Nehru: The Invention Of India - Hardcover

Tharoor, Shashi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 155970697X ISBN 13: 9781559706971

Publisher: Arcade Publishing, 2003

Synopsis

The author of India: From Midnight to the Millennium provides a close-up portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, the influential politician who led his newly independent nation from colonialism into the modern world, and his lasting legacy in terms of India's history and world role. 12,500 first printing.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

The Indian consensus that Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) constructed as the nation's first prime minister, Tharoor writes with unsparing objectivity, "has frayed: democracy endures, secularism is besieged, nonalignment is all but forgotten, and socialism barely clings on." Nehru seems "curiously dated, a relic of another era." His goal of creating "a just state by just means" has been undermined by the centrifugal forces of Indian religious and cultural divisiveness. Tharoor's short and highly readable life never lacks for pithy phrases and strong opinions. A senior U.N. official, Tharoor (India: From Midnight to the Millennium) writes with shrewd wit and cautious ambivalence about Nehru, whom he admires as the Thomas Jefferson of India-a foe of colonialism, a statesman of grace and style and a master of uplifting words-but whose leadership failed in forcefulness and whose political heirs were without his charm. Nehru's privileged Kashmiri background and Harrow-Cambridge education left him replete with paradoxes-a reserved aristocrat yet a near Marxist, a demigod (to the masses) and a democrat (to himself), a political prisoner of the British for nine years who was even more a prisoner to his own "vainglory," an idealist with "a moralism that stood somewhere to the left of morality." Tharoor's distant villain is the curmudgeonly Winston Churchill, whose staunch "racist imperialism," particularly toward India, made his "subsequent beatification as an apostle of freedom... all the more preposterous." This engaging short biography is a scrutiny of a major 20th-century leader from his "Little Lord Fauntleroy" beginnings to his transformation into a historic figure wearing a halo in his own lifetime.
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From Booklist:

Tharoor presents an uncomplicated overview of Nehru's life that is, with rare exceptions, an admiring one. True, the author admits, Nehru hung on to power too long, dying in harness in 1964, but the ledger definitely is positive in Tharoor's accounting. Tharoor confines his opinions to asides, however, and directly narrates Nehru's personal chronology: his education in England; his arranged marriage and attachment to daughter Indira; and, naturally, his political relationships during the protests of the 1920s and 1930s and the negotiations of 1945-47 that eventuated in such tragedy. Readers new to Nehru will receive an efficient introduction by Tharoor. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 155970697X
• ISBN 13: 9781559706971
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304