by Javier Moro
“I found myself face to face with a perfectly normal human being,” Sonia would say, “warm and welcoming. She did everything possible to make me feel at home. She spoke to me in French knowing I was more fluent in it than in English. She wanted to know about myself, my studies.” Rajiv must have told his mother something about how nervous she was, because Indira told her that “she too had been young, terribly shy and in love, and she understood me perfectly.”
Sonia, relaxed now, enjoyed that first meeting, which ended in the most familiar way possible. In fact the young couple had to attend a student party and Sonia asked if she could change into her evening dress in a room in the Embassy. But as soon as she went out, she tripped and the heel of her shoe ripped the hem of her evening gown. “Rajiv’s mother,” Sonia would tell, “in the calm fashion which I was to observe at close quarters later, took out a needle and black threat and proceeded matter-of-factly to stitch up the hem. Wasn’t that exactly the sort of thing my own mother would have done? All the small doubts which had remained vanished, for the moment at least.”
A current of sympathy passed between those two women, each so different in every way from the other, except in their love for Rajiv. Indira had not told her son, but the idea of one day having a foreign daughter-in-law had disconcerted her a little. Now, after meeting her, her reservations had vanished. “Apart from being pretty,” she wrote to her American friend Dorothy Norman, “she is a healthy, straightforward girl.”
Dorothy was glad to hear this news from her friend. It finally seemed that Indira was getting over the deep existential crisis she had been struggling with since the death of her husband Firoz four years earlier, and the more recent death of Nehru, her father. First a widow, and then an orphan. Furthermore, as her sons were abroad, she had been left on her own. The day that Rajiv had gone off to Cambridge, Indira had written to Dorothy: “I feel sad. It’s a heartbreaking moment for a woman when her son becomes a man. She knows he is no longer dependent on her and that from now on he is going to make his own way in life. And even though sometimes he may allow her to glimpse that life, she will always do so from the outside, from the distance of another generation. My heart is suffering.”
It was very hard for Indira to get over Nehru’s death, which had occurred one hot evening on May 27th, 1964. In his final days, she had not left him for a second, always attentive to his needs, giving him his medicines, supervising his diet, keeping visitors at bay. The last photo taken of them together, in which she can be seen squatting at his side, shows an expression of profound sadness and great tenderness on her face. Indira had spent the last years very close to him, organizing his agenda, coordinating the visits of foreign dignitaries such as the Shah of Iran, King Saud, Ho Chi Minh or Krushchev. She had come to act as a communication channel between him and his ministers. Nehru himself, on being named Head of State when India became independent in 1947, had asked her to take on the role of “first lady”, since his wife had passed away some time previously and he needed someone he could trust who knew how to run his household for him. Indira had accepted the challenge reluctantly at first, but then with real devotion. She had done it not only because she was an obedient Indian daughter, but because her marriage was breaking up. She was tired of the unfaithfulness of her husband, Firoz. In fact, they had been practically separated for some time, so she and her children moved into Teen Murti House, the beautiful residence of the Prime Minister of India in the centre of New Delhi. The first thing Indira did was to take down the collection of portraits of heroes of the Empire and send them to the Ministry of Defence. Then she replaced them with Indian handicrafts, and changed the heavy French curtains for raw cotton net curtains, the material that Gandhi’s spinning wheel made into the symbol of self-government. She arranged her father’s room with a low bed, surrounded with his books and favourite photos. One day she confessed that she would have liked to be an interior decorator, but Destiny had another role for her to fulfill.
If the death of Nehru had deprived the world of a giant — he had been the undisputed leader of the movement of non-aligned countries which grouped together over half the population of the world -; if he had left India without the symbol of its struggle for freedom and without its Prime Minister, and the Congress Party without its head, it had left his daughter Indira in the middle of a huge crater, as though his death had been a bomb that had wiped out everything around it. Nehru had been the dominating force and presence in her life, the light that had guided her steps. Perhaps that passion for her father was the consequence of how much she had missed him as a child, since he spent almost more time behind bars than at home because of his political activism. But when he came home his presence filled the family mansion of Anand Bhawan, in Allahabad, with joy. By then he was already a flesh and blood legend, always relaxed, however much tension there was around him, with a face that seemed sculpted by a chisel, a well-proportioned body, a shy yet inquisitive gaze, an open laugh and natural elegance which he emphasized by wearing a rose in the third buttonhole of his sherwani. He was very cultured, with a sharp sense of humour and his gifts as an orator brought him goodwill wherever he was. He felt just as much at ease in high society as he did in the prisons of Her Gracious Majesty. He held talks with everyone from his Cambridge professors to heads of government and Viceroys, from the Emperor King of England himself—and his jailers – to tribal chiefs in Afghanistan.
After his father, the great Motilal, left him on his own at boarding school in England at the age of 13, Nehru spent seven years learning Political Science and reading up on the latest advances of technology. He returned from England in 1912, an English gentleman. He began working in his father’s law practice, and Nehru senior became very satisfied with the substantial income provided by his son. The rest of his time he spent in the library of the Law School and the institution that was fundamental to life in colonial India, the club, where he spent many tedious hours sitting in the Chesterfield armchairs in the crowded rooms, discussing legal matters with old members of the British administration. A boring life, according to Nehru himself, which changed because of an apparently insignificant incident, when he received a visit from a group of peasants who asked him for help against some landowners who were using cruel, expeditious methods to expel them from their legitimate lands. Nehru agreed to go to their village with them to clear up the case. It was a three-day journey which changed him from a shy, proud lawyer who, according to his own words, had no idea how most Indians lived and worked, into a revolutionary. “Seeing them with their poverty, overflowing with gratitude, I felt a mixture of shame and pain,” he wrote, “shame at my easy, comfortable way of life and all the politics in the cities that ignores this vast multitude of half-naked sons and daughters of India, and pain on seeing so much degradation and unbearable poverty.”
In addition to this there came the news that arrived from the holy city of Benares, on the banks of the Ganges. Mohandas Gandhi, the yet unknown lawyer, had caused a real commotion by making an incendiary speech for the poor and against inequality at the opening of the Hindu University. “The exhibition of jewels you are offering us today is a splendid feast for the eyes,” he had said to an auditorium full of colonial authorities and Indian aristocrats, “but when I compare it to the face of the millions of poor people, I deduce that there will be no salvation for India until you take off those jewels and place them in the hands of the poor.” The audience reacted indignantly. Princes and dignitaries left the university precincts. Only the students applauded Gandhi’s words. But the echoes of that speech resounded throughout India, and Jawarharlal Nehru wanted to meet him.
“He was like a great breath of fresh air,” Nehru would write of Gandhi, “like a ray of light cutting through the darkness; like a whirlwind that questioned everything, but above all the way people’s minds worked. He did not come from above, he seemed to emerge from among the millions of Indians, speaking their language and incessantly focussing attention on them and their urgent needs.�
�� His strength was summarized in a concept he articulated in 1907, whose name is derived from the Sanskrit, satyagraha, which means the strength of truth, and whose purpose implied the idea of a powerful but non-violent energy for transforming reality. For the Indian masses, satyagraha represented an alternative to fear. It was the Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize for Literature, who gave Gandhi the title by which he would be known. Tagore called him Mahatma: “great soul”.
But the great soul needed a great second in command. And his disciple and friend Nehru became just that, and even though they had nothing in common, the combination of strengths that emerged from that intense friendship would end up changing the world. Because Gandhi was a man of faith and religion; Nehru was a rationalist, a sophisticated product of Harrow and Cambridge who hardly spoke the native languages of India. His years in Europe made him see the customs of many of his fellow Indians as ridiculous, such as not going out of the house on days that were not considered auspitious. In the most religious country in the world, he was an atheist who despised holy men and yogis. In his eyes they were responsible for the backwardness, the internal divisions and the domination of the foreign imperialists. Gandhi found him to be too much of a gentleman for his taste and did to him what he did with other members of the upper classes. He sent them out to the villages to recruit new members for the Congress Party and to get to know the real face of their homeland at the same time. Most of them had never seen the poverty of their fellow Indians. But that was the beauty of Gandhi’s movement: he put the upper classes in touch with the lowest classes, and these began to exist in the eyes of the rest of society. For the first time, India was subject to a wide people’s movement which rejected the way of life imposed from faraway London.
For thirty years, Nehru went round India on foot, in oxcarts and by train, galvanizing the population. But if Gandhi dreamed of an India of villages living in self- determination, an India without caste discrimination but deeply religious, Nehru dreamed of an India freed from its myths and poverty by industry, science and technology. For Gandhi, those were precisely the misfortunes of humanity. For Nehru, they were its salvation.
Their differences of opinion and vision had never put their friendship at risk, or the deep respect each man professed for the other. They were in agreement about the basics: achieving a united and independent India without any bloodshed. Nehru was convinced that, apart from being a saint, Gandhi was a genius. He valued his extraordinary skill in politics, his artistry at speaking with gestures that touched the people’s soul. When they met up with each other again, they would talk for a long time, exchanging points of view, assessing the latest progress in the struggle, or the latest setbacks. They would discuss strategy, get angry, then laugh, or they would simply meditate. Gandhi always made it clear that the torch of his struggle would one day come into Nehru’s hands, and he helped him into the presidency of the Congress Party on three occasions.
Indira was brought up in that environment where the border between family life and political life was non-existent. She used to tell Gandhi all her little girl’s confidences, explaining how much she missed her father, and telling him about her loneliness and her complexes for being an unattractive, sickly little girl. Nehru spent a total of nine years locked up, interrupted by short periods of freedom. His family life was so badly affected by it that once Indira had to tell a visitor, “I’m sorry, but my grandfather, my father and my mother are all in jail.”
Since Nehru’s death, Indira remembers things from her distant childhood, such as when she dressed up as Joan of Arc and imitated her father saying, “One day I shall lead my people to freedom,” as she harangued an imaginary crowd. Or like when she committed her “first political act” as she would later call it, which was to hit an English policeman who burst into the Anand Bhawan house to seize objects and furniture because her father and her grandfather, just like all the members of the party, refused on principle to pay bail when they were arrested. She wanted to join the Congress Party when she was twelve, but she was rejected as she was not old enough. She reacted in her own way, as she would do later in life, taking the bull by the horns. She gathered several hundred local children in the gardens of the mansion. Indira addressed them as her father would have done, calling on them to fight for the freedom of their country in spite of the dangers. In this way she created the “Monkey Brigade”, which consisted of children who acted as spies, put up posters, made banners and infiltrated police lines to pass messages on to party members. Her “army” came to consist of several thousand children who gave substantial support to those fighting. How happy she felt when her father was proud of her …!
Their relationship was always marked by suffering because of the distance that separated them, which only letters could mitigate: “I want you to learn to write letters and to come and see me in prison. I miss you a lot,” Nehru wrote to her when she was barely six years old. For her thirteenth birthday, Nehru wrote, “What present can I send you from the prison in Naini? My presents cannot be anything material or solid. They can only be made of air, mind, and spirit, like those a fairy might grant you, things that not even the high walls of a prison could hold back.”
Indira delved deep in those letters—there were hundreds of them, interesting, emotional correspondence, because both of them wrote very well — to prepare the commemorative exhibition, the one she was coming to London to inaugurate. She wanted to emphasize the compassionate side of her father as well as his incredible bravery and integrity, with the help of photos and objects, and put captions to them with phrases taken out of his writings and speeches. Of all the projects she had undertaken as Information Minister she gave herself to this one with special devotion. Not only out of sentiment, but because she thought that spreading and exalting Nehru’s memory was important for the world and for India in particular, a nation that needed the example of leaders that forged its unity.
Rajiv accompanied Sonia to visit the Nehru exhibition. It was a way of introducing the young Italian girl into the complex history of his country, and also a way of explaining who he and his family were. Sonia stood for a long time in front of the wedding dress of Rajiv’s grandmother, Kamala, and noted the ritual objects used in weddings in Kashmir. The caption under the photo explained that this woman had also been in prison and that she died of tuberculosis at the age of 36 … Sonia thought of Indira: with a father in jail and a sick mother … What kind of childhood had she had?
“Sad,” Rajiv told her. “My mother was also ill with tuberculosis. She was shut up in a sanatorium for long periods, and they advised her not to get married or have children …”
“Thank goodness she didn’t listen …” she said with a smile.
“She was saved thanks to the discovery of antibiotics. She was luckier than Grandmother …”
There was another sari on exhibit, a pale red one, with a silver border.
“That is the sari my grandfather wove in prison for my mother’s wedding … I hope you will wear it one day …” he told her jokingly. Sonia laughed, not very convinced. She could not imagine herself wrapped in that piece of cloth, which had been made inside a prison cell that had been reconstructed right there for the occasion, from enlarged photos: you could see the camp bed, the notebook in which you could read phrases from his prison diaries, the spinning wheel with which Nehru had spun the sari in a gesture that brought together his love of his daughter and that of his country … Gandhi had made the spinning wheel into a symbol of the struggle for independence. The English had ruined the rich Indian textile industry by putting outrageously high taxes on Indian products, and then selling industrial cloth woven in England. The spinning wheel was a symbol of rebellion, a way of saying that it was not necessary to purchase imported textile products because everyone could weave their own cloth. There was a letter which Sonia read. It was written by Nehru from prison to his daughter who was going to get married: “At first, weaving is very boring but as soon as you get into it, you
discover there is something fascinating about it. I spend half an hour a day on it. As that is not very long, I don’t produce very much, even though I am quite fast. Since I began, seven weeks ago, I have spun almost ten thousand metres. I understand you need thirty thousand for a sari. In four months time, I may have a sari for you!”
That sari was not only a wedding dress, it was also a flag. For Sonia, a wedding dress ought to be white, with a veil, like those she saw on Sundays in the springtime on the brides getting married in the church of St John the Baptist in Orbassano. Sometimes she forgot that Rajiv was Indian.
Films were being shown of the independence celebrations, and you could see the last parade of the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, and his wife Edwina, aboard a carriage literally besieged by the crowd. “It’s raining babies!” said an astonished Pamela, the Viceroy’s daughter, because women were throwing their babies up into the air to avoid them being crushed by the crowd. Rajiv told her that his mother saw how a woman decided that her baby would be safer with Lady Mountbatten and passed it to her. Edwina held it in her arms for a long time. You could see Nehru literally walking over the crowd, shouting for them to raise the yellow, green and white flag of the new nation which included an unusual symbol in the centre: a spinning wheel. Mountbatten struggled to push aside children and young people half-fainting from the confusion and get them to safety. The flag was welcomed with a tremendous roar of joy. A cannon shot could be heard, and then, as though by magic, a rainbow appeared in the sky, giving rise to all kinds of colourful interpretations of the meaning of that “act of God”.