The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

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  UNCOMPROMISING AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT, BLACKLISTED DURING THE MCCARTHY ERA

  JULY 2, 1984

  Lillian Hellman, who died in Boston on June 30 at the age of 77, was one of the most distinguished playwrights of the twentieth century.

  Born in New Orleans on June 20, 1907, she came of an old-established if somewhat stormy deep Southern background; when she wrote of her own life in two indirectly autobiographical collections of character studies (An Unfinished Woman published in 1969 and Pentimento published in 1974) it was clear that her recollections of childhood were marked by an uncertain affection for many of her relatives and a feeling of alienation from the more conservative traditions of the American South in the early years of the century.

  In 1925 she married the writer Arthur Kober and went with him to Paris where she began to write short stories for a magazine with which he was involved; the marriage did not last long however — it was her only one — and by 1926 she was back in New York working as a reader for the celebrated publishing house of Horace Liveright.

  Early in the 1930s Lillian Hellman met Dashiell Hammett, the writer who was to share her life until his death 30 years later and with whom she was to be blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Her first produced play, The Children’s Hour, reached Broadway in 1934 and dealt prophetically with the tragic effects of manipulated public opinion and subsequent victimisation: it was first filmed as These Three and later re-made as The Loudest Whisper.

  Throughout the rest of the 1930s and early 1940s Miss Hellman continued to work as a playwright. The Little Foxes (1939) and Another Part of the Forest (1946) told the tangled and tortured history of a decadent Southern family, while Watch on the Rhine (1941) was about dogged anti-Nazis. Miss Hellman had also by this time been involved with the Spanish civil war, and with the early anti-Nazi underground; her life had moved some way from its sheltered and cloistered beginnings. A section of Pentimento made into the film Julia was about an American woman involved in getting Jews and dissidents out of Nazi Germany.

  Her playwriting and her later autobiographical work was marked by a lean, spare, uncompromising and peculiarly American style — seeing her plays in Britain, she once said, was “like seeing them in translation”.

  It is tempting to see in her one of the first of the modern feminists — the kind of lady played most often by Katharine Hepburn in Hollywood films of the 1930s. More seriously, her refusal to compromise with the changing times got her into trouble in California where she had gone to write screenplays in the late 1940s.

  Taken before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, and refusing to answer questions about the politics of her friends, she stated: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions”. This experience formed the basis of another autobiographical work, Scoundrel Time (1976); Maybe (1980) was also autobiographical.

  In later years Miss Hellman turned to theatrical adaptations — Anouilh’s The Lark in 1955, Voltaire’s Candide as the book for a musical in 1956, and Blechman’s How Much? as My Mother, My Father and Me in 1963. She also edited some of Hammett’s short stories as well as a collection of Chekov letters, but much of her later life was spent travelling and working on the character sketches which made up her first two part-autobiographical collections. The cast for these included such friends and enemies as Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker as well as Hammett and her many relatives from the deep South, but she retained the observer’s distance — she once described herself as a loner, not by choice but certainly by temperament.

  Dedicated as Lillian Hellman was to the principles of freedom and tolerance, she took a lighter view of her own calling. “Despite many disillusions,” she once wrote, “I still cling obstinately to the belief that writing can be done with your left hand while your right is busy with something else”.

  Lillian Hellman, playwright and screenwriter, was born on June 20, 1907. She died on June 30, 1984, aged 77

  INDIRA GANDHI

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  RULER OF INDIA WITH A TALENT FOR POLITICAL MANOEUVRE BUT WHO, FATALLY, COULD NOT CURB THE DISAFFECTION OF THE SIKHS OF PUNJAB

  NOVEMBER 1, 1984

  Mrs Indira Gandhi, who was Prime Minister of India for most of the last 18 years, and who came to dominate the country’s affairs through her combination of personal aura and sheer political toughness, was assassinated yesterday in Delhi at the age of 66.

  Much of her appeal derived from the fact that she was the only daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India and widely revered as a father figure. This gave the impression of a Nehru dynasty ruling India, and she herself lent strength to this by the way in which she closely associated first her younger son, Sanjay, and after his death his elder brother, Rajiv, with her political activities. It was clear that she was preparing the way for a possible succession.

  But she herself could not have achieved the pre-eminence she did without considerable gifts of her own: she showed a talent for political manoeuvre and, frequently, ruthlessness. It was this latter quality which led her to declare a state of emergency in June, 1975, which in turn led to severe restrictions on democratic liberties, and fears of the installation of a dictatorship.

  To her credit, however, she decided to call a general election in March, 1977; this revealed a decisive repudiation of her and her associates’ policies, and the attachment of the Indian electorate to democratic principles. She accepted the verdict, and in a remarkable recovery, admittedly helped by the incompetence of her successors, fought her way back to the Prime Minister’s office.

  India, a vast country of disparate peoples, widespread poverty and turbulent climate, is a hard country to rule, let alone lead to greater achievement. The difficulties with outlying regions are demonstrated by the fact that Mrs Gandhi met her death at the hands of Sikhs, only months after she had ordered the Indian Army to storm the Golden Temple at Amritsar, where Sikh extremists had holed up. Another problem area, among many, was Assam, where some 3,000 people are estimated to have died in ethnic clashes in the past two years.

  Mrs Gandhi’s response to such situations was to try to impose control, if not rule, from Delhi — often by less than scrupulous means. It can be argued that just as the Indian economy has shown a modest improvement over the years, so she, by her own personal presence and determined style, did much to hold the country together.

  In international relations she aimed, by her own account, to steer a middle course between the two superpowers — though to Western eyes this appeared to involve a particularly close relationship with the Soviet Union, and an attitude of suspicion towards the United States. Certainly there was no doubt of her pursuance of Indian national objectives, seen in her intervention in the war between East and West Pakistan in 1971, and the explosion of a nuclear device in 1974, putting India among the nuclear powers.

  Mrs Gandhi was not a political thinker, or a skilled administrator. But she inherited from her father an intolerance of linguistic or religious fanaticism, which stood her in good stead, as well as a belief in state intervention in the economy. Perhaps most important of all, she understood power and, under a deceptively mild exterior, was determined to do what appeared necessary to attain and retain it.

  Indira was born in Allahabad on November 19, 1917, into a wealthy Kashmiri Brahmin family. Her father, educated at Harrow, Cambridge and the Inner Temple, had married Kamala Kaul the daughter of a Delhi Kashmiri businessman. She was beautiful but, compared with the Nehru family, unsophisticated and she was not made welcome by some of the women of the family. This brushed off on Indira, only child of the marriage, and the residual effect later marred relations between her and her father’s distinguished sister, Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, and other members of the family.

  The rich Allahabad household provided a fascinating, but sometimes uncomfortable background for Indira’s childhood. Although highly westernized and Anglophile in style, it became a centre for
India’s growing nationalist movement and she grew up in an intensely political atmosphere among the Congressmen of the day.

  It was a very lonely life for the child as her father and mother were often in jail and her grandfather, Motilal Nehru, joined the movement led by Mohandas Gandhi for independence, abandoned his lavish life style and spent an obligatory spell in prison.

  It was during these years that she decided that she would model her life on that of Joan of Arc and could be observed practising poses suitable to that famous and feminine opponent of the British.

  Her education was spasmodic and varied; she spent some time at the International School in Geneva, at various schools in India, happy days at Shantiniketan, the university established in Bengal by Rabindranath Tagore, and finally at Oxford. She went up to Somerville in 1937, a year after her mother had died of tuberculosis in Switzerland. She enjoyed her stay at Oxford, but was longing to return to India and to her father, and she finally arrived in Bombay in 1941, without a degree but escorted by the man she was later to marry. He was Feroze Gandhi, a Parsi student who had courted her assiduously but with great discretion since she was 16.

  Indira visited her father in prison and told him that she had made up her mind to marry Feroze. He was not at all pleased and there was also something of a public outcry because marriage between members of different communities was not as common then in India as it is now. Mahatma Gandhi, however, spoke up for the young couple whose love was breaking through traditional barriers, and in early 1942 they were married.

  They had two children — both boys, Rajiv and Sanjay — but it was an unusual marriage, particularly for the conservative society in which they lived. With the coming of independence, Nehru became India’s first Prime Minister, and Indira felt it her duty to act as his hostess and to look after him. Relations between father-in-law and son-in-law were uneasy and as his own political career as an MP developed, Feroze lived apart from his family although they frequently met.

  He died in 1960, and although Indira was aware of the vicious gossip among Delhi socialites about her married life, she would never accept that it had been less than successful. She and her husband had both been jailed by the British on their return from their honeymoon in Kashmir, and each of them in their own fashion was absorbed in politics for the rest of their lives.

  As hostess to her father from 1947 until his death in 1964, Indira not only travelled with him on his many journeys abroad and helped to entertain the world’s leaders who visited Delhi, but gained a unique insight into the Indian political scene. She lived right in the eye of the many storms that shook the country, and had a privileged position from which to observe the motivation and methods of many of her father’s colleagues. She was observing them while they largely ignored her and when the time came for her to deal with them as Prime Minister, she demonstrated a penetrating understanding of their weaknesses.

  She also had seen her father often seeking agreement through conciliation and losing ground by vacillation, and seems to have made up her mind that her style would be different, without undue concern for constitutional niceties, the claims of personal loyalty or the opinions of critics.

  The first indications she gave of her own style came in 1959 when she accepted the post of Congress President. She showed dynamism and a certain lack of principle in fostering the agitation which led to the unseating of the Communist Government of Kerala State and the return to power of a Congress Ministry in somewhat dubious alliance with Socialists and the Muslim League.

  Mrs Gandhi was elected leader of the Congress party, and thus Prime Minister, in February 1966, after the sudden death of Lal Bahadur Shastri in Tashkent. She was then Minister of Information, having been brought into the cabinet by Shastri when he succeeded her father less than two years before.

  Her term in the Congress presidency had been brief, but those who had called on her ailing father for discussions on party or even policy matters had become accustomed to being told to “talk it over with Indira”, and the idea of her becoming prime minister had even been in the air on Nehru’s death in 1964, though Shastri was then more acceptable.

  Even in 1966 it was primarily for negative reasons that Mrs Gandhi was advanced to the prime ministership. From the point of view of the Congress party’s organization men, the man to stop was Morarji Desai (the former Finance Minister, who had been dropped from the Cabinet by Nehru and passed over in favour of Shastri after Nehru’s death). Mrs Gandhi, hailing from Uttar Pradesh, the heartland of Congress politics, and even more significantly from the Nehru family, had wide acceptability in the party.

  There were, however, setbacks to Congress in the polls in the early days of her prime ministership, and dissatisfaction with her leadership — or, as her critics had it, the absence of leadership — was openly expressed. The “queen-makers” who backed her original election as leader of the party and therefore prime minister began to consider alternatives.

  The opportunity to assert their dominance came with the death in the summer of 1969 of Dr Zakir Husain, the president of India. The party leadership moved to fill the office with one of their own men, Sanjiva Reddy, who was known to be personally ill-disposed to Mrs Gandhi. The party leadership appeared united behind Reddy’s candidacy, and at first Mrs Gandhi seemed to bow to the inevitable — going so far as to nominate Reddy herself.

  But in fact — and naturally — she was strongly resistant to the nomination; she had her own candidate, and she meant to fight for him. She came into the open, opposing Reddy, putting her weight behind the then vice-president, V. V. Giri.

  In this struggle Mrs Gandhi showed her true mettle. She used every weapon at her command, challenging normal party conventions and in consequence splitting Congress. By using the powers of her office to legislate by ordinance she outmanoeuvred her opponents (and that her manoeuvres were later ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court did not make them any less effective); she succeeded in presenting a pure struggle for office as if it were an ideological contest, a battle for the socialist soul of Congress — and she won hands down.

  The extent of her victory was not at first apparent. Two parties, each claiming to be the true Congress, emerged from the struggle. But Mrs Gandhi was Prime Minister, her candidate had won the presidency, and the rival (or “organization”) Congress was left in very poor shape.

  At this time, however, the decisiveness and effectiveness she had shown in the party’s internal struggles were not complemented by equivalent achievements in the field of government. Measures such as the cutting off of the princes’ privy purses and the nationalization of the major banks were not in themselves of great significance, when judged against the problems Mrs Gandhi’s government faced. The late 1960s were years of great difficulty; bad food years combined with the consequences of the short 1965 war with Pakistan had left the economy in worse straits than usual.

  Elections for the central parliament were due again in 1972, but Mrs Gandhi seized the initiative, obtained a dissolution a year in advance, and won an astounding victory. Far from seeing her majority reduced, she saw it increased beyond anything conceived as possible. Her Congress party was returned to a more than two-thirds majority in the Indian parliament — a strength nearly as great as the most it had achieved in the first, heady years after independence.

  If 1971 began with Mrs Gandhi’s triumph at the polls, it was to end with an even greater triumph, and one that, like the election, was taken to be very largely a personal one. At the end of March, 1971, as a result of demands for autonomy in what was then East Pakistan, the Pakistani army acted to put down the autonomy movement, and return the province to the centre’s authority. The army acted with great ferocity, and killing and counter-killing spread and intensified.

  Refugees by the scores of thousands and then by the million poured into India, presenting the government there with a huge and explosive problem. Even before the refugee problem reached such magnitude, the Delhi government was seized of course with t
he question of what India’s role should be: to stand back, and watch the Pakistani army crush the Bengalis? Or to intercede and bring the dissolution of Pakistan, the emergence of the new state of Bangladesh? The multitude of refugees made an answer to the question imperative, and the record of events suggests that towards the end of April the Indian government decided on support for the Bengalis, including military intervention if need be.

  The eventual Indian intervention on behalf of Bangladesh (as East Pakistan now became) was brilliantly successful on both the military and the diplomatic level. Except for Washington and Peking — where the Indian action was strongly criticized — most world capitals were at least silent, while some praised India.

  Understandably, this triumph too redounded solidly to the credit of Mrs Gandhi in her own country.

  Every Indian felt, it seems, more confident of his identity and future, more alive to his role as an Indian, than he had been able to do in the preceding years of doubt and failure in India; and for this they all thanked Mrs Gandhi. In response she arranged for state elections, which she had originally wanted to postpone, to be held in early 1972, and her Congress Party was returned to power in every state where an election was held.

  Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi attracting crowds in London on a visit in 1978

  It was, perhaps, inevitable that the high hopes of 1971 and 1972 could not be sustained. Externally, the groundswell of international support for India’s intervention on the side of the Bengalis against Pakistan ebbed steadily away. It must in fairness be said that Mrs Gandhi showed both the authority and the magnanimity to resist the jingoistic demands from some political quarters in India which would have seen the country taking a wholly unyielding approach to the defeated rump of Pakistan. The 1971 military victory encouraged nevertheless in Indian foreign policy a disregard for the opinions of the outside world which sprang from the renewal of national confidence. This was shown in the explosion of India’s nuclear device in the Rajasthan desert in May, 1974, and the incorporation of Sikkim later that year.