NEHRU: A Political Life

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), India's first prime minister, was from a well-to-do Kashmiri family. To rise in politics he had to connect with the real India represented by the maverick apostle of nonviolence, Mohandas Gandhi. As Gandhi's political heir, Nehru presided over the birth of the republic in 1947, then clung to power as his authority ebbed with illness and age. His patrician sense of knowing what was good for India, even when that clashed with the realities of nation-building and imperial devolution, lies at the core of Brown's biography. In the foreground, as colonial rule grudgingly fades, are Nehru's cycles of imprisonment for anti-British protests and his uneasy adaptation to the dynamics of party struggle and social change. The pressures of Indian tradition in conflict with Nehru's Western upbringing, and the East-West ambivalence of his public and private lives, put his personality under agonizing strain, which emerges here largely in passing. Brown, biographer of Gandhi and an Oxford historian, focuses upon the challenges to Nehru as father of Indian independence. Although Nehru's family ties and friendships do not escape scrutiny, it is the political side of Nehru that dominates the book. Despite the density of detail, Brown sometimes evades or downplays controversial aspects of Nehru's stewardship of India—the domestic impact of the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army formed by Chandra Bose from prisoners of war; Nehru's stubbornly embarrassing and damaging appointments; his dubious flirtations with communism and the Soviet bloc. Nevertheless, this is the fullest one-volume life of Nehru available, and a primer of 20th-century Indian politics. Illus. not seen by PW . (Nov.)