Biography presents word-portraits of a range of fascinating or forgotten individuals in India and beyond.
In April 1931, Mohandas K. Gandhi attended an inter-faith meeting in Bombay. He had just been released from one of his many terms in prison. Now, while listening to Christian hymns and Sanskrit slokas, he had as his companions the Admiral’s daughter Madeleine Slade (known in India as Mirabehn) and the Oxford scholar Verrier Elwin. Thus, [...]
Marxism claims to offer a materialist approach to history, where class relations and the forces of technology are given more importance than the doings of individuals. In practice, however, political regimes based on professedly Marxist principles have indulged in an unprecedented worship of their leaders. Communist parties the world over brook no criticism of the Holy [...]
Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men. Joseph Conrad India’s two main religions, Hinduism and Islam, are both deeply patriarchal. Their scriptures and their historical practice have relegated women to an inferior status. Women were not allowed to assume positions of power and authority. Women were denied [...]
Last week, the novelist, essayist, and polemicist U. R. Ananthamurthy turned eighty. His Bangalore home is named ‘Suragi’, after a flower that retains its fragrance even after it has aged and dried up. Some might find the name self-regarding; but then Ananthamurty is a man with much to be immodest about. His novels Samskara and Bharathipura [...]
The most admired human being on the planet may be a one-time boxer named Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. To spend three decades in prison fighting racial oppression, and then guide and oversee the peaceful transition to a multi-racial democracy, surely ranks as the greatest personal achievement since the end of the Second World War. For the capaciousness [...]
In Zareer Masani’s recent memoir of his parents, And All is Said, he quotes a letter written to him by his mother in 1968. ‘Yesterday we went to Mrs Pandit’s reception for Rajiv Gandhi and his wife’, wrote Shakuntala Masani, adding: ‘I can’t tell you how dim she is, and she comes from a working-class family. [...]
When Dr Manmohan Singh went to call on Aung San Suu Kyi earlier this week, I wonder whether the great Burmese lady recalled her first encounter with India and Indians. In the 1950s, as a young teenager, she moved to Delhi with her mother, who had been appointed Burma’s Ambassador to India. The years she spent [...]
General Elections are all-India affairs, with citizens in twenty-eight states taking part to elect a new Parliament. On the other hand, elections to Legislative Assemblies have a particular resonance for the citizens of the state, or states, going to the polls. Some state elections, however, are of national significance. The first such was the Kerala elections [...]
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The importance of the India International Centre (IIC) in New Delhi is gauged, in part, by the number of armed security men who pass through its portals. These come to accompany—and, one supposes, protect—the big shots, the fat cats, the Ministers and MP’s and Ambassadors and Generals who wish to be seen at a place located, [...]