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Indira Gandhi: Tryst with Power
A nuanced and critical biography of Indira Gandhi by a member of the Nehru family
How did Indira Gandhi reach the pinnacle of Indian politics? Did India move away from freedom under her leadership? What kind of woman was she?
Indira Gandhi made unorthodox use of power and possessed a highly individual style of functioning. In this book, Nayantara Sahgal persuasively argues that authoritarianism was the inevitable outcome of Indiras personality and temperament. Her leadership marked a drastic break with the democratic tradition of her family and Indian politics. During her regime, the political landscape of India underwent profound changes. The Emergency of 1975 - 77 was used to promote her son Sanjay as her ultimate successor. The entry of her elder son, Rajiv, into politics after Sanjays death, and his immediate political prominence showcased Indiras essential belief in her familys right to rule.
Nayantara Sahgal's personal knowledge of her cousin, in combination with her unparalleled access to letters exchanged within the Nehru family, makes for a striking and insightful analysis of Indiras tryst with political power and an unusually penetrating psychological and political portrait from an intimate family viewpoint.
How did Indira Gandhi reach the pinnacle of Indian politics? Did India move away from freedom under her leadership? What kind of woman was she?
Indira Gandhi made unorthodox use of power and possessed a highly individual style of functioning. In this book, Nayantara Sahgal persuasively argues that authoritarianism was the inevitable outcome of Indiras personality and temperament. Her leadership marked a drastic break with the democratic tradition of her family and Indian politics. During her regime, the political landscape of India underwent profound changes. The Emergency of 1975 - 77 was used to promote her son Sanjay as her ultimate successor. The entry of her elder son, Rajiv, into politics after Sanjays death, and his immediate political prominence showcased Indiras essential belief in her familys right to rule.
Nayantara Sahgal's personal knowledge of her cousin, in combination with her unparalleled access to letters exchanged within the Nehru family, makes for a striking and insightful analysis of Indiras tryst with political power and an unusually penetrating psychological and political portrait from an intimate family viewpoint.
412 pages, Paperback
First published September 24, 2012
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About the author
Nayantara Sahgal
48 books63 followersNayantara Sahgal is an Indian writer in English. Her fiction deals with India's elite responding to the crises engendered by political change. She was one of the first female Indian writers in English to receive wide recognition. She is a member of the Nehru family (not the Nehru-Gandhi family as she so often points out), the second of the three daughters born to Jawaharlal Nehru's sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.
She was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for English, for her novel Rich Like Us (1985)awarded by India's National Academy of Letters.
She was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for English, for her novel Rich Like Us (1985)awarded by India's National Academy of Letters.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 19, 2024
This book made me realize the extent of atrocities committed during emergency period. The author has meticulously researched the material and included letters , newspaper excerpts, interview quotes in her book to support her assessment of Indira Gandhi and her despotic rule. The book talks about the utter lawlessness and brute force that were a norm during her prime minister-ship. The practice of chamch-giri and dynasty we see in INC today is a contribution of hers.
The book doesn't talk about the positive aspects of her period. Green revolution, nuclear test and Bangladesh liberation do not figure in the book. Two chapters on Jayprakash Narayan are very interesting. They bring out the personality of JP and his commitment to democracy and Gandhian values. The chapter on Sanjay Gandhi also describe his goonda-ism and utter disrespect for rules and regulations.
One feels that Indira Gandhi's blunders far exceeded some of her successes during her long stint at the top office in the political system of the country. This feeling of mine is summarized by the author herself in the following paragraph.
"After seventeen years of Nehru government , and over a decade of Indira's it was not surprising that her relatives too spoke, not always jokingly , of belonging to the royal family. These and other beneficiaries of the family cult have been glad to fan the feudal flame and keep it alive. Yet the idea of family succession as a birthright, tragic and retrograde for a republic , will, if it succeeds, provide and ironic ending to a heroic experiment in democracy, unique in Asia."
The book doesn't talk about the positive aspects of her period. Green revolution, nuclear test and Bangladesh liberation do not figure in the book. Two chapters on Jayprakash Narayan are very interesting. They bring out the personality of JP and his commitment to democracy and Gandhian values. The chapter on Sanjay Gandhi also describe his goonda-ism and utter disrespect for rules and regulations.
One feels that Indira Gandhi's blunders far exceeded some of her successes during her long stint at the top office in the political system of the country. This feeling of mine is summarized by the author herself in the following paragraph.
"After seventeen years of Nehru government , and over a decade of Indira's it was not surprising that her relatives too spoke, not always jokingly , of belonging to the royal family. These and other beneficiaries of the family cult have been glad to fan the feudal flame and keep it alive. Yet the idea of family succession as a birthright, tragic and retrograde for a republic , will, if it succeeds, provide and ironic ending to a heroic experiment in democracy, unique in Asia."
March 8, 2017
its a wonderful piece of work on Indira Gandhi's rule, it shows not only mind set of Indira but perhaps of entire political elite of south asia. her diction is scholarly and language immaculate a person like me with limitation in English readings its an good opportunity to enhance his own word power.
there is a one issue which mars this otherwise immaculate body of work and that is a very clear personal bias of author against her subject, this bias is unfortunately is based on a class complex that existed against Kamla Nehru with in Anand Bhawan walls. the way author describes Kamla's background with reference to "old Delhi" and "distance from formal education" is a bit strange. one should expect from the author to be more hearty and clean of family feud.
there is a one issue which mars this otherwise immaculate body of work and that is a very clear personal bias of author against her subject, this bias is unfortunately is based on a class complex that existed against Kamla Nehru with in Anand Bhawan walls. the way author describes Kamla's background with reference to "old Delhi" and "distance from formal education" is a bit strange. one should expect from the author to be more hearty and clean of family feud.
January 23, 2021
Indira Gandhi was a complex personality, that much is clear from the material available about her. When people write about her, they either praise her handling of the after-effects of Operation Searchlight in East Pakistan and India’s military intervention in the same matter in 1971, or criticize her for the dictatorship she and her son Sanjay, the single greatest beneficiary of her power, imposed on the country in the garb of an Emergency in 1975. When Narendra Modi mentions her, the image one sees is of a politician similar in many, many ways to him. When her grandson talks about her, he enjoys one of his brief moments of good oration.
Mrs Gandhi was by no means the gungi gudia the Congress of yore thought would do their bidding when she was chosen as the Prime Minister in 1966. Nor was she the benevolent messiah that she is often made out to be. At her best, she was a solid tactician and a damn good politician, and at her worst, she was a figure of terror, unleashing upon her own people seemingly random acts of violence and depravity.
The thesis, if one might call it that, of the biography Mrs Gandhi’s cousin Nayantara Sahgal penned on her forty years ago, when she was very much alive and in power, is to examine the interaction India’s third Prime Minister had with power, hence the subtitle Tryst with Power.
It seeks to establish the circumstances in which Mrs Gandhi took power and those in which she held on to it with a vice-like grip. Sahgal wishes to examine what it was that made Mrs Gandhi desire power the way she did, as well as her desire for it to be absolute.
This Sahgal does concisely, if in a manner that makes for dull, one-sided reading. Drawing from material to which not many others could have had access, she begins with a painting of Indira’s early life and the seeds which were sowed into her mind through her interactions with people and life.
A large part of the narrative Sahgal attempts to create is the marked difference between father and daughter – Nehru, a man to whom death would probably have been preferable to a dictatorship, and Indira, whose inability to regulate her own power would cause her downfall. It is here that Sahgal exposes her biases – while she calls out Indira for coterie creation in surrounding herself with people of the same Kashmiri Pandit lineage she belongs to, there is not a line about Sahgal’s beloved Mamu having done the same, a glaring omission because Nehru’s blatant backing of two country cousins (COAS Gen. PN Thapar and CGS Lt. Gen. BM Kaul) would see India get a battering of a lifetime at the hands of the Chinese. When Sahgal picks apart Indira’s propelling Sanjay into the limelight at the cost of national interest, she does not note that her Mamu did the same thing in elevating his sister (and Sahgal’s mother) Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit to high-profile diplomatic appointments while he was Prime Minister when she was not a diplomat (admittedly, this was probably in keeping with the norm of the time, that of appointing public figures to ambassadorial positions rather than career diplomats). Sahgal’s problem seems to be the same as the rest of us – nobody would have criticized Indira for propping Sanjay up if he hadn’t turned out to be a gunda and a grossly-incompetent professional in whatever he tried to do (the latter seems to be the issue with Sanjay’s nephew too – nobody but the Bee Jay Pee would crack Pappu jokes if Rahul knew how to do his job).
Sahgal admittedly does a better job of looking into parts of her cousin’s life that led her to develop the kind of administration – both within government and the party – she did. It’s interesting to read Sahgal’s theories about how a childhood shaped by as many things as Indira’s was contributed to her personality.
What’s also interesting to note is Indira’s systematic suppression and subsequent destruction of the very pillars of a sane democracy – the India our grandparents talked about, one of civility in public life, pretty much vanished under Indira, replaced by a culture of goondaism (led by none other than her own son) and vulgarity, a trend which even today, after nine people have succeeded Indira in office (two of them for a decade each), remains prevalent.
Sahgal also goes to great length in describing the role of Jayaprakash Narayan in shaking the core of Indira's government and mobilising a mass of people in a way reminiscent only of Gandhi. It was undoubtedly the best part of the book.
The issue of the book I read was released by Penguin in 2012, the first edition having been published in 1982 in the States. Unfortunately, apart from a chapter at the end, Sahgal has not revisited any material, so much so that the book effectively rushes through the Janata Party-led government and Indira’s resurgence three years after the Emergency. The book thus feels incomplete, and one can’t help but wonder why Sahgal didn’t deem it necessary to fill in the blanks thirty years later.
On the whole, a readable account of India’s most powerful Prime Minister till date and her relationship with the concept of power, albeit to be taken with the usual tablespoon of salt (a little more maybe, since Sahgal’s perception of Indira is coloured by Indira being distant and cold towards her mother which, in my view, is not terrible. People don’t deserve to be judged for disliking their relatives. I should know).
Mrs Gandhi was by no means the gungi gudia the Congress of yore thought would do their bidding when she was chosen as the Prime Minister in 1966. Nor was she the benevolent messiah that she is often made out to be. At her best, she was a solid tactician and a damn good politician, and at her worst, she was a figure of terror, unleashing upon her own people seemingly random acts of violence and depravity.
The thesis, if one might call it that, of the biography Mrs Gandhi’s cousin Nayantara Sahgal penned on her forty years ago, when she was very much alive and in power, is to examine the interaction India’s third Prime Minister had with power, hence the subtitle Tryst with Power.
It seeks to establish the circumstances in which Mrs Gandhi took power and those in which she held on to it with a vice-like grip. Sahgal wishes to examine what it was that made Mrs Gandhi desire power the way she did, as well as her desire for it to be absolute.
This Sahgal does concisely, if in a manner that makes for dull, one-sided reading. Drawing from material to which not many others could have had access, she begins with a painting of Indira’s early life and the seeds which were sowed into her mind through her interactions with people and life.
A large part of the narrative Sahgal attempts to create is the marked difference between father and daughter – Nehru, a man to whom death would probably have been preferable to a dictatorship, and Indira, whose inability to regulate her own power would cause her downfall. It is here that Sahgal exposes her biases – while she calls out Indira for coterie creation in surrounding herself with people of the same Kashmiri Pandit lineage she belongs to, there is not a line about Sahgal’s beloved Mamu having done the same, a glaring omission because Nehru’s blatant backing of two country cousins (COAS Gen. PN Thapar and CGS Lt. Gen. BM Kaul) would see India get a battering of a lifetime at the hands of the Chinese. When Sahgal picks apart Indira’s propelling Sanjay into the limelight at the cost of national interest, she does not note that her Mamu did the same thing in elevating his sister (and Sahgal’s mother) Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit to high-profile diplomatic appointments while he was Prime Minister when she was not a diplomat (admittedly, this was probably in keeping with the norm of the time, that of appointing public figures to ambassadorial positions rather than career diplomats). Sahgal’s problem seems to be the same as the rest of us – nobody would have criticized Indira for propping Sanjay up if he hadn’t turned out to be a gunda and a grossly-incompetent professional in whatever he tried to do (the latter seems to be the issue with Sanjay’s nephew too – nobody but the Bee Jay Pee would crack Pappu jokes if Rahul knew how to do his job).
Sahgal admittedly does a better job of looking into parts of her cousin’s life that led her to develop the kind of administration – both within government and the party – she did. It’s interesting to read Sahgal’s theories about how a childhood shaped by as many things as Indira’s was contributed to her personality.
What’s also interesting to note is Indira’s systematic suppression and subsequent destruction of the very pillars of a sane democracy – the India our grandparents talked about, one of civility in public life, pretty much vanished under Indira, replaced by a culture of goondaism (led by none other than her own son) and vulgarity, a trend which even today, after nine people have succeeded Indira in office (two of them for a decade each), remains prevalent.
Sahgal also goes to great length in describing the role of Jayaprakash Narayan in shaking the core of Indira's government and mobilising a mass of people in a way reminiscent only of Gandhi. It was undoubtedly the best part of the book.
The issue of the book I read was released by Penguin in 2012, the first edition having been published in 1982 in the States. Unfortunately, apart from a chapter at the end, Sahgal has not revisited any material, so much so that the book effectively rushes through the Janata Party-led government and Indira’s resurgence three years after the Emergency. The book thus feels incomplete, and one can’t help but wonder why Sahgal didn’t deem it necessary to fill in the blanks thirty years later.
On the whole, a readable account of India’s most powerful Prime Minister till date and her relationship with the concept of power, albeit to be taken with the usual tablespoon of salt (a little more maybe, since Sahgal’s perception of Indira is coloured by Indira being distant and cold towards her mother which, in my view, is not terrible. People don’t deserve to be judged for disliking their relatives. I should know).
July 1, 2020
Inspite of many good works done by Mrs. Gandhi it does not reflect in this book ...The command on words are excellent
...But according to my personal view I didn't like this book as of my point of view she was the iron lady of India and I'm inspired by her works whereas this book only shows the negative side of Mrs. Gandhi. Each and every person has a positive and negative side but to reflect only the negative side of a person is wrong.
...But according to my personal view I didn't like this book as of my point of view she was the iron lady of India and I'm inspired by her works whereas this book only shows the negative side of Mrs. Gandhi. Each and every person has a positive and negative side but to reflect only the negative side of a person is wrong.
September 30, 2023
2.5 Stars
November 23, 2013
'Indira Gandhi - Tryst with Power' makes no shattering revelations. Instead, the author goes about trying to unravel the mind of one the most remarkable Indian politicians. Gandhi, was and is, a deeply polarising personality. She's always had legions of fans as well as detractors. Sahgal, being a part of the extended Nehru family, got a ringside view of Indira's rise from the shadows of her illustrious father to the pinnacle of Indian polity and her subsequent fall from grace.
The book is a scathingly critical account of Gandhi's rule. Sahgal even goes to the extent of doubting the sanctity of the 1973 polls which saw her being re-elected as India's prime minister. The author has held Gandhi responsible for the corruption and criminalisation of the country's politics and reducing institutions to mere rubber stamps.
The image that emerges from the book is that of a power-hungry woman who believed it was her birth right to rule over India. It makes for racy reading for the most part. Sahgal does try to play the balancing game by writing some positive stuff in the last chapter. However, it does little to elevate Indira's stature.
The book is a scathingly critical account of Gandhi's rule. Sahgal even goes to the extent of doubting the sanctity of the 1973 polls which saw her being re-elected as India's prime minister. The author has held Gandhi responsible for the corruption and criminalisation of the country's politics and reducing institutions to mere rubber stamps.
The image that emerges from the book is that of a power-hungry woman who believed it was her birth right to rule over India. It makes for racy reading for the most part. Sahgal does try to play the balancing game by writing some positive stuff in the last chapter. However, it does little to elevate Indira's stature.
February 11, 2017
Not the kind of biography I expected. From a factual perspective, this book has nothing great to offer, instead it attempts to go inside Indira Gandhi's mind and tries to find the rationale behind some of her dangerous decisions.
July 15, 2014
A largely critical account of Indira's tenure at the helm by her own disillusioned family member. No wonder this book was banned by the Indira government in 1982 owing to the book's allegiance to truth rather than the personality of Indira Gandhi.
This new publication could have had more a detailed afterword summing up the legacy of Indira in the 21st century.The chapter "Completing the picture" is inadequate. Except for that minor quibble,this book is an important one with great turn of phrase. New insights related to rigging of 1971 polls were shocking.
Warning : This is NOT a biography of Indira Gandhi from 1917 to 1984. This is an analysis of her leadership style and centralizing policies from 1966 to 1982.
August 18, 2019
Barely finished as it was difficult to read the book. YouTube review here https://youtu.be/Tto_9YVQ1zc
October 29, 2013
The analysis is great... But the book could have been written in a better way!!!
July 23, 2014
Well written biography of Indira Gandhi by her cousin Nayantara Sehgal . Unbiased and scathing account of Indira's tenure as PM.
January 1, 2021
Language is abstract,narrative seems patterned on fixed formulae.Indira is seen through a niece's lens.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews