley and various other Hollywood performers playing Indians.

[Sri Raghavendra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book during early 2012 while I was outside the country. This was around the the time, I had read Gandhi's autobiography. I really enjoyed the details presented in the book. Given the fact the book was banned in India gave me the impetus to read this before I got back home.
Though the characters created were fictional, you get a feeling that a lot of the anecdotes could have been real. Especially when you read some literature in India that tries to portray the righteousness of the killer, this book tries to paint a picture of the events that may have transpired (sic). It may also serve as a justification depending on how you look at it , though personally I would not buy into the justification. This book consists of events in the life of Mahatma Gandhi's assassins (names are fictional) and the chain of events culminating in the 30th of January murder of the Mahatma.
An Interesting read.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this 55 years ago. I still have vivid memories of it. My 16 year-old self obviously liked it a great deal.

[Sandesh Kolekar · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is fascinating to read , loved reading it till the last word of book , what a gem absolutely recommend it

[Abby]

This book was crazy good! I want to read it again! It kind of was about good and evil. It showed the good people and the "evil" people, and when you got into the "evil"'s people's heads, they didn't seem so evil! It was about the guy who assassinated Gandhi. But he didn't seem evil. He was a messed up guy, but he was always praying and wanting something. I want to read it again!

[Joanne Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wolpert's style is a little dated (as expected for a book written several decades ago) but this story of the hours prior to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi reads like a modern mystery. The details of the setting and political background are fascinating. Hard to find, but worth it!

[G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very gripping political realism with a hint of drama leading towards the freedom of a country.

[Manish · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Jay Akar]

i want to read it but not getting anywhere..... could someone sell/share? thanks

[Varun Varanasy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an amazing read and the author's descriptions of the time period seemed very realistic.

[Eric Layton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit slow paced, but an interesting story.