Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

  Just as Subbulakshmi felt ashamed of her mother, her mother was embarrassed that her daughter had abandoned classical music to become a popular singing starlet. For Sadasivam’s part, he appreciated the money his wife was making, but not the adulation she was receiving, especially from charismatic male film stars. At the same time, his friends in the national movement thought that Subbulakshmi’s representation of classical music could be the soundtrack for a new India.

  With this in mind, he decided to produce a final film for MS on the life of the iconic bhakti singer Mirabai (15). Released initially in Tamil as Meera (1945), a Hindi version followed, part of Sadasivam’s plan to make his wife a star (or saint) of India’s emerging national culture. As the poet and nationalist Sarojini Naidu said, “The story of Mira is the story of India, the story of Indian faith and devotion and ecstasy. Subbulakshmi’s performance [shows] that she is not an interpreter of Mira but Mira herself.”

  The final film achieved its purpose. Henceforth, Subbulakshmi had a faithfully devoted, all-India bandwagon. Not yet thirty when the film was first released, she would to the end of her life sustain her persona as a new-age bhakti saint: an artist who sang only for God, and for whom God was the only inspiration. MS herself reinforced this image: “At a time when so much is said about the liberation of women the world over,” she once wrote, “it is good to think of a woman whose soul wanted to liberate itself and merge with the Lord.”

  There is a tone of idiot savant in this that might make a contemporary feminist cringe, but Subbulakshmi was complicit in nurturing it. As she told an interviewer late in her life: “I have never gone out alone. I have never been educated. I have been brought up listening to elders … I never get angry with anyone on any issue.” However, such rare and tedious press statements don’t account for a life that included running away, across the state, from a marriage her mother had arranged, or living with one man while in love with another.

  While MS played placid and apolitical, Sadasivam worked to turn her musical success into cultural conquest. He used his political connections to present her in the highest circles of the national leadership and then the Indian government. She sang before Gandhi and Nehru, and for the common folk. She sang at the United Nations and across the United States—the world stage being Sadasivam’s greatest ambition. Above all, she sang to raise money for hospitals, schools, orphanages, TB clinics, and Hindu temples. Her husband worked her for causes as hard as her mother had worked her—and that choice, too, helped her go down in history not merely as a musician, but as the ideal of the cultured, virtuous, selfless Indian woman.

  As with many Indian women who have been elevated to canonical status, Subbulakshmi’s human reality got drained away and replaced by idealizing myth. It’s worth noting that her love letters, saved by the recipient, are among the few documents of her candid thoughts. The rest of the record was under her husband’s control. Yet the words so often used for her—tranquil, content, beatific—fit awkwardly with the choices she made when it counted. As in so many other stories of exceptional, hardworking women, their own ambition is denied a role in their achievement.

  In 1998, Subbulakshmi was the first musician to receive the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honor. Sadasivam had died the year before, after which Subbulakshmi never gave a public performance again.

  46

  INDIRA GANDHI

  The Center of Everything

  1917–1984

  Before senior Congress party leaders orchestrated Indira Gandhi’s ascent to the young nation’s prime ministerial office, a chhokari or gungi godiya—a “chit of a girl” or a “dumb doll”—was how some politicians described her. All the easier, the old congressmen thought, to make her a cat’s paw. But they soon grasped their misjudgment. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, India’s first (and, as of the present day, only) woman prime minister would subvert the political establishment and dominate India’s public life. After Margaret Thatcher, she was the most powerful woman of the twentieth century.

  While her brusque manner and ability to elicit the sycophancy of her colleagues are sometimes compared to Thatcher’s, a better mirror might be her American contemporary Richard Nixon, a man who found it so distasteful to negotiate with a woman leader as prickly as he that he termed Mrs. Gandhi a “witch” and a “bitch.” Although ideologically incompatible, both politicians harbored paranoid and antidemocratic tendencies, and both were deeply insecure. (“I was so sure I had nothing in me to be admired,” Mrs. Gandhi confided to a close friend days before her death in 1984.) Both were also acclaimed for international achievements while sabotaging their reputations at home.

  The comparison starts to falter thereafter. The choices Indira Gandhi made between 1975 and 1977, a time known as the Emergency, make Nixon’s corruption and cover-up during Watergate look like fudging a line call in badminton. She suspended democratic liberties, amended the Constitution, imprisoned political rivals (in total, some one hundred thousand are reckoned to have been rounded up), censored the press, and effectively coerced a mass sterilization of the poor. In short, she demonstrated just how fragile a young democracy can be.

  To the intelligentsia, there is no political figure in independent India more loathed. She’s seen as malevolent and megalomaniacal, and is considered responsible—to use Salman Rushdie’s line about her betrayal of India’s founding ideals—for “the smashing, the pulverizing, the irreversible discombobulation of the children of midnight.”

  Yet Indira Gandhi is a polarizing figure in Indian life, not a pariah like Nixon. If you shrink-wrap her story to the contours of a cautionary parable, and see the Emergency as an aberration in the history of Indian democracy, you miss something crucial. During years of severe economic crisis, for the poor Indian majority and for many minority citizens, she was their best hope for some prosperity and protection. Three years after being ousted from office in early 1977, she was voted back in; even today, she’s rated in polls as one of India’s most popular prime ministers.

  It’s one of many paradoxes about the Indira Gandhi era. She made India, officially, a socialist state while loosening trade policy and fostering crony capitalism. She ruthlessly controlled senior politicians, but was herself dominated, to the country’s great detriment, by her difficult younger son. And while she created the greatest threat to democracy in independent India’s history, weakening constitutional regularities established by her father, the enduring effect of her rule was to open the state to a deeper and more accessible democracy. Despite herself, she made democracy ordinary for Indians—not pretty, just ordinary. It was an achievement of stupendous proportions.

  * * *

  “Politics is the center of everything.” When she told The New York Times this in 1966, Indira Gandhi could have been articulating a family motto. Born in 1917, Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru’s only child was raised at their Allahabad home, which had been established by Jawaharlal’s father, Motilal, a prominent and ambitious lawyer of Kashmiri ancestry. When Indira was a toddler, Motilal threw his lot in with Mohandas Gandhi; through the house whirled a pageant of twentieth-century India’s political and intellectual life.

  Politics also exposed Indira, early on, to loss. Through the 1920s and ’30s, her parents, aunts, relatives, and family friends were all in and out of prison, at the pleasure of the Raj. Her father’s incarcerations were so frequent that their relationship became largely epistolary. Nehru’s first book, a survey of world history in which he tried to adopt a non-European perspective, was written as a series of letters to his daughter from prison—an anticolonial nationalist’s version of the Victorian father’s advice book. The Nehrus were not a typical Hindu “joint family.” In Motilal’s household, deliberation and personal choice were encouraged (within limits), and women were educated. Indira, though never an enthusiastic pupil, studied in India, in Geneva, with Tagore (32) in Shantiniketan, at an English boarding school, and at Oxford, after which it was expected that she would slip into a profession
al life.

  Her mother, only seventeen years older, wasn’t a role model for the life Indira would come to lead. Kamala’s family were unanglicized Kashmiris of modest means, and the strain of becoming a Nehru cracked her confidence and took its toll on her health. She died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-six. (Indira, who was not yet nineteen at the time, never quite forgave her hale, preening father and his two younger sisters for belittling her mother and her ailments.) Afterward, defying her father, Indira took up with and married Feroze Gandhy, a young Parsi nationalist who had cared for Kamala during her illness (the Parsi spelling of his family name was later altered to blur his origins).

  The unpublished correspondence between father and daughter from these years is charged with accusation and guilt, as well as an intense emotional interdependence. Indira was herself frequently ill in her youth, and she wrote to her father with the clarity of someone trying to set the historical record straight about his neglect—the Nehru household not being deficient in a sense of its own historical significance. When she ultimately married Feroze, in 1942, after years of her father’s resistance, she seemed to be trying, pointedly, not to be a Nehru.

  Four years later, though, she and two young sons were back with her father. Feroze had proven unfaithful, and erratic as an earner. There was little time to mourn the rupture. Within months, the country would be independent, her father its first prime minister, and she among the leading female faces new India was presenting to the world.

  At first, Indira was content with entertaining world leaders and managing the family’s new home, in the grand former residence of the British commander in chief. But her interests deepened as she accompanied her father overseas two dozen times between 1949 and 1959, including to the famous Bandung Conference of “nonaligned nations” in 1955. She’d dabbled in politics and economics at Oxford, but only now did the political animal in her genetic makeup begin to stir.

  Although Nehru’s letters make clear he initially saw his daughter as more of a calming influence than an adviser, she was soon taking over internal Congress matters for which he had little stomach, and moving up the hierarchy of the party. She also began to offer unsolicited advice to her father about appointments, and acted as an earpiece for political gossip, sometimes put up to it by Nehru’s manipulative private secretary, M. O. Mathai, and sometimes on her own.

  One scholarly biography, by Katherine Frank, suggests that the new confidence reflected a sudden improvement in her health. She had secretly been battling TB for more than fifteen years and had spent nearly a year at a Swiss sanatorium. After the discovery of new antibiotic treatments for the illness, she was cured. She became stronger, and her appearance changed. She campaigned strenuously on behalf of the Congress in the general elections of 1957, and in 1959 became the party president.

  Some Congress members were frustrated by the nepotism. Today, more than half a century later, the influence held by successive generations of Nehrus and other prominent political families has weakened the proclaimed openness of Indian democracy. Certainly, once Mrs. Gandhi had acquired power, she would do everything to see that it remained in the possession of her family. But rumors that Nehru schemed to have his daughter become party leader and, later, prime minister find little support in the historical record. Nor did Indira initially have designs on the job; by the 1960s she was writing to close friends that she’d had enough of public life—a feeling she acted upon when she stepped down from her Congress post instead of serving a second term. It would take a series of deaths to create the conditions, political and personal, that brought her to power.

  * * *

  In 1962, India went to war with China and lost, an experience that broke Nehru mentally and physically. By May 1964, at the age of seventy-four, he was dead. His successor, as he’d hoped, was Lal Bahadur Shastri, a politico loyal to Nehru’s wishes. Shastri offered Indira Gandhi the portfolio of Information and Broadcasting, a minor Cabinet position. She took it partly from a desire for financial security. Her estranged husband had died, leaving her no property. Her only income consisted of the royalties from Nehru’s books. The family mansion had been donated to the nation as a museum, and she could no longer live in the prime minister’s residence.

  When Shastri suddenly died two years later, five senior Congress leaders chose the not-quite-fifty-year-old Mrs. Gandhi (as she was now known, despite the absence of a Mr. Gandhi) to replace him. They were compelled by the combination of name recognition and her lack of a power base in the party or country. Given her gender and vague ideological vision, they expected her to defer to their ideas. What the men hadn’t properly factored in was the home tuition on power consolidation she had received as her father’s confidante. If there is such a thing as political osmosis, Mrs. Gandhi was its exemplar. Before long, she would become a master of the art of political undermining. But, first, she had trials to face.

  India was in economic distress when the inexperienced Mrs. Gandhi took up her post. The costly war with China had been followed by one with Pakistan, and a series of monsoon failures had led to famine. After several months in office, she went to the United States and, building on negotiations begun by Shastri, secured from President Lyndon B. Johnson a promise of nine hundred million dollars in aid and International Monetary Fund support. One of the conditions, however, was a near 60 percent devaluation of the Indian currency relative to the dollar. Returning from what had seemed a triumphant visit, she was burned by a firestorm at home: nationalist fears about India’s vulnerability to international pressures had flared up.

  Unlike most of her political peers, Mrs. Gandhi hadn’t before been subject to such heated criticism. Wounded as well by electoral setbacks to the Congress party, she attempted to win back support by altering her economic approach. Enacting protectionist measures, nationalizing banks and other industries, and engaging in populist politics by, for example, divesting India’s former maharajas of stipends that had been constitutionally promised, she worked to build a direct line to the Indian voters and improved her public speaking to sustain it. Her political growth in these years obliquely undercut the Congress party and its leaders, but a more direct blow was struck in 1969. Faced with opposition from the right, she split the party, moving it leftward while sidelining regional leaders—a self-preserving move that foreshadowed what later became an even more concerted drive to centralize and control.

  Following Congress tradition, her father had given regional bosses a fairly long leash. Those leaders hustled money from supporters and used it for electioneering in their own patches, in return for benefits negotiated from the center. Yet now Mrs. Gandhi changed the rules. Cash from the regions’ business houses would henceforth be delivered to her private secretaries (their offices famously two-doored, so no visitor was aware of who had preceded him), with the distribution of election expenses controlled directly from her office. The rupees came first in briefcases, then in suitcases: money that created a material chain of fidelity between her and her chosen party men. She was now able to make or break the political careers of congressmen across the country, a power no Congress leader had ever held before.

  Mrs. Gandhi’s march on mass adulation reached its apex in 1971, when she called a snap election and launched a cult-of-personality campaign. Appealing directly to the poorest and lowest in the social order (Dalits, Muslims, and women), she projected herself as a unique scourge of Indian poverty, through socialist policy. As she explained to a journalist, the language of socialism was what the people wanted to hear. Her policies over the next years of economic turmoil would position her well to the right of her rhetoric, but the rhetoric served: she won the 1971 election handily. She was poised, unwittingly, to become an international humanitarian superstar.

  While she was campaigning across India to “Remove Poverty,” the military leadership of West Pakistan had been pursuing a genocidal policy against the Bengalis of East Pakistan. Millions of refugees were flowing into India, and international condemnation
was generally sharp—except from the Nixon administration, which sided with Pakistan, in part because Nixon and Kissinger hoped that Pakistani officials would help them facilitate secret détente talks with China.

  Gandhi thought military action against Pakistan was inevitable, and she was given the pretext she sought when the trigger-happy general Yahya Khan, the Pakistani leader, launched an attack on India in December 1971. The war was short, and resulted in India’s first major military victory—a decisive one for Mrs. Gandhi. The “dumb doll” was now, according to a Gallup poll, the world’s most admired woman.

  International opinion was more mixed three years later, when, after years of research and development, India conducted its first successful nuclear test. Mrs. Gandhi was now one of very few non-Western leaders accorded respect—and a certain amount of apprehension—in world capitals. Perhaps this is why, in domestic politics, her sense of her own capability was creeping toward narcissism.

  Between 1973 and 1975, the Indian economy, still absorbing the cost of the upheaval in Bangladesh, was given a further knock by the global oil crisis. Year-on-year inflation surged over twenty points, to as much as 33 percent. Worried by public opinion turning against her, she closely tracked prices across the country, annotating weekly reports by hand. Her efforts to keep opinion onside perhaps revealed her to be less a natural dictator than she would have liked to be. Yet when parliamentary politics hindered implementation of her plans for economic stabilization, she began to think she could do without facing obstreperous and misguided parliamentarians. Confident of her legitimacy after her electoral success, and convinced of the urgent need for more state control in other arenas of life, she began to embrace a Jacobin (or what the historian Patrick Clibbens has called an “authoritarian republican”) conception of political power, in which acclaim at the polls was thought to absolve leaders from the other forms of accountability.