May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (28 page)

That outburst, of course, became one of the more famous prophecies
in the life of the infant girl who would one day rule over one sixth of the world’s population. In recounting that life in the following pages, I will tell other such anecdotes, many of them well known to Indians, which seem to me to provide revealing insights into the psyche of the woman, and into the psyche of India itself. I have culled the stories principally from three biographies: Zareer Masani’s excellent, even-handed
Indira Gandhi: A Biography
, Dom Moraes’s respectful
Mrs. Gandhi
, and Nayantara Sahgal’s scathing
Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power
. I have also relied on Mrs. Gandhi’s letters to her American friend Dorothy Norman, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1986; Linda Charlton’s 7,000-word obituary of Mrs. Gandhi in
The New York Times;
and
My Truth
, a collection of Mrs. Gandhi’s interviews with the journalist Emmanuel Pouchpadass.

By most accounts, Indira Gandhi led a turbulent and intensely lonely childhood, one which—depending on the point of view of the source—either inspired her or forever hardened her. By the 1920s, when she was still a young girl, her father and grandfather had set aside the English trappings of their lives and allied themselves with Mahatma Gandhi and the fight against the British. The palatial Anand Bhawan evolved into a bustling political headquarters for Congress party leaders, who crowded the spacious lawns for around-the-clock meetings. Indira could only watch from afar, a forgotten child in the chaos. Once when a visitor arrived he was met by a solemn Indira, who told him in a very grave tone, “I’m sorry, but my grandfather, father and mummy are all in prison.” The struggle in many ways robbed her of her childhood. One of Indira’s earliest memories was of the day when the Nehru family, in response to Mahatma Gandhi’s appeal, gathered up their European clothes to burn them as part of a boycott of all foreign-made goods. “What fun for a toddler to jump on, play hide and seek in the heaps of velvets and satins, silks and chiffons!” she said. A short time later, a relative returning from Paris brought a beautiful embroidered dress for Indira, but Nehru’s dutiful daughter, repeating the arguments she had heard from the adults, told the woman she could not wear it. “All right, Miss Saint,” the relative replied, “how is it that you have a foreign doll?” The doll was Indira’s favorite—“my friend, my child,” she called her—and for days afterward she struggled with her conscience, unable to decide, she said, between her love for her doll and what she saw as her duty to her country. “At last I made my decision,” she said. “Quivering with tension, I took the doll up on the roof-terrace and set fire to it. Then
tears came as if they would never stop and for some days I was ill with a temperature.”

Although the adults in the household doted on Indira when they had the time, very little in her life was normal. One of her favorite activities was to climb up on a table and deliver thunderous political speeches to the household servants. Once an aunt found her with her arms outstretched on the veranda, talking to herself; Indira said she was Joan of Arc being burned at the stake. Years later, Mrs. Gandhi told one of her biographers that her life in the household “was really all very unsettled. There was no regularity about meals, and I never knew where my parents were or when or if they would come home. By that time my mother was also involved in the freedom fight. I used to want to be with them whenever they went out, but I was never allowed to.” Indira’s aunt, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who later became a bitter political rival of Mrs. Gandhi, wrote in her autobiography,
The Scope of Happiness
, that for her niece, “the long years alone gave her strength of character, but they took away from her some of the qualities a settled home helps to develop—tolerance and a kindred spirit. Instead of compassion she developed hardness—a feeling that life had not been fair, therefore she would have her revenge.”

Adding to Indira’s unhappiness was the scornful treatment of her mother by the more sophisticated English-speaking women in the Nehru household. “She thought her mother had been wronged,” Sharada Prasad told me. Kamala became a passionate feminist within the freedom struggle, urging women to revolt against domination by their husbands and their lack of education, but her daughter, who had never been stifled, did not follow her mother’s path. “She said, ‘My mother was a feminist, but I am not,’ ” Prasad recalled. “By her time she felt it was so much easier.” And yet Kamala taught her daughter one painful, important lesson. “I saw how my mother was hurt by people,” Mrs. Gandhi once said, “and I made up my mind never to let people hurt me.”

Indira’s formal studies began at boarding schools in India and Switzerland, none of them as educational as the Nehru household, where history was unfolding every day. “It just seemed to me that what they were trying to teach had nothing to do with life,” Mrs. Gandhi said years later. After boarding school she spent a brief but happy year at the university at Shantiniketan in West Bengal, founded by Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and freedom fighter. Nehru, in a letter to Tagore’s secretary, informed the university of his
requirements for his daughter’s education, revealing what were radical views about women in the India of the 1930s. “I dislike the education which prepares a girl to play a part in the drawing room and nowhere else,” Nehru wrote. “Personally if I had the chance I would like to have my daughter work in a factory for a year, just as any other worker, as a part of her education.” In a background report sent with Indira’s application, Nehru further instructed: “Her parents would like her later to specialize in some subject or subjects which would enable her to do some socially useful work … and at the same time enable her to be economically independent, so long as the present structure of society lasts. She is not likely to have an unearned income and it is not considered desirable by her parents that she should depend for her subsistence on a husband or others.” Such expectations, as forward-thinking as they were, put enormous pressures on Indira. As Prasad said, “She always felt that she had to be worthy of her parents.”

In 1936, after battling tuberculosis for nearly two decades, Kamala Nehru died, leaving Indira, at eighteen, in despair. The following year, still suffering from her mother’s death, she became an indifferent student at Somerville College at Oxford. A shy young woman, she was intimidated by the intellectuals she had entrée to as Nehru’s daughter. The widow of Harold Laski, the British political scientist and economist, remembered Indira as a “mousy, shy little girl who didn’t seem to have any political ideas.” Indira returned to India in 1941 without finishing at Oxford, and brought with her Feroze Gandhi, an exuberant young socialist from the London School of Economics who had been active in Congress party politics and had known the Nehru family for years. Shocking everyone, Indira announced that she intended to marry Feroze, who was no relation to Mahatma Gandhi. Letters poured in from across India, most of them abusive and threatening objections to the union of Indira, who as a Kashmiri Brahmin was considered to be among the most racially pure Brahmins in the country, and Feroze, a Parsi. Even the open-minded Nehrus were opposed to the marriage, although not on religious grounds; they worried instead that Feroze’s lower-middle-class background would not be compatible with Indira’s aristocratic roots. Finally Mahatma Gandhi himself gave the couple his blessing, and the two were married in March 1942.

That summer, in a dramatic turning point in the battle for independence, the Congress party adopted its historic “Quit India” resolution against the British, and by September both Indira and Feroze were in
prison. Indira had been arrested while addressing a public meeting in Allahabad, and in later years she would refer to this as the most dramatic event of her life. Certainly it legitimized her; a stay in jail, for Congress party members, had become a credential that one needed in the nationalist struggle. The well-educated went so far as to see it as a chance for reflection and intellectual improvement. As Indira’s aunt, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, wrote: “Popular jail reading among the educated were the French and Russian revolutions and Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
.” For twenty years, Indira had stood on the sidelines while her elders were taken to prison, but now, at the age of twenty-five, she could at last feel a part of the movement. “I had made up my mind that I had to go to prison,” she said. “Without that … something would have been incomplete.”

Indira was taken to Naini Prison in Allahabad and shared a squalid barrack with her cousin and her aunt. Since childhood, she had visited her parents in jail, but as she once said, “What a world of difference there is between hearing and seeing from the outside and the actual experience. No one who has not been in prison for any length of time can ever visualize the numbness of spirit that can creep over one.” The roof leaked, chunks of plaster fell periodically from the ceiling, a small corner of the barrack served as a bathroom and there was grit in the food. She was permitted to see Feroze only once before he was transferred to another prison. She was released nine months later—an internment that can scarcely be compared with her father’s total record of nine years. But unlike Nehru, who used his years in prison to write his best books and formulate his political ideas, Indira, a doer rather than a thinker, came to a dead end during her time in jail. As she said years later: “It was only when I left prison that I suddenly found I had cut off my emotions and intellect, and I had been living only at a surface level.”

A few months later Feroze was also released from prison, and the couple settled down for a period of relative stability in Allahabad. Rajiv was born in 1944 and Sanjay in 1946, the year that Nehru became prime minister of a provisional government in anticipation of full Indian independence. Kamala had been dead for ten years, and Indira became her father’s official hostess in New Delhi, a job she later said she “hated,” and which forced her to split her time between a famous, charismatic father living in the excitement of the prime minister’s house and a resentful husband smoldering back home in small-town India. The marriage, which had always been difficult, began to fall
apart. Invariably, when Indira returned to her husband, she would receive a telegram from her father, telling her that important guests were arriving and she should come at once. “My father would feel so hurt if I didn’t come that it was very difficult to say no,” Mrs. Gandhi said. Yet in Delhi, she claimed, she was “simply terrified by the so-called social duties. Although I met a large number of people, I wasn’t good at ‘socializing’ and small talk and that sort of thing.” There were always overnight guests at the prime minister’s residence, and meals to be served from breakfast to dinner. Indira planned the menus, supervised the housekeeping, looked after heads of state and, for nearly two decades, submerged herself in her father’s life. In 1951, she wrote to Dorothy Norman that “if someone asks me at the end of the week what I have been doing, I can’t really answer but moment by moment the odd jobs seem important and urgent. On the whole it is a frustrating life. Long ago when I was a student in England, I went to Harold Laski for advice about my studies. He said, ‘Young woman, if you want to amount to something you had better start on your own life right now—if you tag along with your father you won’t be able to do anything else.’ But there doesn’t seem to be any choice, in the sense that I
felt
my father’s loneliness so intensely, and I felt also that whatever I amounted to, or whatever satisfaction I got from my own work, would not, from a wide perspective, be so useful as my ‘tagging along.’ ”

Yet Mrs. Gandhi was active behind the scenes in social welfare work and the women’s wing of the Congress party, traditionally a political graveyard that restricted women to those do-good tasks that bored the men. The hard work of Nehru’s daughter, however, did not go unnoticed, and by 1955 Mrs. Gandhi, now familiar to millions of Indians, who had seen her at her father’s side, was elected to the twenty-one-member Congress Working Committee, the party’s powerful national executive council. Although she remained quietly in the background, it was a small step toward a political career in her own right. In 1959, she was named president of the Congress party, a move widely seen as engineered by Nehru, who apparently needed an absolute loyalist to oversee the infighting among the membership. His daughter knew the party regulars from her days as her father’s hostess and had already begun to display some acute political skills.

During her eleven months as Congress president, Indians got a first look at the emerging politician, whose maneuverings in those months to dismiss a popularly elected Communist government in the southern
state of Kerala indicated that she was willing to put the fortunes of the Congress party above Indian democracy. The next year Mrs. Gandhi turned down the offer of another term as president in part because of her concerns about her father’s failing health, but it was her own husband who died nine months later, leaving his estranged wife in stunned anguish. “We quarrelled over every conceivable subject, but the strong bond of affection never weakened,” Indira Gandhi wrote to Dorothy Norman. “I feel as if I were all alone in the midst of an unending sandy waste.” In 1964, when Nehru died of a stroke, Indira Gandhi withdrew for weeks, bursting into tears whenever anyone offered condolences. The new prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, made Mrs. Gandhi Minister of Information and Broadcasting, an undistinguished cabinet post that did not meet her expectations. Indeed, for the first time she seemed to be nurturing serious political ambitions. She had no husband and no father and seemed aware that she had to start developing, as Harold Laski had told her, a life of her own. She made speeches across India, invoking the dreams of her father, and complaining in private about what she saw as the aimlessness of Shastri’s government. She stumbled upon a chance to prove herself during a brief holiday in Kashmir, when several thousand Pakistani troops crossed the border into the state, igniting what became the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War. Mrs. Gandhi’s refusal to leave until the situation was stable helped maintain Indian morale and later earned her praise as “the only man in a cabinet of old women.”