Of the books I read last year, Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi stayed in my mind and left a mark. I especially admired the part how Guha admired Jawaharlal Nehru and his role in building the modern India. From someone who disliked Nehru and attributed all our social ills to him to someone who turned indifferent, I became a complete convert and therefore an ardent admirer of our first Prime Minister. I am fully convinced that if not for the first almost two decades of Nehru’s rule India wouldn’t be what it is today. I mean obviously much worse. I didn’t want to rely only on Guha’s arguments for that conclusion so I read other books on India’s independent struggle and Nehru’s biography. From juicy, nosey and gossipy Indian Summer to the authentic biography by Stanley Wolpert to even Nehru’s own writings. After reading others, especially the British writers, I found Guha’s devotion woefully inadequate.
I intend reading more about Nehru in the coming months. One book I have in mind is Nayanthara Sahgal’s Civilising a Savaged World. It’s about Nehru and not to be confused with similarly titled Guha’s book, Savaging the Civilised which is about Verrier Elwin, a tribal leader.
