Nehru: The Invention of India

A Note on Sources

As stated in the Preface, this book has involved no original research into the archives; it is a reinter-pretation of material largely in the public domain. The extensive quotes from Jawaharlal Nehru are all from his own published writings (and in a few cases from newspaper accounts of his statements); the volumes I have consulted are listed in the Select Bibliography that follows. I have delved into several biographies, the most useful of which I found to be Sarvepalli Gopal’s magisterial three-volume study and M. J. Akbar’s highly readable work, both of which wear their political points of view on their sleeves. The textual references to both men, and to the more disappointing effort of Stanley Wolpert, relate to their biographies listed in the Bibliography. The text also cites such writers as André Malraux, Norman Cousins, and the Indian diplomat Badruddin Tyabji; once again the corresponding books may be found in the Bibliography. Rafiq Zakaria’s 1959 anthology and K. Natwar Singh’s recent compilation of tributes expressed by a wide range of world figures shortly after Nehru’s death is the source of many of the quotations in chapters 9 and 10.

I was privileged to have several conversations with Phillips Talbot, who first met Nehru as a visiting student in 1939 and over the next twenty-five years as journalist, scholar, and diplomat, and the quotations from him are from these conversations, not from any published material. From my departure for graduate school in the United States in 1975 to his death in 1993, my late father, Chandran Tharoor, peppered me with a remarkable array of newspaper clippings on Indian politics and history, many of which I have used and quoted from. My friends Arun Kumar and Ramu Damodaran have read the manuscript with care and offered me invaluable information and in-sights of their own, for which I am most grateful.

It hardly needs stating that, in distilling such a wealth of material into a short volume, I have made my own selections of facts and material on which to dwell. The responsibility for any errors of detail or interpretation, and indeed of omission, are mine alone.