Nehru: The Invention of India

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This short biography examines a great figure of twentieth-century nationalism from the vantage point of the beginning of the twenty-first. Deftly weaving personal facets with historical happenings, it tells the fascinating story of Jawaharlal Nehru’s life. Finely portrayed is the unremarkable youth who found his calling in politics and followed Gandhi into British jails; the aristocrat born to privilege who was moved by the plight of peasants because of his socialist convictions; the cosmopolitan who became the hero of the nationalist youth; the die-hard secularist who confronted Hindu mobs, trying to stop the partition violence; and the Prime Minister who desired to educate the poor, illiterate and idolizing Indian masses in democracy by his own personal example. The book also analyses the principal pillars of Nehru’s legacy to India: democratic institution building, staunch pan-Indian secularism, socialist economics at home and a foreign policy of non-alignment. Tharoor sees the first two as having been indispensable to the survival of our pluralism, and non-alignment to preserving our self-respect, though socialist economics, he believes , was disastrous – boosting poverty, stagnation and widespread corruption. All of these, however, were integral to a vision of Indianness that is fundamentally contested today. Beautifully written and sparkling with fresh insights, full of anecdotes retold with a novelist’s pen, this book offers us a reinterpretation of an extraordinary man and his times.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor After taking his doctorate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston, Shashi Tharoor worked for the United Nations in various humanitarian, peace-keeping and management roles for nearly thirty years. He was Under- Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information during the tenure of Kofi Annan and was the runner up in the election to replace him in 2006. He is an acclaimed novelist, author and newspaper columnist. He has 11 books and hundreds of articles to his name. His non-fiction titles include Nehru, the Invention of India (2003) and India: from Midnight to the Millennium (1997). His novels include The Great Indian Novel (1989) and Riot (2001). He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Indian cricket, which he has followed avidly from afar, and has played in such cricketing hotbeds as Singapore and Geneva.

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Bibliographic information

Title
Nehru: The Invention of India
Author
Edition
1st ed.
Publisher
ISBN
0670049859
Length
xii+261p.
Subjects