Katherine Frank took six years to write this meticulously detailed account of Indira which invited a lot of flak (more) due to her brief focus on the intimate vista of Indira’s life. Though I am not trying to pull chestnut out of fire here but I would like to opine that there is hardly any conclusion that Frank has drawn in her book about the rumours of Indira’s possible involvement with her German teacher at Shantiniketan, or then M. O. Mathai or Dinesh Singh or Dhirendra Brahmachari, not to mention P. K. Haksar or the entire male population of India. The misapprehension in the Congress camp is an old age thin-skinned habit of trying to see demons where they are not. If anything, this is not an attempt by Frank to show Indira’s feet of clay.
The book is written with the precision and exhaustiveness of a scholar, footnoting sources ubiquitously. However, there is little, if any analysis of these facts, possibly due to the reason that as a foreign biographer, Katherine does not come close enough to have the sensitivity to analyse the life of Indira.
“Indu boy” was born in the same month as the Russian Revolution and she always felt that her life was linked to the trajectory of history. She had a tough childhood due to her mother’s illness and finally sad demise; and even more challenging married life with Feroze. Indira grew upto become a gutsy politician who took draconian measures to suit her political motives. Charged guilty of illegal practices in election campaigns, she refused to resign and declared a state of emergency. However, Frank supports her authoritarianism by saying that she “was guilty of hubris but not megalomania.”
Further reads: Pupul Jayakar’s Indira Gandhi: An Intimate Biography (1993) and Inder Malhotra’s Indira Gandhi: A Personal and Political Biography (1991).
