Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Rajendra Prasad(1884?1963): early supporter of Mahatma Gandhi and associate of Patel; president of the Congress, 1934, 1939, and 1947?48; president of the Constituent Assembly, 1946–50; first president of the Republic of India, 1950–62

Lala Lajpat Rai(1865?1928): leading?Extremist? Congressman, known as the “Lion of the Punjab”; president of the Congress, 1920; died of injuries inflicted by police during nationalist demonstration against Simon Commission, 1928

C. Rajagopalachari(1878–1972): early supporter of Gandhian noncooperation and leading member of the Congress who never held the presidency; chief minister of Madras, 1937–39 and 1952–54; disagreed with Quit India movement and resigned from the Congress, 1942, but rejoined, 1946; governor of West Bengal, 1947–48; governor-general of India, 1948–50; cabinet minister, 1950–51; resigned from the Congress in protest against Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies and founded conservative Swatantra Party, 1959

Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru(1875–1949): Liberal Party leader; law member of the Viceroy’s Council, 1920–23

Sardar Baldev Singh(1902–1961): Sikh leader in the Punjab; member of the interim government, 1946–47; minister of defense, 1947–52

Purushottam Das Tandon(1882–1962): conservative Congress leader of Hindu traditionalist leanings; candidate for mayor of Allahabad, 1923, but supplanted by Jawaharlal Nehru because of his unacceptability to Muslims; elected president of the Congress, 1950, but forced to resign because of differences with Jawaharlal

Bal Gangadhar Tilak(1856?1920): major Indian nationalist figure and leader of the?Extremists?; lecturer and journalist in Poona, edited newspapers in both English and Marathi; sentenced to long periods of imprisonment by the British; author of scholarly works in history and philosophy

Atal Behari Vajpayee(1924–): leader of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (now Bharatiya Janata Party) and skilled parliamentarian; minister of external affairs in Janata Party government, 1977–79; prime minister of India, 1996 and 1998–present

Lord Wavell(1883–1950): British general, commander in chief of British forces in the Middle East, 1939–41, and in India, 1941–43; viceroy of India, 1943–47

Lord Willingdon(1866?1941): British colonial administrator; governor of Bombay, 1913–19, and of Madras, 1919–24; governor-general of Canada, 1926–31; viceroy of India, 1931–36

As stated in the Preface, this book has involved no original research into the archives; it is a reinter-pretation of material largely in the public domain. The extensive quotes from Jawaharlal Nehru are all from his own published writings (and in a few cases from newspaper accounts of his statements); the volumes I have consulted are listed in the Select Bibliography that follows. I have delved into several biographies, the most useful of which I found to be Sarvepalli Gopal’s magisterial three-volume study and M. J. Akbar’s highly readable work, both of which wear their political points of view on their sleeves. The textual references to both men, and to the more disappointing effort of Stanley Wolpert, relate to their biographies listed in the Bibliography. The text also cites such writers as André Malraux, Norman Cousins, and the Indian diplomat Badruddin Tyabji; once again the corresponding books may be found in the Bibliography. Rafiq Zakaria’s 1959 anthology and K. Natwar Singh’s recent compilation of tributes expressed by a wide range of world figures shortly after Nehru’s death is the source of many of the quotations in chapters 9 and 10.

I was privileged to have several conversations with Phillips Talbot, who first met Nehru as a visiting student in 1939 and over the next twenty-five years as journalist, scholar, and diplomat, and the quotations from him are from these conversations, not from any published material. From my departure for graduate school in the United States in 1975 to his death in 1993, my late father, Chandran Tharoor, peppered me with a remarkable array of newspaper clippings on Indian politics and history, many of which I have used and quoted from. My friends Arun Kumar and Ramu Damodaran have read the manuscript with care and offered me invaluable information and in-sights of their own, for which I am most grateful.

It hardly needs stating that, in distilling such a wealth of material into a short volume, I have made my own selections of facts and material on which to dwell. The responsibility for any errors of detail or interpretation, and indeed of omission, are mine alone.

WORKS BY JAWAHARLAL NEHRU

Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions (Allahabad: Ram Mohan Lal, 1928)

Glimpses of World History (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 2 vols., 1934–35)

An Autobiography (London: John Lane, 1936)

Letters from a Father to a Daughter (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1938)

Towards Freedom (New York: John Day, 1941)

The Discovery of India (1945; reprint, New Delhi: Nehru

Memorial Fund, 1988)

A Bunch of Old Letters (New Delhi: Asia Publishing

House, 1959)

India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches (New Delhi: PubNehru: The Making of Indialications Division, 1961)

Selected Speeches, September 1946 to April 1961 (New

Delhi: Publications Division, 1961)

Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, First Series, vols.

1–15, ed. M. Chalapati Rau, H. Y. Sharada Prasad,

and B. R. Nanda (New Delhi: Orient Longman,

1972)

Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, vols.

1–16, ed. S. Gopal (New Delhi: Nehru Museum

and Memorial Library, 1984)

Works by Nehru Family Members

Indira Gandhi, My Truth (New Delhi: Vision Books,

1981)

Sonia Gandhi, ed., Freedom’s Daughter: Letters between

Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1922–39 (Lon-

don: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989)

Sonia Gandhi, ed., Two Alone, Two Together: Letters be-

tween Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1940–64

(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992)

Krishna Nehru Hutheesing, We Nehrus (New York: Holt,

Rinehart and Winston, 1967)

Vijayalakshmi Pandit, The Scope of Happiness (New York:

Crown, 1979)

Biographical Works on Jawaharlal Nehru

M. J. Akbar, Nehru: The Making of India (London: Viking, 1988)

Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, USA, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Photo Perspective (New York: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1989)

Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1959)

Norman Cousins, ed., Profiles of Nehru (New Delhi: India Book Company, 1966)

A. K. Damodaran, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Communicator and Democratic Leader (New Delhi: Radiant Publishers/Nehru Memorial Museum & Library,

1997)

Michael Edwardes, Nehru: A Political Biography (London:

Penguin, 1971)

Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography

Volume One: 1889–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1975)

Volume Two: 1947–1956 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979)

Volume Three: 1956–1964 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984)

H. V. Kamath, Last Days of Jawaharlal Nehru (Calcutta:

Jayasree Prakashan, 1977)

M. O. Mathai, Reminiscences of the Nehru Age (Delhi: Vikas, 1978)

M. O. Mathai, My Days with Nehru (Delhi: Vikas, 1979)