Indira in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 22, 2021 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it liked it

Shelves: genre-non-fiction, a-reviewed, author-white, author-woman, usa, zchallenge-2021-readingwomen, z-read-gelesen-2021

I learned a lot from this extremely interesting and important period in Indian political history. It wasn't hard to learn a lot as I knew very little to begin with. So this biography fulfilled the minimum. Biographies are not a genre of choice for me. And the things I didn't like about this biography are no doubt tropes of the genre as a whole -- tropes that annoy me so it's unlikely I'll be a bio-convert anytime soon.

This book is very readable. It's long (412 pages). The text ends at 75%, follo I learned a lot from this extremely interesting and important period in Indian political history. It wasn't hard to learn a lot as I knew very little to begin with. So this biography fulfilled the minimum. Biographies are not a genre of choice for me. And the things I didn't like about this biography are no doubt tropes of the genre as a whole -- tropes that annoy me so it's unlikely I'll be a bio-convert anytime soon.

This book is very readable. It's long (412 pages). The text ends at 75%, followed by endnotes and bibliography -- which is extensive, based on research in the published literature and on interviews. If this were history (more in my own line of genre tastes), there would be archival material as well and material in languages other than English. But I can't fault the meticulous amassing of sources. All of this ends in a blow-by-blow account of Indira Gandhi's life which biography fans might like. I myself would have preferred less of the (to me) not so relevant detail, like the lengthy description of Indira Nehru's stay in a Swiss sanatorium when she was ill with tuberculosis in her young years.

Fascinating to me is the dynastic nature of politics within the Nehru-Gandhi family. Indira Gandhi's father was Jawaharlal Nehru, activist for independence from Britain, leader of the Congress Party and India's first prime minister. The Nehrus were intimate friends with Mahatma Gandhi. Indira Nehru married a man called Feroze Gandhi, no relation of Mahatma Gandhi. Feroze Gandhi had no experience of politics but rose to prominence as a politician; indeed, a politician opposing Indira Gandhi. The pattern repeats: Indira Gandhi's two sons went into politics; upon her death, her son Rajiv immediately became prime minister. And Rajiv's Italian-born wife Sonia Gandhi went into politics after Rajiv's death. Jawaharlal Nehru opposed dynasticism as running counter to democracy. It's ironic that his own family legacy turned out to be so dynastic. The author Katherine Frank suggests that power was thrust upon them: Rajiv and Sonia were practically forced into it by party and parliament. I'm sure, though, that historians might have opposing arguments.

Linked to the dynastic nature and sheer nepotism we witness in operation throughout this bio is the role of women. I had not realised how (relatively) many women were involved in politics, especially in regional governments and (before independence) in anti-colonial activism (and many also in dynastic situations). At the time, though, Indira Gandhi was the first and for years the only democratically elected head of state in the world (until joined by Margaret Thatcher).

Through the lens of the bio, I learned some of the details of political events I had known vaguely about, and that is really why I chose to read this, not for Indira Gandhi's life as such. Events include: civil disobedience pre-independence, the boycotting of British-made goods, the Amritsar massacre of 1919, Partition, the Kashmir problem, the annexation of the kingdom of Sikkim, the Punjab problem, the Indo-Pak wars, the founding of Bangladesh, the politics of non-alignment and India's resultant closeness to the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, the storming of the gurudwar at Amritsar and the Emergency.

I first heard about the Emergency when I read Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children in the 1980s. The Emergency was the highlight of this book for me. I had been anticipating it for over 300 pages and read about it with great interest. By the time it was decreed in 1975 (it lasted until 1977), Indira Gandhi was basically an undemocratic autocrat (the author Frank never says so, and Indira Gandhi herself maintained that she always was for the Indian people). The way that democratic processes were subverted and the way in which Indira Gandhi manoeuvred her own people into positions of power, and also the way in which she appealed to the people in a populist move that bypassed parliament -- all of this is breathtaking. The story of the enforced slum clearings and the enforced sterilisation of millions (millions!) of men, mostly from low-caste poor backgrounds, is chilling.

On the personal level of biography: it is interesting to read about a woman who was such a ruthless and in many ways terrible (in the Michelangelesque sense of "terribilitá") politician, and how a young girl grows up in a politically saturated environment. I read this for the Reading Women Challenge 2021, rubric "about a woman in politics", and after considering many worthy candidates like Jacinda Aherne, Julia Gilliard, Joyce Banda, Leymah Gbowee and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (all of whom I admire), I am very glad to have chosen a book about a powerful non-admirable politician. It also makes me think about the legacy of this time and its repercussions for India today -- the world's largest democracy (and that IS admirable; no matter what, Indira Gandhi did not dismantle democracy, as did Pakistan in the 1960s).

The book by Elizabeth Frank has some irritating flaws. Maybe this is a weakness of biographies in general (as I don't much read them, I don't know) but there is a "tell not show" mode that lends itself to glib shorthand characterisation that scream inappropriate ad irrelevant cliché. How does it help to be told that "there was nothing effete about Feroze Gandhi"? Why say that there was an "emasculation" of the Secretariat? Why is every woman who married into the Nehru-Gandhi family or had an affair with one of their men "beautiful"? etc. What are these tired gender normativities?

There can also be an ignorance of historical context: in 1930s Germany, Indira Nehru was told that she was a "true Aryan"; the author hastens to point out that this attitude was "exceptional". Me: no, it wasn't, and no, being called Aryan was not a racial slur, on the contrary. Being truly "Aryan" was, for the Nazis, a racial compliment -- and another interesting aspect to the independence movement in India was the way some of its members cosied up to the Nazis as they were the enemies of the colonising British.

Now on to the publishers, HarperCollins. HC, you did a TERRIBLE job. Like so many traditional publishers, you give, it seems, zero Fs for your e-book readers. The text is full of random apostrophes. These, I realised after a while, mark the end of quotes but there is no way of knowing when a quote starts. As a result, I never knew when I was reading a quote; this is a serious flaw in a biography that relies heavily on quoting others' words. HC, you also did not think to remove hard hyphens so we have randomly hyphenated words dotted throughout. And why an index? Why the notice (loc 11907) "The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader." So, I ask you, why even include this 9%-long index?? I know why: you just couldn't be bothered. Because for you the print-book readers are primary. (In which case: why bother with an e-book at all?) Very disappointing. ...more

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