Tales from A Broken Era

Uma Vasudev is the biographer of Indira Gandhi, India's late Prime Minister.  Her two books, Indira Gandhi: Revolution in Restraint and Two Faces of Indira Gandhi cover the tumultuous years of Indira Gandhi's growth to power and the later controversial period of the nineteen seventies and the Emergency.  Her third book, Indira Gandhi; Courage Under Fire takes the late Prime Minister's life up to her assassination in 1984.  Uma Vasudev's first novel, Song of Anasuya came out in 1978 and set a trend in analytical structural form and its portrayal of Delhi's high society.  Her second novel, Shreya of Sonagarh ranges over the nuances of a crumbling feudal order and bureaucratic ascendance in India of the nineteen sixties.  It was based on her own observations over years in Madhya Pradesh as the wife of an IAS officer, the late L.K. Malhotra.  She also published and edited her own magazine, Surge.  She was editor of India Quarterly, the journal of the Indian Council of World Affairs.  Subsequently, briefly, editor, India Today.  As a free lance columnist Uma Vasudev has continued to cover topics ranging from politics to the arts, both in the literary field and for radio and television.  Her particular interest has been Indian classical music in which she herself took vocal training at Delhi's Gandharva Mahavidyalaya.  Her portraits of India's great ustads and gurus in classical music were the earliest to be published in The Illustrated Weekly of India in the late fifties in the form of personal interviews which are now of archival value.  She has coordinated a series on Indian classical musicians for the BBC entitled Eastern Sounds.