The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India - the Emerging 21st-Century Power

24. The Legacy of Gandhi and Nehru

THE TUMULTUOUS TWENTIETH CENTURY produced many remarkable leaders, but few nations were blessed with a pair quite like India's Mahatma Gandhi and his protégé Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi was idealistic, quirky, quixotic, and determined, a cross between a saint and a ward politician; like the best crossbreeds, he managed to distill the qualities of both and yet transcend their contradictions. Nehru was a moody, idealist intellectual who felt an almost mystical empathy with the toiling peasant masses; an aristocrat, accustomed to privilege, who had passionate socialist convictions; an Anglicized product of Harrow and Cambridge who spent over ten years in British jails; an agnostic radical who became an unlikely protégé of the saintly Mahatma. Together they brought a nation to freedom and laid the underpinnings for the world's largest democracy.

Gandhi's life was, of course, his lesson. He was unique among the statesmen of the twentieth century in his determination not just to live his beliefs but to reject any separation between beliefs and action. In his life, religion flowed into politics; his public persona meshed seamlessly with his private conduct.

Gandhi was the extraordinary leader of the world's first successful nonviolent movement for independence from colonial rule. At the same time he was a philosopher who was constantly seeking to live out his own ideas, whether they applied to individual self-improvement or social change: his autobiography was typically subtitled The Story of My Experiments with Truth.

No dictionary imbues “truth” with the depth of meaning Gandhi gave it. His truth emerged from his convictions: it meant not only what was accurate, but what was just and therefore right. Truth could not be obtained by “untruthful” or unjust means, which included inflicting violence upon one's opponent. For Gandhi, the way to truth was not by the infliction of suffering on one's opponent, but on one's self. It was essential to willingly accept punishment in order to demonstrate the strength of one's convictions.

To describe his method, Gandhi coined the expression satyagraha—literally, “holding on to truth” or, as he variously described it, truth force, love force, or soul force. He disliked the English term “passive resistance” because satyagraha required activism, not passivity. If you believed in truth and cared enough to obtain it, Gandhi felt, you could not afford to be passive: you had to be prepared actively to suffer for truth.

It was satyagraha that first bound Nehru to Gandhi, soon after the latter's return to India in 1915 from a long sojourn in South Africa, where his morally charged leadership of the Indian community against racial discrimination had earned him the sobriquet of Mahatma (“Great Soul,” a term he detested). Gandhi's unique method of resistance through civil disobedience, allied to a talent for organization gave the Indian nationalist movement both a saint and a strategist.

Gandhi's singular insight was that self-government would never be achieved by the resolutions passed by a self-regarding and un-elected elite pursuing the politics of the drawing room. To him, self-government had to involve the empowerment of the masses, the toiling multitudes of India in whose name the upper classes were clamoring for Home Rule. This position did not go over well with India's political class, which consisted in those days largely of maharajahs and lawyers, men of means who discoursed in English and demanded the rights of Englishmen. Nor did Gandhi's insistence that the masses be mobilized not by the methods of “princes and potentates” but by moral values derived from ancient tradition and embodied in swadeshi (self-reliance on indigenous products) and satyagraha.

To put his principles into practice, the Mahatma lived a simple life of near-absolute poverty in an ashram and traveled across the land in third-class railway compartments, campaigning against untouchability, poor sanitation, and child marriage, and preaching an eclectic set of virtues from sexual abstinence to the weaving of khadi and the beneficial effects of frequent enemas. That he was an eccentric seemed beyond doubt; that he had touched a chord among the masses was equally apparent; that he was a potent political force soon became clear. He captured the imagination of the nation by publicly breaking English law in the name of a higher law (“the voice of conscience”) and challenging the British to imprison him.

It was when the British passed the Rowlatt Act in March 1919, suspending the rights of defendants in sedition trials, that Jawaharlal Nehru became a serious follower of Gandhi, signing the “satyagraha pledge.” Despite the initial reluctance of his father, the redoubtable lawyer Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal soon followed Gandhi into the streets and into jail. Within a decade Motilal suggested to the Mahatma that “the need of the hour is the head of Gandhi and the voice of Jawahar.”

Gandhi did not need persuading: he pushed and promoted the younger man, winning him the presidency of the Indian National Congress in 1929, two months before his fortieth birthday. Despite differences over both tactics (the younger, more impatient Nehru wanted independence immediately whereas Gandhi believed Indians had to be made ready for their own freedom) and philosophy (the agnostic Nehru had little patience for the Mahatma's spirituality), the two men proved a formidable combination. Gandhi guided Jawaharlal to the political pinnacle; Nehru in turn proved an inspirational campaigner as president of the party, electrifying the nation with his speeches and tireless travel.

Where sporadic terrorism and moderate constitutionalism had both proved ineffective, Gandhi took the issue of freedom to the masses as one of simple right and wrong and gave them a technique to which the British had no response. By abstaining from violence Gandhi wrested the moral advantage. By breaking the law nonviolently he showed up the injustice of the law. By accepting the punishments imposed on him he confronted his captors with their own brutalization. By voluntarily imposing suffering upon himself in his hunger strikes he demonstrated the lengths to which he was prepared to go in defense of what he considered to be right. In the end, his moral rectitude and Nehru's political passion made the perpetuation of British rule an impossibility.

But neither could stave off the demand of the Muslim League for the creation of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland on the subcontinent, and the partition of India amid bloody communal rioting. When independence came amid tragedy, Gandhi felt he had failed.

Of course, there was much more to Gandhism — physical self-denial and discipline, spiritual faith, a belief in humanity and in the human capacity for selfless love, the self-reliance symbolized by the spinning wheel, religious ecumenism, idealistic internationalism, and a passionate commitment to human equality and social justice (no mean conviction in a caste-ridden society). The improvement of his fellow human beings was arguably more important to him than the political goal of ridding India of the British. But it is his central tenet of nonviolence in the pursuit of these ends that represents his most significant original contribution to the world. Though the Mahatma never won the Nobel Peace Prize, several who did — Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States, Adolfo Perez Esquivel in Argentina, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma — all sought inspiration from his teachings.

Upon the Mahatma's assassination in 1948, Nehru became the keeper of the national flame, the most visible embodiment of India's struggle for freedom. Incorruptible, visionary, ecumenical, a politician above politics, Nehru's stature was so great that the country he led seemed inconceivable without him. Gandhi's death could have led Nehru to assume untrammeled power, but he did not. Instead he spent a political lifetime trying to instill the habits of democracy in his people — a disdain for dictators, a respect for parliamentary procedures, an abiding faith in the constitutional system. He himself was such a convinced democrat, profoundly wary of the risks of autocracy, that, at the crest of his rise, he authored an anonymous article warning Indians of the dangers of giving dictatorial temptations to Jawaharlal Nehru. “He must be checked,” he wrote of himself. “We want no Caesars.” And indeed, his practice when challenged within his own party was to offer his resignation; he usually got his way, but it was hardly the instinct of a Caesar.

As prime minister, Nehru carefully nurtured the country's infant democratic institutions. He paid deference to the country's ceremonial presidency and even to its largely otiose vice presidency; he never let the public forget that these notables outranked him in protocol terms. He wrote regular letters to the chief ministers of the states, explaining his policies and seeking their feedback. He subjected himself and his government to cross-examination in Parliament by the small, fractious but undoubtedly talented opposition, allowing them an importance out of all proportion to their numerical strength, because he was convinced that a strong opposition was essential for a healthy democracy. He took care not to interfere with the judicial system; on the one occasion he publicly criticized a judge, he apologized the next day and wrote an abject letter to the chief justice, regretting having slighted the judiciary. And he never forgot that he derived his authority from the people of India; not only was he astonishingly accessible for a person in his position, but he started the practice of offering a daily darshan at home for an hour each morning to anyone coming in off the street without an appointment, a practice that continued until the dictates of security finally overcame the populism of his successors.

On May 27, 1964, Jawaharlal Nehru died at the age of seventy-four. Just five days earlier, the prime minister had told a press conference, in reply to a question about whether he should not settle the issue of a successor in his own lifetime: “My life is not coming to an end so soon.” When he died, Robert Frost's immortal lines were found on his bedside table, written out by him in his own hand: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep/But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep./And miles to go before I sleep.”

An earthquake rocked New Delhi on the day of Nehru's death, and many saw this as a portentous omen. Cynics (at home and abroad) waited for his survivors to fight over the spoils; few predicted the democracy that Nehru had been so proud of would survive. But it did. India kept Nehru's “promises.” There were no succession squabbles around Nehru's funeral pyre. Lal Bahadur Shastri, a modest figure of unimpeachable integrity and considerable political and administrative acumen, was elected India's second prime minister. The Indian people wept, and moved on.

Nehru never doubted that they would. During his seventeen years as prime minister, by his speeches, exhortations, and, above all, by his own personal example, Jawaharlal imparted to the institutions and processes of democracy a dignity that placed it above challenge from would-be tyrants. Democratic values became so entrenched that when his own daughter Indira suspended India's freedoms with a state of emergency for twenty months, she felt compelled to return to the Indian people for vindication, held a free election, and comprehensively lost it.

In 2004, forty years after Nehru's death, another confident government, secure in its assumption of popularity and increasingly accustomed to seeing itself as a natural party of governance, bit the dust. But the graciousness with which Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee immediately accepted the electorate's verdict and used it as an opportunity to affirm the transcendent values of democracy was itself an advertisement of India's democratic maturity. Nothing so much became the Bharatiya Janata Party in office as its leaving of it.

The legacies of the two men marked India's twentieth century. While the world disintegrated into fascism, violence, and war, Gandhi taught the virtues of truth, nonviolence, and peace. He destroyed the credibility of colonialism by opposing principle to force. And he set and attained personal standards of conviction and courage that few will ever match. 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 nonalignment — were all integral to a vision of Indianness that sustained the nation for decades. Today, both legacies are fundamentally contested, and many Indians have strayed from the ideals bequeathed to them by the Mahatma and the Pandit. Yet Gandhi and Nehru, in their very different ways, each represented that rare kind of leader who is not diminished by the inadequacies of his followers.

The American editor Norman Cousins once asked Jawaharlal Nehru what he hoped his legacy to India would be. “Four hundred million people capable of governing themselves,” Nehru replied. The numbers have grown, but the very fact that each day over a billion Indians govern themselves in a pluralist democracy is testimony to the legacy of these two men.

25. The Man Who Saved India

AS A RECENT BIOGRAPHER OF JAWAHARLAL NEHRU, I have been somewhat disconcerted to discover that my admiration for my subject immediately prompts people to assume that I must dislike his formidable deputy, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. In fact, I count myself among the doughty Sardar's fans, and am at somewhat of a loss to account for the presumed incompatibility of these two inclinations.

It is true that the two men had their differences, which neither kept particularly secret. Just before independence Patel was privately scathing about Jawaharlal's “acts of emotional insanity” and “childlike innocence, which puts us all in great difficulties quite unexpectedly.” Nehru, in turn, could not have been unconscious of the fact that the older man (Patel was fourteen years his senior) was seen by many congressmen as more deserving of the country's leadership than the mercurial Jawaharlal. But it was not true, scurrilous rumors notwithstanding, that Nehru had initially omitted Patel from the cabinet list and had been obliged by Mountbatten to include him. Nehru, in inviting Patel to serve as his deputy, called him “the strongest pillar of the cabinet.” Patel replied: “My services will be at your disposal, I hope, for the rest of my life and you will have unquestioned loyalty and devotion from me in the cause for which no man in India has sacrificed as much as you have done. Our combination is unbreakable and therein lies our strength.” The Sardar's assurances were sincere and their “combination” was indispensable as independent India consolidated its unity and found its feet. (Sadly, “the rest of my life” Patel alluded to would extend no more than another three years.)

Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel was the humble fourth son of an impoverished farmer who had fought in the armed forces of the Rani of Jhansi. He had revealed a capacity for hard work at school and also for political organization when, as a high school student, he successfully conducted the election campaign of one of his teachers for a seat on the municipal council, defeating the overwhelming favorite, a rich businessman. Married at sixteen, he worked to support his family, including his elder brother's legal studies in England. Patel was self-employed from the start, working as a largely self-taught lawyer in Godhra, a town that was to assume tragic importance at a later stage of our history. But when his wife died sadly young in 1909 (while Patel was arguing a case), he too traveled to England to study law, financing his education entirely out of his own savings. Patel did well; he was admitted to the bar in 1913 and returned immediately to Ahmedabad to set up what soon became a flourishing and highly lucrative legal practice. England had Westernized him. Vallabhbhai Patel came back a bit of a dandy, fond of Savile Row suits and comfortable living, exemplified in his joining the Gujarat Club, a bastion of Anglicized attitudes. In 1916, when Mahatma Gandhi returned to India, both Nehru and Patel were living well, practicing law, and well on the way to becoming top-of-the-line brown sahibs.

It was satyagraha that first bound Patel and Nehru to Gandhi. Patel first became impressed with the Mahatma on hearing him speak particularly about the principles of truth that lay behind satyagraha. In late 1917 Gandhi was elected president of the Gujarat Sabha and Patel was elected secretary, marking the first formal association between the two men, which would last their lifetimes. Patel, a fellow Gujarati lawyer, was among Gandhi's first and most devoted followers, working closely with him on his efforts to obtain decent wages for Ahmedabad's mill workers. The Savile Row suits went onto a bonfire as he took to the Mahatma's taste for simpler dressing, though he wore a bit more than Gandhi, donning dhoti and kurta.

In those days Patel was constantly by Gandhi's side. He was the Mahatma's chief lieutenant in the Kheda agitation in 1918 (a no-tax campaign in which the peasants refused to pay revenues demanded by the British despite famine and crop failure following heavy rains and flooding). The British tried to crack down by confiscating the farmers’ land, cattle, and even what little crops they had grown. Patel exhorted them not to give in. When Gandhi went to Delhi for talks with the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, he left Patel in charge of the struggle on the ground. In the end the government relented, the taxes were lifted on the poorest cultivators, and the confiscated property returned. It was the first of many organizational triumphs for Patel.

In 1920 Patel resigned from the Viceroy's Council, on which he served alongside the likes of Jinnah, to support the Mahatma's non-cooperation movement. In 1927, when Nadiad and other districts of Gujarat were flooded and Gandhi was traveling in South India, Patel led the relief work, keeping the Mahatma informed and acting as his surrogate in the region. In 1928 he led the Bardoli satyagraha campaign and proved himself a champion of nonviolent resistance. Once again the British hiked the tax on land and Patel led their resistance to the new and unjust charges. Once again the British reacted by confiscating land, cattle, and crops; they went further than they had in Kheda by arresting hundreds of farmers and provoking an exodus of the dispossessed. Patel rallied the remnants, vowing not to give in. He devised a system whereby the farmers only sold milk, vegetables, and other essentials to purchasers bearing a chit from the local satyagraha committee. The struggle raged for six months, before it ended with the government agreeing to hold an inquiry into the merits of the tax increase, to return all the confiscated items, and to release the arrested farmers. With Bardoli, a city in Gujarat, Patel acquired the stature of a hero in the eyes of Congress leaders; the Mahatma bestowed upon him the title of “Sardar,” or leader, and hailed him publicly as “my right hand.” Many thought he might be made president of the Congress Party in Calcutta at the end of 1928 as a reward, but Gandhi asked Motilal Nehru to take on that role once more, and Patel bided his time.

The following year Gandhi prepared the ground for a political earthquake: he wanted Motilal to be succeeded as president of the Congress Party by his son. Jawaharlal, a stirring and radical leader who had done his own share to organize the peasantry in Uttar Pradesh and had gone to jail several times, had acquired great popularity as the glamorous face of Indian nationalism, his appeal differing greatly from that of the spiritual Mahatma and the doughty Patel. Though his writings and speeches and his international standing had made him a national figure, Nehru was conscious that he would not yet be the genuinely democratic choice of the party. But Gandhi would not be deterred. He cajoled and cudgeled Jawaharlal into submission, overcoming the objections even of Motilal himself, who feared that imposing his son on the party would not be fair either to the party or to Jawaharlal. (Ironically, it was Motilal who had first suggested to the Mahatma that “the need of the hour is the head of Gandhi and the voice of Jawahar.”) Sardar Patel, fifteen years older than Jawaharlal and a valiant organizer who was already being thought of as the “Iron Man” of the Congress Party, had more support than Nehru for the top job. But though the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) was not enthusiastic about Gandhi's announcement that Jawaharlal would lead it, the party could not repudiate the Mahatma. On September 29, 1929, two months before his fortieth birthday, Jawaharlal Nehru was elected to preside over the Congress Party at its December session in Lahore.

Sardar Patel it was, though, who conducted talks with Jinnah in the hope of forging a common front for the Round Table Conference convened by the British. He was the cool-headed, calm lawyer; Nehru the impatient, mercurial, hothead whom Patel sought to exclude from the process. Nonetheless, this attempt at peacemaking with the Muslim League failed. Patel was a leading light of Gandhi's Salt March to Dandi, in the course of which he earned his first prison sentence. A year later, having been released from prison as a result of the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, Patel succeeded Nehru as Congress president. He succeeded in steering the Karachi Congress session toward moderation, despite the passions aroused by the British execution of the unsuccessful insurrectionist Bhagat Singh and other revolutionaries.

It was to be of no avail. Gandhi, Patel, and Nehru were all arrested following the failure of the Round Table Conference. Gandhi and Patel spent sixteen months together in Yeravada prison in Pune. Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel all spent much of the early 1930s in prison. While the Sardar was in jail his mother and brother both died; on each occasion he refused to accept a conditional release to attend their funerals.

In 1937 the British called elections based on the Government of India Act, which offered only a limited franchise to Indians and did so under the iniquitous system of “communal awards,” which entitled voters only to vote for candidates of their own religious persuasion. Nehru wanted to boycott these elections, but Patel felt that half a loaf was better than no bread. This time the Patel view (which was also that of Rajagopalachari and others) prevailed. Gandhi persuaded Nehru to lead the Congress election campaign. Patel was in charge of selecting the candidates and the overall organizational effort. It was a great success for both of them: Congress won 62 percent of the seats it contested, emerging as the largest single party in nine of the eleven provinces and winning an outright majority in six of them.

In 1937 Patel hoped to succeed Nehru again as party president, but the Mahatma nominated Nehru for a second successive term and Patel, ever the loyalist, withdrew his candidature. After Congress resigned office in protest against the viceroy's unilateral declaration of war against Germany in 1939, Maulana Azad assumed the party presidency. Both Nehru and Patel wasted the war years in jail, having been arrested for their role in the “Quit India” movement. After their release, both Nehru and Patel assumed key leadership roles in the waning days of British rule. In February 1946, when the famous Indian naval mutiny occurred in Bombay and Indian sailors on board the cruiser INS Talwar took command, hauled down the Union Jack and raised the tricolor instead, training their guns on the city, it was Patel who rushed to the port and firmly persuaded the young men to surrender.

In April 1946 Maulana Azad, after an unprecedented six years as Congress president, announced that he would be resigning and handing the reins to Jawaharlal. Sardar Patel and Acharya Kripalani, Congress's general secretary, announced their candidacies as well, but the Mahatma intervened swiftly and decisively, and both men withdrew. On May 9, Kripalani announced that Jawaharlal Nehru had been elected unopposed as president of the Congress Party — leading inevitably to his becoming the first prime minister, initially of an interim government, and then, a year later, of independent India.

In Nehru's first cabinet, Patel was named his deputy and in charge of home affairs, bringing his considerable organizational skills to the calamitous law-and-order situation and to the integration of the princely states. The new prime minister of India and his deputy had to deal with the consequences of the carnage sweeping the country; preside over the integration of the princely states into the Indian Union; settle disputes with Pakistan on issues involving the division of finances, of the army, and of territory; cope with massive internal displacement, as refugees thronged Delhi and other cities; keep a fractious and divided nation together; and define both a national and an international agenda. On all issues but that of foreign policy, Nehru relied heavily on Patel, who welded the new country into one with formidable political and administrative skills and a will of iron.

As prime minister, Jawaharlal had ultimate responsibility for many of the decisions taken during the tense period 1947–49, but it is true to say he was still finding his feet as a governmental leader and that on many key issues he simply went along with what Patel and Mountbatten wanted. Nehru was the uncontested voice of Indian nationalism, the man who had “discovered” India in his own imagination, but he could not build the India of his vision without help. When the Muslim rulers of Hindu-majority Junagadh and Hyderabad, both principalities surrounded by Indian territory, flirted with independence (in Hyderabad's case) and accession to Pakistan (in Junagadh's), the Indian army marched in and took over with scarcely a shot being fired. In both cases the decision was Patel's, with acquiescence from Nehru. It was Patel who managed the integration of the princely states into the Union with a combination of firmness and generosity: “We are all knit together by bonds of blood and feelings…. Therefore, let us sit together as friends.” What could have been messy and administratively a nightmare was managed with remarkable smoothness and efficiency under Patel's firm hand.

There were clashes in the cabinet on some of these issues, and in late 1947 Patel even told Mahatma Gandhi that he was seriously contemplating resignation. But the Mahatma persuaded his two disciples to try to work together. This they did; it was then the Mahatma turned against both of them when funds due as part of the national division of assets were not released to Pakistan by India because Patel (backed by Nehru) feared the money would be used to buy arms for war against India in Kashmir. Gandhi fasted against his own government; Patel offered to resign, but the Mahatma ended his fast only when his government gave in to his demands.

In the philosophical differences between Gandhi and Nehru, Patel occupied the middle ground. On economics, he was Gandhian in his desire to promote self-sufficiency and Nehruvian in his respect for industry, but he set far greater store by private enterprise. The Nehruvian vision of the country's foreign policy as an emanation of the nation's self-respect would have appealed to Patel, but he was far too much of a hardheaded realist to accept what he saw as the more woolly-minded of Nehru's international ideas. Patel was not in favor of India joining the Commonwealth, and he was severely critical, in private and directly in writing to the prime minister, of Nehru's Tibet and China policy.

In political style, Patel was much more of a pragmatist than Nehru; ever the hard-boiled realist, he was not easily swayed by passion, emotion, or ideology. A superb organizer and fund-raiser during the struggle for freedom, Patel proved an excellent administrator in government. His strong support for the civil servants, whose loyalty was initially suspect because of their service to the British Raj, preserved India's “steel frame.” It was Patel who, in the teeth of opposition from nationalist politicians who had been jailed (and worse) by Indian civil servants in the service of the Raj, insisted upon incorporating into free India's Constitution two articles protecting the positions, the independence, and the privileges of the Indian civil service. Without this the administration might have disintegrated. Patel ran his Home Ministry as firmly as he administered the country as a whole, and he brooked little interference from Nehru. He was firm and decisive in integrating the princely states, and his political toughness was never better seen than in his determination to pursue the use of force on Hyderabad and Junagadh, actions he executed swiftly and brilliantly.

Patel was, of course, far more conservative than Nehru, even if he was not the “Tory” of the Congress Party (a distinction even the British privately conferred upon Rajaji). Nehru gave in to his insistence on the maharajahs’ privy purses being guaranteed in perpetuity (a policy that would be undone two decades later by Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi). Yet Patel was hardly a monarchist: in 1939 he had personally led a popular movement against the Thakore of Rajkot, declaring that a “state cannot survive whose raja wastes money on dances while the peasants die of starvation.” It was rather his sense of what it would take to persuade the princes to join the republic, as well as his own integrity that was at stake: Patel was always known as a man who, once he gave his word, never failed to keep it. Patel also differed with Nehru on the question of the right to property and fair compensation for the expropriation of land, an issue on which his views initially prevailed. As the historian Sarvepalli Gopal put it, “The differences between Nehru and Patel derived from a conflict between two different systems of thinking and feeling; what enabled an avoidance of open rupture was mutual regard and Patel's stoic decency.”

Political clashes were, however, inevitable. When the time came for the position of governor general of India to be converted to that of president of the republic (upon the adoption of independent India's new Constitution on the symbolic date of January 26, 1950, the old Independence Day becoming the new Republic Day), Patel engineered the election of his crony Rajendra Prasad as the Congress candidate at the expense of the incumbent governor general, Rajaji. Jawaharlal had been completely bypassed; he was so surprised that he actually asked Prasad to withdraw and propose Rajagopalachari's name himself. Prasad cleverly suggested that he would do whatever Nehru and Patel agreed upon, at which point Nehru understood and threw in the towel. One of Prasad's first acts upon election was to ask that January 26 be changed to a date deemed more auspicious by his astrologers. Jawaharlal flatly turned him down, declaring that India would not be run by astrologers if he had anything to do with it. This time, Nehru won.

But it is true that a key area that divided Nehru from Patel was the issue of the treatment of India's Muslim minority, and this may be where the two men's admirers diverge irreconcilably. Both Nehru and Patel strove, like their mentor Mahatma Gandhi, to keep the country united. But once Partition had occurred, Patel was inclined to see India as a state that symbolized the interests of the Hindu majority, while Nehru's idea of India explicitly rejected the two-nation theory; having spurned the logic that had created a state for Muslims, he was not about to succumb to the temptation of mirroring that logic by allowing India to become a state for Hindus. “So long as I am prime minister,” he declared in 1950, “I shall not allow communalism to shape our policy.” Patel, on the other hand, was suspicious of the loyalties of Muslims who remained in India and felt those loyalties had to be proven. On one occasion, he proposed that Muslim officials should seek permission from the government before visiting Pakistan; Nehru objected to any double standard (other officials required no such permission in those days), and the prime minister prevailed.

And yet, this does not mean that Patel was communalist in his approach to India's Muslims. As home minister, Patel dealt with the communal disturbances that accompanied Partition firmly and evenhandedly; he transferred army units from Poona and Madras to restore order in Delhi, and asked the army to move ten thousand homeless Muslims into the Red Fort to protect them from Hindu rioters. But he saw Muslims in India, in the words of the historian Sarvepalli Gopal, as “hostages to be held in security for the fair treatment of Hindus in Pakistan.” Temperamentally, the Sardar was more inclined to draw the conclusion from Partition that an entire community had in effect seceded; he once suggested in 1948 that if Hindus were expelled from Pakistan, an equal number of Muslims should be expelled from India, an idea that appalled Nehru, who slapped it down immediately.

No wonder, then, that readers aware of my views on communal bigotry should presume my hostility to Patel. But one must make allowances for the temper of the times; and more important, Patel's fundamental decency became apparent on a communal issue on which he and Nehru in fact disagreed.

This was in 1950, with the government under pressure from the right to intervene militarily in East Pakistan, where a massacre of Hindus had begun. Jawaharlal first tried to work with his Pakistani counterpart, Liaquat Ali Khan, on a joint approach to communal disturbances and then, when this had been ignored, offered President Rajendra Prasad (a Patel ally) his resignation. But when Patel called a meeting of Congress Party members at his home to criticize Jawaharlal's weakness on the issue, Nehru fought back, withdrawing his offer of resignation, challenging Patel to a public debate on Pakistan policy and even writing to express doubt as to whether the two of them could work together anymore. The counterassault was so ferocious that Patel backed off and affirmed his loyalty to Jawaharlal, supporting the pact Nehru signed with his Pakistani counterpart.

Yet Patel did so not because he could not have defeated Nehru politically, but because he felt Nehru deserved his support on an issue of principle. Whereas the Hindu Mahasabha sympathizers in the cabinet, Shyama Prasad Mookherjee and K. C. Neogi, resigned over the Nehru-Liaquat Pact, Patel not only urged them to stay, he committed himself to the pact's implementation. His logic was Gandhian: the problem may have started with the mistreatment of Hindus in East Pakistan, but the moment retaliatory measures were taken against Muslims in West Bengal, India, in his view, lost the moral authority to put itself on a different plane than Pakistan or to take military action against it. Those who saw Patel as a hard-liner and a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sympathizer were surprised, but those who knew him as a lifetime Gandhian — and a man of his word who had been trained to respect and believe in the law — were not.

The Nehru-Patel partnership lasted only three years beyond independence. Sardar Patel had suffered a heart attack a few months after the Mahatma's assassination; then stomach cancer struck, and in December 1950, having fulfilled his historic role of consolidating India's fragile freedom, he passed away, age seventy-five. Patel and Nehru had also served as a check upon each other, and his passing left Jawaharlal unchallenged.

And yet, it must not be forgotten that Mahatma Gandhi's assassination by a Hindu fanatic strengthened the fundamental unity of the two men. The Mahatma's last conversation was with Patel; it is believed that the Sardar had been describing his differences with Nehru and seeking permission to quit the cabinet. Gandhiji again advised them to work together, and his death minutes later made that request a binding obligation upon the Sardar. Nehru (who had been scheduled to meet with the Mahatma on the same subject immediately after that fateful prayer meeting) saw it the same way. Gandhi's death brought the two together again; in their grief they put their differences behind them. It is time that their followers do the same. The heritage of all Indians is richer for having both Nehru and Patel to honor.

26. The Man Who Stayed Behind

IT IS ONE OF THE MORE INTRIGUING PARADOXES of Indian nationalism that the man who led the Congress Party for most of the crucial years before independence — at a time when the struggle was increasingly seen as being not just between Indians and British but between advocates of a united India and followers of Muslim separatism — was himself a Muslim.

Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed — Maulana “Azad” (free) as he had baptized himself in his twenties — was president of the Indian National Congress from 1940 to 1945, leader of the Quit India movement and head of Congress Party delegations in crucial meetings during this period. As a Muslim divine, steeped in the erudition of his faith, and as a committed nationalist unalterably opposed to the proposed partition of his country, Azad symbolized the all-inclusive aspirations of the nationalist movement. The Muslim League leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah disparaged him as the “Muslim Lord Haw-Haw” (a reference to the British traitor who made propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis during World War II) and a “Congress Showboy,” a token elected by the Congress Party in 1940 to advertise its secular credentials. Maulana was too dignified a figure to respond to these insults. But at the All-India Congress Committee session in July 1947 that debated the Partition plan, Azad stayed silent throughout, and finally abstained from voting on the resolution. He could not vote against it because he knew that the League's appeal had now captured most of the Muslim masses, and he had learned through bitter experience how intractable the League's leaders were and how illusory the prospects of cooperation with them in a national government. So Partition, the very idea of which he found abhorrent, had become inevitable, and Maulana Azad was too intelligent a man not to acknowledge reality. His silence was the silence of a man who had nothing left to say; no words could have been adequate in the face of this transcendent political failure.

The irony was that he was ten times the Muslim that the secular, bacon-and-sausage-eating, English-educated, and Westernized Jinnah was. Born in Mecca and raised in Calcutta, Maulana Azad was a brilliant Islamic scholar, completing his religious studies at the astonishingly young age of sixteen, some nine years younger than the norm. He was a linguist, mastering Persian and Arabic in addition to Urdu and Hindi; an internationalist, who traveled extensively in the Arab and Muslim worlds acquiring a deep understanding of the main currents in those societies; a scholar, who read widely and retained a profound, even enyclopedic, knowledge of political and social issues; an educationist, who founded the Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi; a journalist and writer, who started, edited, and wrote India's first nationalist newspapers in Urdu; and a man of action, who led the Khilafat movement and the Dharasana agitation, and who remains the youngest-ever president of the Indian National Congress, having been first elected to that position in 1923 at the age of barely thirty-five.

And in the midst of all this he was a deeply humane and reflective Islamic thinker. Where Jinnah's was an Islam of identity, Azad's was an Islam of faith and conviction, the source of his intellectual worldview. As a follower of the Ahl-i-Hadith school of Islamic theology, he took a broad and all-encompassing view of his faith, reflected in several treatises liberally reinterpreting the holy texts and principles of Islam. Within the grand debate in Islamic jurisprudence between votaries of Taqlid, or strict adherence to conformity, and Tajdid, or constructive reinterpretation of doctrine in the light of contemporary social needs, the Maulana stood uncompromisingly for innovation. Muslim scholars counted him among the most gifted exponents of wahdat-i-deen, the Islamic equivalent of “Sarva Deva Samabhavaha,” or the essential oneness of all religions, and his unfinished Tarjuman-al-Quran is a remarkable exposition of the Koran as a vehicle for pluralism, intercommunal harmony and coexistence.

After Partition, Azad understood his historic role as the country's most important Muslim leader; in his person he symbolized the new democracy's guarantee that his co-religionists could remain in their homeland in security and dignity. In the wake of Partition he traveled extensively in the regions rent by communal carnage, directing the organization of relief work and setting up refugee camps, making powerful speeches to large audiences to promote peace in the newly drawn border areas and encouraging his fellow Muslims throughout India to remain loyal to their homeland, without fear for their safety and well-being. His devotion to this role sometimes involved him in clashes in the cabinet, notably with Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel over security issues in Delhi and Punjab, as well as over the allocation of resources to displaced Muslims for relief and rehabilitation. “If you want to see Pakistan, go to the Education Ministry,” one politician darkly growled about the Maulana's appointment of Muslim officials to positions in his own department.

Nothing could have been less fair to Azad's ecumenical spirit: this was a man who fought hard in the Constituent Assembly to end separate electorates for Muslims, and who devoted his life to the protection of religious freedom and the equal treatment of all Indians irrespective of faith. As education minister he began the process of tackling the gigantic challenges of educating a populace which, at the time of independence, was only 18 percent literate. As a deeply religious man himself, Azad saw the use of religion in political life as sheer manipulative opportunism: the real problems of all Indians, in his view, were economic, not religious. It little mattered what God you prayed to, or how, if you did not have enough to eat or a school to send your child to. So he was a man of religion and, counterintuitively, a strong supporter of Nehruvian socialism. For Azad, Nehru's economic and industrial policies would bring to his people the justice on earth that, in spiritual terms, only Allah could dispense in heaven. Nehru, never a great fan of religious thinking, hailed Azad's “razor-sharp mind” that cut through the fog of theological disputes: he wrote of how much he had learned from his conversations with Azad when they were both imprisoned by the British.

But it is above all as a visionary of the place of Muslims in India's civilizational history — and therefore in its present and its future — that Azad must be remembered. When he became president of the Indian National Congress at Ramgarh in 1940, Azad delivered perhaps the greatest testament of the faith of a religious Muslim in a united India. He declared that “every fiber of my being revolted” against the thought of dividing India on communal lines. “I could not conceive it possible for a Mussulman to tolerate this,” he declared, “unless he has rooted out the spirit of Islam from every corner of his being.” It galled him that the secularized Jinnah claimed to speak for India's Muslims and to assert their claims to being a separate nation, while Maulana was both a deeply committed Muslim and a passionate Indian. “I am a Mussulman and proud of the fact,” he said to his majority non-Muslim Congress audience. “Islam's splendid traditions of thirteen hundred years are my inheritance. I am unwilling to lose even the smallest part of this inheritance. In addition, I am proud of being an Indian. I am part of that indivisible unity that is Indian nationality.” And then he added — this is the key part—“I am indispensable to this noble edifice. Without me this splendid structure of India is incomplete. I am an essential element which has gone to build India. I can never surrender this claim. It was India's historic destiny that many human races and cultures and religions should flow to her, and that many a caravan should rest here…. One of the last of these caravans was that of the followers of Islam. They came here and settled for good. We brought our treasures with us, and India too was full of the riches of her own precious heritage. We gave her what she needed most, the most precious of gifts from Islam's treasury, the message of human equality. Full eleven centuries have passed by since then. Islam has now as great a claim on the soil of India as Hinduism.”

It took courage to say this. The Maulana was not immersing his Islam in any soft and fuzzy notion of Indian secularism, still less was he uncritically swallowing Hindu professions of tolerance and inclusiveness. He was instead asserting his pride in his religious identity, in the majesty and richness of Islam, while laying claim to India for India's Muslims. He dismissed talk of Partition by arguing that he was entitled — just as any Hindu was — to a stake in all of India, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from the Khyber Pass to Khulna; why should he accept the Pakistani idea of a narrower notion of Muslim nationhood that confined Indian Muslims to a truncated share of the heritage of their entire land? He was a far more authentic representative of Indian Islam than Jinnah, and it is part of the great tragedy of 1947 that it was Jinnah who triumphed and not Azad.

Partition was, of course, less a triumph for Indian Muslims than an abdication. Azad realized this, and among those Muslims who opposed Partition, he represented a key bridge between secularists like Rafi Ahmed Kidwai and Saifuddin Kichlew, on the one hand, and Deobandi Muslim fundamentalists like Maulana Maudoodi (who felt that Islam should prevail over the world at large and certainly over India as a whole, and believed it to be treasonous — both to India and to Islam itself — to advocate that the religion be territorially circumscribed as Jinnah and the Muslim Leaguers did). Critics like Keonraad Elst have associated Azad with the latter view, seeing him as a surrogate fifth columnist for an eventual Islamicization of the whole of India. Though there is no denying that in some of his appeals to Muslim supporters Azad may have given grounds for such beliefs, Elst and others overlook the profundity of Azad's lifelong engagement with the multireligious civilizational heritage of his home-land. “Islam,” Azad averred, “has now as great a claim on the soil of India as Hinduism. If Hinduism has been the religion of the people here for several thousands of years, Islam also has been their religion for a thousand years. Just as a Hindu can say with pride that he is an Indian and follows Hinduism, so also we can say with equal pride that we are Indians and follow Islam. I shall enlarge this orbit still further. The Indian Christian is equally entitled to say with pride that he is an Indian and is following a religion of India, namely Christianity.” What became the great cliché of “unity in diversity” emerged from Azad as an affirmation of the equality of the rights of all of India's communities to be themselves.

Today, Maulana Azad is largely forgotten. To Pakistanis, he was a pathetic figure on the wrong side of history; to Indian Muslims, a symbol still, but little more; to other Indians, a name associated with medical colleges and other institutions rather than the progenitor of a legacy either to cherish or contest. His tomb lies largely neglected in Delhi. In the history of nations, the great rewards go to the winners, and Azad, by his own lights, failed in the most important cause of his life. But in the history of the ideas that make up the intellectual underpinnings of any country, there must be an honored place for those who, whether they won or lost, had the great merit of being right. Maulana Azad was right. That is his legacy — and ours.

27. The Man Who Wanted More

IT IS DIFFICULT TODAY TO IMAGINE THE SCALE of what Babasaheb Bhimji Rao Ambedkar accomplished. To be born into an “untouchable” family in 1891, and as the fourteenth and last child of a poor Mahar subedar, or corporal, in an army cantonment, would normally have guaranteed a life of neglect, poverty, and discrimination. Not only did Ambedkar rise above the circumstances of his birth, but he achieved a level of success that would have been spectacular for a child of privilege. One of the first untouchables ever to enter an Indian college, he became a professor (at the prestigious Sydenham College) and a principal (of no less an institution than Bombay's government law college). One of the earliest Indian students in the United States (on a merit scholarship paid for by the Gaekwar of Baroda), he earned multiple doctorates from Columbia University and the University of London, in economics, politics, and law. An heir to millennia of discrimination, he was admitted to the bar in London and became India's James Madison as the Chair of the Constitution Drafting Committee. The son of illiterates, he wrote a remarkable number of books, whose content and range testify to an eclectic mind and a sharp, if provocative, intellect. An insignificant infant scrabbling in the dust of Mhow in 1891 became the first law minister of a free India, in the most impressive cabinet ever assembled in New Delhi. When he died, aged only sixty-five, he had accumulated a set of distinctions few have matched; only one remained. In belated recognition of that omission, he was conferred posthumously in 1990 the highest award his country has to offer — the Bharat Ratna.

Ambedkar was a self-made man in the profoundest sense of that term. Even his name was his own creation, for he was born a Sakpal, but decided to take a name based on that of his village (Ambavade) as Maharashtrian Brahmins did. He was born a Hindu Mahar, but died a Buddhist, converting with hundreds of thousands of his followers at a public ceremony months before his death. Once a child who was refused water in school because his touch would “pollute” the caste of the person serving it to him, he married a Brahmin. He wore Western suits in rejection of the traditional trappings of a society that had for so long enslaved his people. And he raged against the injustice of social discrimination. Not for him the mealy-mouthed platitudes of the well-meaning: he was prepared to call a spade a bloody shovel, and to do so in print. It was an attitude that Indian society was not prepared for, but at a time when Indians were fighting for their freedom from foreign rule, it was both appropriate and necessary that Indians should fight equally against domestic oppression.

Ambedkar rejected what he saw as the patronizing indulgence of the Gandhian approach to untouchability. The Mahtama called them “Harijans”—children of God. Arrant nonsense, said Ambedkar, aren't we all children of God? He used, instead, Marathi and Hindi words for the “excluded” (Bahishkrit), the “oppressed” (Dalit), and the “silent.” He publicly burned the Manusmriti, the ancient law-book of the caste Hindus. He was an equal opportunity offender, condemning caste consciousness in the Muslim community with as much vehemence as he savaged the Hindus. Ambedkar fought for his people, and he fought against injustice and oppression by whomever it was practiced. He was an enemy of cant and superstition, an iconoclast who had contempt for traditions that he felt deserved no sanctity.

It wasn't easy. As a nationalist, he was sensitive to the charge that he was dividing Indians at a time when they needed to be united against the British. When he demanded separate electorates for his people, Mahatma Gandhi undertook a fast unto death until an unconvinced Ambedkar, fearing mass reprisals if the Mahatma died, caved in. Gandhi, who abhorred untouchability, believed that the answer lay in the social awakening of caste Hindus rather than in building walls of separation. Ambedkar, who lived with the daily reality of caste discrimination, was not convinced that the entrenched practices of traditional Hinduism could ever disappear. In the end he opted out of the religion altogether, embracing the ethics of equality that Buddhism embodied.

Buddhism also inspired his faith in democracy, which infused his role as the Father of India's Constitution. Whereas some saw Ambedkar, with his three-piece suit and formal English, as a Westernized exponent of Occidental constitutional systems, he was inspired far more by the democratic practices of ancient India, in particular the Buddhist sanghas. Sangha practice had incorporated democratic voting by ballot, formal rules of precedence and structured debates, and parliamentary practices like committees, agreed agendas, and the tabling of proposals for the conduct of business. This in turn had its precedence in the system of governance that prevailed in the ancient Indian tribal republics like those of the Lichchavis and the Shakyas. “This democratic system,” Ambedkar told the Constituent Assembly, “India lost. Will we lose it again?”

His skepticism was not cynical: he saw in the institutions of Indian democracy that he was helping to create the best guarantee for the future development and welfare of his own people, the oppressed and marginalized of India. He fought hard to introduce into the Constitution fundamental protections and guarantees of civil liberties for individual citizens, including freedom of religion and speech, economic and social rights for women, and the outlawing of all forms of discrimination. Ambedkar also convinced the Constituent Assembly that it was not enough to abolish untouchability: what was needed to undo millennia of discrimination and exploitation was a system of affirmative action to uplift the oppressed, including reservations of jobs in the civil service, schools, and universities. When the Constitution was adopted, Ambedkar rather typically remarked: “If things go wrong under the new Constitution the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is that Man was vile.”

The comment suggests a deep pessimism about human nature for which he can scarcely be blamed, after witnessing the humiliations heaped upon millions for no reason other than their accident of birth. But if there is one failure that can be ascribed to him, it lay in his impatience with established political structures as instruments of change. After independence, as a minister in Nehru's first cabinet, he might have got a great deal done through the Congress Party, but he denounced it as a dharamsala, or rest home, devoid of principle or policy, “open to all, fools and knaves, friends and foes, communists and secularists, reformers and orthodox, and capitalists and anticapitalists.” In his own quest for political rigor he founded no fewer than three parties, each of which faded away. He was better at articulating powerful ideas than in creating the structures to see them through. But the Constitution of which he was the principal author remains the best instrument for pursuing his ideas. The leader and spokesman of a community left his greatest gift to all communities — a legacy that belongs to all of us, and one of which we are yet to prove ourselves wholly worthy.

28. Anchored in Himself

WHEN K. R. NARAYANAN WAS ELECTED AS PRESIDENT of India in 1997, there was a great deal of self-congratulation in the air. What was hailed most widely by politicians and pundits was not merely the triumph of a unifying figure at the helm of a fissiparous polity but that a Dalit — an “untouchable” outcaste — should ascend to the highest office in the land four weeks before the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence. I was just as proud as the next man to see Mahatma Gandhi's wishes being fulfilled at this auspicious time, but I thought (and wrote at the time) that it did a disservice to President Narayanan to reduce him to a symbol of his caste, or lack thereof. The nation had much to congratulate itself about in his election — not because Narayanan was a Dalit, but because he possessed one of the finest minds to have been exercised in high office in our country.

Like many others who have followed our affairs of state, I too have a Narayanan story. It goes back to 1984, when a leading national journal asked me to review his book India and America, published at the end of his tenure as ambassador to the United States. I am normally allergic, both as a reader and as a reviewer, to collections of official speeches; I find them usually drab and unilluminating, the self-promotional attempts of functionaries to accord their routine reflections an unmerited permanence. But Narayanan's was a worthy exception to this rule, and I engaged with it at some length, finding much to praise and a few things to criticize.

I had never met Narayanan, and my review was pseudonymous. So I was all the more surprised when the editor of the magazine forwarded to me a letter received in the name of my alias, from none other than K. R. Narayanan himself. It was an uncommonly gracious letter, thanking me not merely for my kinder words but for my criticisms, saying how much he had learned from my comments and expressing a desire to meet me. This was so exceptional an experience for me as a reviewer that I shed my anonymity and wrote back to the author — by then vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, a fitting position for an individual of such intellectual integrity. Our first meeting occurred a year or so later, when K. R. Narayanan, by then minister of state for science and technology, was visiting Geneva, where I was living and working at the time. The minister was as disarming in person as he had been in his correspondence: kind, soft-spoken, intellectually curious, morally engaging. A lifelong friendship was born.

Thereafter I made it a point to call on him on all my visits to Delhi. I was then privileged to see him, on and off, for eighteen more years, through spells in office and out of it. I saw him as minister in two different ministries, as vice president, and finally as president. The surroundings changed, but as each receiving room became grander and more awe inspiring, the man himself did not change. It was as if his own humanity was so genuine that it could not be affected by its external trappings. Few people who have held high office are so profoundly anchored in themselves that they are immune to being swayed by the tall waves and high winds that buffet the ship of state. K. R. Narayanan was an exception. Through all the positions he held, it could truly be said of our tenth president, as it can of few others, that he remained himself.

Whenever we met, we conversed and argued; I was bowled over not only by the range and depth of his engaging intellect but by his humility and modesty, qualities that are so uncharacteristic of highly placed Indians. He was never a “typical politician,” but he survived politics while managing to stay above its worst aspects. That is what made him a worthy successor to the likes of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Dr. Zakir Hussain.

President Narayanan had written and spoken enough — especially before his ascent to the rarefied levels where speechwriters churn out his words — for us to have a sense of where he stood on the vital issues confronting the nation. His vision of a multireligious and multilingual India was the national counterpart of his view of a multi-ideological, multicultural world. Behind the mild manner and the invariably courteous smile, his was an unusual and eclectic spirit, forthright and remarkably free of cant. Narayanan's writings and speeches revealed the unusual mind of a man who, despite spending most of his adult life in government — and an awful lot of it as a career diplomat — could cheerfully whisk the tail of many an officially blessed sacred cow. He once described the sanctified Belgrade non-aligned summit of 1961 as “a very decorous, high level, and rather unsuccessful attempt to run away with some of Nehru's clothes.” Krishna Menon he portrayed as a man thriving on “tea and antipathy.” After forty years of international experience he wrote that even the consensual national dogma of continuity in India's foreign policy was often based on no more than “easy and inglorious routine.” Even at the peak of our adherence to nonalignment as the be-all and endall of our foreign policy, Narayanan was one of the few senior diplomats capable of rising above the usual official tendency to treat it as some sort of magic mantra which needed only to be incanted to be understood.

Narayanan's view of the world was rooted very firmly in a vision of India. Not an idealized, propagandist's vision, but a vision of an India whose injustices and inequalities the president himself had keenly felt as a member of an underprivileged community; yet an India that offered, through a constitutional system of democracy authored principally by a member of that same community, the possibility of overcoming these injustices. As a Keralite, Narayanan hailed from the state that had done most to fulfill the human potential of its people, a state whose record of literacy, communal tolerance, gender equality, workers’ rights, and integrity in public life should be a model for the rest of the country. As a human being, he brought to the helm of our ship of state a rare intelligence, a broad education, and an identification with the downtrodden that both Ambedkar and Gandhiji would have been proud to see in the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

It was particularly fitting that, on the fiftieth year of our political independence, the presidency was won by one whose life had been shaped by the iniquities and the opportunities of India, and whose mind reflected this appreciation. India was lucky, for five years, that the highest office in the land was occupied by someone who was born among the lowest of the low: a man who was not only a Dalit but one born in a thatched hut with no running water, whose university refused to award him his degree at the same ceremony as his upper-caste classmates, and yet who rose above his lot to triumph without bitterness. The country learned about his Tata scholarship to England, the letter from Professor Harold Laski to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru urging him to take the young man into the Foreign Service, the illustrious career that followed in diplomacy, education, and politics, culminating in his assumption of the highest position his country could offer. Obituarists better qualified than I have written of his principled positions on political issues, his memorable assertion of his independent convictions at the state dinner for President Clinton, his courage in sending improper decisions back to the cabinet for reconsideration.

And yet none of that tells the whole story about K. R. Narayanan, about why he will be missed by those who had the privilege of encountering him in person. I salute K. R. Narayanan for what he did, but I write now to praise him for who he was. Decent, learned, unaffected, a gentleman through and through in a land — and a profession — where gentlemen seem a vanishing breed, K. R. Narayanan stood for an idea of India that appealed to the better angels in all of us Indians. As president he led an India whose injustices he had keenly felt but an India that offered, through its brave but flawed experiment in political democracy, the real prospect of change through affirmative action and the ballot box. In his five years as our rashtrapati, the man who did not change embodied the enduring values of a country that has changed profoundly. That is what we have lost with his passing, and it is a loss that touches every one of us.

29. Tea and Antipathy

I ONLY MET THE LEGENDARY V. K. KRISHNA MENON ONCE, and in hardly the most propitious of circumstances. My father, then only thirty-eight, had been hospitalized with a heart attack and I was in the ward, an anxious child of twelve, when his old friend came calling. Krishna Menon was out of office at the time, having been defeated the previous year in his attempt to be reelected to his seat in Parliament, and I did not quite know what to make of him. He arrived in his white mundu and shirt, the unruly shock of white hair distinctive above his hawklike nose, trailing a couple of hangers-on, and greeted my father with a bluff comment: “What's this about a heart attack? Chandran, I didn't know you had a heart.” That is all I remember about the great man, though I also recall being childishly offended by his remark, then growing up to think that his was a very witty comment, only to conclude a few years later that it was not witty enough. (My father was famed for his generosity of spirit, so Menon could easily have said, instead: “Chandran, we all know you have a heart. You didn't have to prove it this way.”)

Four years later, when I went to college in Delhi, Krishna Menon was back in Parliament and my father urged me to call on him. I never did, for reasons I can no longer explain; and before I had graduated, he had passed away. My father had helped him establish the India Club in London's The Strand, where masala dosas and tea could always be had at prices affordable to young Indian newsmen. I never learned whether Menon had been partial to dosas, but of tea he was a notorious addict, admitting to consuming thirty-eight cups a day. I will always regret never sharing one of those with him.

On May 3, 2007, the handful of people who still care marked V. K. Krishna Menon's 110th birthday. Or maybe it was his 111th; even on the subject of his date of birth, Menon could not shake off controversy. He was an extraordinary figure, one who attracted more opprobrium in his lifetime than any other Indian leader, certainly in the West, where the choice epithets about him ranged from “Mephistopheles in a Savile Row suit” to “the snake charmer with hooded eyes” and even, unimaginatively, “the devil incarnate.” Time put him on its cover, a snake hissing behind his head: it was an honor the magazine had been slow to accord the Mahatma, but Menon was a foreigner most Americans loved to hate.

He has also, paradoxically, been unjustly treated by the guardians of our historical memory. Krishna Menon is remembered in India largely for two things: delivering a record-setting marathon seven-hour-and-fifty-eight-minute speech on Kashmir in the Security Council fifty years ago, during the course of which he fainted, had to be revived, and carried on; and presiding over a Defense Ministry whose lack of preparedness for war in 1962 led to the humiliation of military defeat by China, a humiliation seen as having been brought about by Menon's own leftist illusions about the Communist giant. His abrasive personality, his reluctance to suffer fools gladly, his bluntness to those he did not judge intellectually worthy of his time — even Nehru's sister Vijaylakshmi Pandit, the first female president of the United Nations General Assembly, fell short of his standards and complained to the prime minister of his “rudeness” to her — meant that he had few genuine loyalists. In good times, his brilliance, his restless energy, his eloquence, and his astonishing reserves of stamina carried the day and won him admirers, if not fans; but when disaster came, he was left friendless and alone, abandoned by the party he had served without pay or thanks in the best years of his life. He died a forgotten backbencher, without even a political party to call his own.

His had been an unusual life. Much of it had been spent in London, where he devoted himself to fighting the battle for India's independence on Britain's home turf, against men “who draw their incomes from India and spend the evenings of their life in maligning India and her people.” He enjoyed the cut and thrust of debate, serving as a Labor Party councillor for the London borough of St. Pancras, where he established libraries and started a literary festival (Menon had been an early consulting editor for Penguin Books, tricking Allen Lane into publishing A Passage to India by implying it was a travel book). Nehru, who had admired Menon's record in the U.K., rewarded him by making him independent India's first High Commissioner in London, a position he used to put the former colonial masters firmly in their place. That acerbic wit rarely failed him: when the hapless Brigid Brophy complimented him on his English, Menon retorted scathingly, “My English, Madam, is much better than yours. You merely picked it up; I learned it.”

It was not an approach calculated to win friends, but it did influence people. I have read no more remarkable exposition of the mind-set of the first generation of India's nationalist leaders than Krishna Menon's magisterial interviews with the Canadian political scientist Michael Brecher, published in 1968 as a book titled India and World Politics: Krishna Menon's View of the World. It is difficult to think of an Indian leader other than Nehru who would have been capable of the extensive discourse on world affairs, human history, and international politics that Menon so magisterially managed.

I did not agree with most of Krishna Menon's views — his socialism was imbibed directly from Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, and his anti-Americanism was visceral rather than rational — but I admired the way he expressed them. Unlike my father, Krishna Menon may not have had a heart, but he had a brain, and a tongue. In this golden jubilee year of his historic UN speech, they're both worth raising a toast to.

30. Smother India

OF THE DOZEN PRIME MINISTERS WHO HAVE RULED INDIA, the world's most populous democracy, since independence from Britain in 1947, none evokes the extremes of adulation and hatred that Indira Gandhi does. Shrewd politician, two-time prime minister (with a total of fifteen years in office), and autocrat, she is deified and despised in equal measure: like India herself, Indira leaves no one indifferent.

Her life can clearly be divided into two phases: a modest, even unremarkable youth and early adulthood, followed by a formidable middle age. Surviving childhood frailty and a brush with the tuberculosis that had killed her mother, Indira was a sickly and often bedridden young woman with a penchant for silence. Even her famous childhood identification with Joan of Arc was a fabricated piece of adult self-mythologizing. She made little impression on family and friends until she dropped out of college in Oxford and married a young Congress Party worker, Feroze Gandhi. (Feroze was no relation to the Mahatma, but a member of the tiny Parsi minority.) The marriage soon foundered, however, over the conflicting demands of father and husband, or as Indira saw it, her duty to the nation over her loyalty to her marriage. Feroze, a fiercely independent Congress MP and anticorruption crusader, felt politically and personally stifled, turned to drink and infidelity, and died young in 1960.

When Nehru's successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, died at the age of sixty-two of a sudden heart attack after peace talks with Pakistan in Tashkent in 1966, the Congress Party stalwarts known as the “Syndicate” picked her as someone who enjoyed national recognition but could be counted upon to take instructions from the party. They mistakenly saw her, in the words of opposition Socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia, as a gungi gudiya, or “dumb doll.” Initially, Indira, inarticulate and tentative, overreliant on advisers of dubious competence, stumbled badly in office. The party paid the price in the elections of 1967, losing seats around the country, and seeing motley opposition governments come to power in several states.

At the brink of the abyss, Indira fought back. Sidelining the Syndicate, finding allies among Socialists and ex-Communists, she engineered a split in Congress in 1969 on “ideological” grounds. Having established a populist image and expelled the old bosses, she led her wing of Congress to a resounding victory in 1971, campaigning on the slogan “Garibi Hatao” (Remove Poverty). This was swiftly followed by the decisive defeat of Pakistan in the war that created Bangladesh later that year. Her popularity soared; she had reinvented her party, upstaged the older generation of political leaders, and won a decisive war against the country that had, in 1947, vivisected the motherland. India's leading modern painter, the Muslim M. F. Husain, depicted her as a Hindu mother goddess. The imagery was appropriate: indeed, at her peak, Indira Gandhi was both worshiped and maternalized.

But what did she stand for? As Nehru's daughter and political heir, Indira Gandhi had imbibed his vision, but it was distorted by her own proclivities. She took great pride in the fact that she was born in November 1917, at the time of the Russian Revolution. From her father and his friends she had learned to be skeptical of Western claims to stand for freedom and democracy when India's historical experience of colonial oppression and exploitation appeared to bear out the opposite. These convictions fitted in with her domestic left-wing political strategy, her need for Soviet support on the subcontinent against a U.S.-backed Pakistan-China axis, and her dark suspicion, born more out of personal insecurity than of any hard evidence, that the CIA was out to destabilize her government as it had done Allende's.

Nonetheless, Indira Gandhi once memorably confessed, “I don't really have a political philosophy. I can't say I believe in any ism. I wouldn't say I'm interested in socialism as socialism. To me it's just a tool.” But tools are used for well-defined purposes, and it was never clear that Indira Gandhi had any, beyond the politically expedient (one observer sardonically said her politics were “somewhere to the left of self-interest”). The 1971 electoral and military triumphs — the first over a sclerotic and discredited political establishment at home, the second over a sclerotic and discredited martial law establishment next door — saw Indira at her pinnacle. But it was not to last. Mrs. Gandhi was skilled at the acquisition and maintenance of power, inept at wielding it for larger purposes. She had no real vision or program beyond campaign slogans; “remove poverty” was a mantra without a method. Her only ideology seemed to be opportunism, garbed in socialist rhetoric.

As mounting protests in 1975 threatened to bring her down, a High Court judge convicted the prime minister on a technicality of electoral malpractice in her crushing 1971 victory. Mrs. Gandhi, it seemed, would have to resign in disgrace. Instead, she struck back. Declaring a state of emergency, Indira Gandhi arrested opponents, censored the press, and postponed elections. As a stacked and compliant Supreme Court overturned her conviction, she proclaimed a “20-point program” for the uplift of the common man. Its provisions — which ranged from rural improvement schemes and the abolition of bonded labor to mass education and urban renewal — remained largely unimplemented. Meanwhile, her thuggish younger son, Sanjay, ordered brutally insensitive campaigns of slum demolitions and forced sterilizations. The Nehruvian compact with the people was ruptured, even as a meretricious slogan spouted by a pliant Congress Party president proclaimed, “Indira is India and India is Indira.”

Nehru's daughter had betrayed her father's democratic legacy. But — blinded by the mirrors of her sycophants, deafened by the silence of the intimidated press — Mrs. Gandhi called an election in March 1977, expecting vindication in electoral victory. Instead, she was routed, losing her own seat and the reins of office to an opposition coalition, the Janata (People's) Front. She quietly surrendered the reins; she had flirted with autocracy for twenty-two months, yet she was ultimately the daughter of the man who had done more than most to entrench democracy in India.

But the fractious Janata government could not hold together. By their mistakes, ineptitude, and greed (cynically, if artfully, exploited by Mrs. Gandhi and Sanjay) they opened the way for her improbable comeback. In January 1980, Mrs. Gandhi, having split the Congress once more and unembarrassedly renamed her faction after herself (as Congress-Indira, or “Congress-I”) was prime minister of India again.

The rest of the story is more familiar, and all tragic. The reckless Sanjay died in the crash of his stunt plane (one editor, Arun Shourie, wrote that “if he had lived he would have done to the country what he did to the plane”). Mrs. Gandhi, having systematically alienated, excluded, or expelled any leader of standing in her own party who might have been a viable deputy (and thus a potential rival) to her, drafted the only person she could entirely trust — her self-effacing, nonpolitical, and deeply reluctant elder son Rajiv — to fill the breach. (Indira Gandhi's deep mistrust of everyone but her own sons, her blindness to their limitations, and her intolerance of dissent remain profound and inescapable flaws.)

Rajiv had barely begun to grow into the role when Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated by the forces of Sikh extremism, forces she herself had primed, along with Sanjay, for narrow partisan purposes. There is no excusing the cynicism with which she encouraged (and initially financed) the fanaticism of a Sikh fundamentalist preacher, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, in order to undercut her political rivals, the moderate Sikh Akali Dal. As the murders ordered by Bhindranwale mounted, Mrs. Gandhi had little choice but to destroy the monster she had spawned, at a terrible price for Indian democracy and ultimately for the prime minister herself. Mrs. Gandhi had created the problem in the first place and let it mount to the point where the destructive force of “Operation Bluestar” seemed the only solution. Her earlier failure to nip the problem decisively in the bud demonstrated once again the Indira Gandhi paradox: so skilled at acquiring power, so tentative in wielding it. Her murder by her own Sikh security guards came at the end of an inglorious second term of office, at a time when the prospects of reelection had looked remote.

Indira Gandhi's was an extraordinary life, but one which raises too many unanswerable questions. Why did a woman brought up in privilege feel so insecure? Why did her fifteen years in office (with the exception of her annus mirabilis, 1971) have so little to show for them? How did she, with her crushing parliamentary majorities, miss so many opportunities to resolve some of India's most persistent problems? How could she encourage so much sycophancy and corruption, trusting, by her own admission, “men who may not be very bright but on whom I can rely”? What led a secular rationalist — a woman who was so agnostic that she took her oath of office as prime minister without the customary reference to God — to become religious and superstitious in her last years?

Some admirers take Indira Gandhi at her word, seeing a defender of the poor and the wretched where others saw only a political opportunist. Whatever she accomplished for the poor — and the evidence suggests her major “socialist” acts, like bank nationalization, did not do much to benefit them — the balance sheet tilts sadly against her. It is difficult to justify Mrs. Gandhi's deinstitutionalization of Indian democracy, or to explain the grim legacy of failure and paranoia she left the nation. The prime minister's emasculation of party, Parliament, and civil service, and the destructiveness of her actions in Punjab, Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, and even Sri Lanka in the months leading up to her assassination, were undeniably self-destroying. When she returned to office in 1980 and was asked how it felt to be India's leader again, she snapped at her questioner, “I have always been India's leader.”

To many at the time, it seemed that way, and yet, in the almost unrecognizable politics and society of today's India, another epitaph seems more likely to endure. Asked a few months later “what one thing” she wanted to be remembered for, Indira Gandhi bitterly replied, “I do not want to be remembered for anything.” Since the party she enfeebled heads a coalition government pursuing policies diametrically opposed to hers, and since India's fractious federalism throws up multiparty coalitions as far removed as imaginable from the centralized “priministerialism” of Indira Gandhi, it seems she may get her wish after all.

31. The Spy Who Came In Through the Heat

I RECENTLY HAD THE GREAT PRIVILEGE OF BEING THE FIRST outsider, unconnected to the security community, to deliver a lecture within the premises of RAW, our country's external intelligence agency. The occasion was the first R. N. Kao Memorial Lecture, on the fifth anniversary of the death of the legendary Rameshwar Nath Kao.

I had never met the man in whose honor I spoke. But his story is a compelling one — from joining the police as a twenty-two-year-old in 1940, moving to the Intelligence Bureau in 1947, winning numerous honors and medals, and serving in 1963 as the first director of the Aviation Research Center, India's first technological intelligence agency. In 1968 Kao took charge as the first head of a new external intelligence agency with the innocuous name of the Research and Analysis Wing. (I am told that many of the agency's professionals prefer to speak of it as “R & AW,” whereas like others infected by the media, I like the sound of RAW.)

Kao and RAW proved themselves in the lead-up to and the conduct of the 1971 war with Pakistan; his bureaucratic reward came with elevation to the level of secretary to the government in 1973. After his formal retirement at age fifty-eight, Kao continued to advise the government at the highest levels, providing invaluable advice on various issues relating to the country's national security. Between 1981 and 1984 he served as Security Adviser to the cabinet, in effect as the first National Security Adviser. His role in setting up the Policy and Research Staff as an in-house think tank became the forerunner to today's national Security Council Secretariat. He was a pioneer in intelligence coordination, that bugbear of so many national security systems. The personal links Kao maintained with foreign intelligence chiefs served the country well in many ways that most of us will never learn about. (Kao even set up the intelligence service of Ghana.) And he had a sense of humor — when critics in the bureaucracy described RAW agents as “Kao-boys,” he promptly commissioned a fiberglass sculpture of a cowboy and installed it in the foyer of the RAW building.

Kao's own interest in sculpting was, appropriately enough, in iron, and he was known for his fine collection of Gandhara paintings. As a writer, my one regret is that he never wrote his memoirs, despite earning his master's in English literature at Allahabad University. Rather like the reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon, the legend goes — I heard it from one of his juniors — that R. N. Kao has been photographed in public only twice. There might be an element of exaggeration there, but there is no doubt that his death in January 2002 robbed the country of one whose contribution to building the nation — a safe and secure India — is immeasurable and yet will never be widely known. It is as a consequence of his tireless efforts that the foundations of modern intelligence in India were laid and an edifice constructed that protects the nation to this day. Kao made an enduring impact on the training and professional development of an entire generation of intelligence professionals.

Some of the secrecy that is part of Kao's legacy is natural and understandable. Some of it may merit greater debate. As the Research and Analysis Wing of the Cabinet Secretariat, RAW is not a separate department of government and is therefore not answerable to Parliament. The funds allotted to it are not audited in the usual way, again for understandable reasons, but equally any form of public judgment or performance audit it faces is almost always political rather than professional, with the agency regularly being blamed and traduced in the media without any objective means of defending itself. I suspect that many of the professionals in RAW would benefit from the agency being made accountable in the legal sense, so that they can do their assigned work as a legitimate government body and receive appropriate recognition and criticism for their performance.

I am sure there are many who would disagree with this, and who would celebrate that RAW is relatively little known to the informed international public. Nonetheless, RAW's exact locus within the Indian strategic establishment has remained a puzzle even to many well-informed observers. Our diplomats are not always noted for valuing intelligence inputs in foreign policymaking; our internal intelligence institutions, including the police and the army, do not want RAW's expertise in counterterrorism to amount to meddling in issues of internal security. Indeed, RAW's contribution to Indian foreign policy and national political objectives has never been properly documented: even the study commissioned by R. N. Kao of RAW's work on the 1971 war has never seen the light of day. In any country, an external intelligence organization should always serve as an effective, even if necessarily hidden, arm of foreign policy. But part of that effectiveness comes from a knowledgeable sense of the organization's performance. I think it is a great pity if it is true that, as I am told, secrecy has gone to the point where many who serve in RAW do not have a sense of their own history.

Today, informed knowledge about external threats to the nation, the fight against terrorism, a country's strategic outreach, its geopolitically derived sense of its national interest, and the way in which it articulates and projects its presence on the international stage are all intertwined, and are inseparable from its internal dynamics. There can no longer be a watertight division between intelligence and policymaking, external intelligence and internal reality, foreign policy and domestic society. Indeed, even the image of our intelligence apparatus contributes to the way India is perceived abroad. This is why I welcomed the invitation to speak at RAW. I hope that, in the years to come, its doors will open even wider. R. N. Kao would, I suspect, have grudgingly approved.

32. The Genius Lost to Infinity

THE NEWS THAT THE BRITISH ACTOR-DIRECTOR STEPHEN FRY and our own Dev Benegal will co-write and direct a new film about the tragic mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan is both welcome and worrying. Welcome, because Ramanujan's story deserves to be told for a mass audience; worrying, because the obstacles in the realization of such a project are so great that one fears the tragedy of the genius's life and death might be compounded by the further disappointment of never seeing the movie made.

And what a story it is! In January 1913, a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras, with no university education, sent the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy nine pages of closely written mathematical formulae, in a rounded schoolboy script. The letter offered startling conclusions on such arcana as divergent series and the negative values of gamma function — and refuted one of Hardy's own papers. At first Hardy thought the author might be a crank; but after studying the theorems he realized that they “could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class…. They must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them.”

The letter offered only a foretaste of the prodigious calculations to come. For Ramanujan, born so poor he could not afford paper to record his formulae (he wrote many of his calculations in chalk on a slate and erased them with his elbow; sometimes he would write in red ink on paper already written upon) was now summoned to Cambridge, where he embarked on a brilliant career that brought him the world's greatest mathematical honors — and led to his death at the age of thirty-two. When Ramanujan died, at the height of his powers, he left a final notebook full of formulae—650 theorems devised as his body was being inexorably consumed by tuberculosis. It was a tragedy, his doctor later wrote, “too deep for tears.”

A film of this tragedy must vividly portray Ramanujan's humble birth (and a childhood marked by questions like “How far is it between clouds?”), his strong-willed mother, his schoolboy brilliance (a headmaster declared that he “deserved higher than the maximum possible marks”), his Hindu religious convictions (“an equation,” Ramanujan once said, “has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God”). And it must not gloss over the years of neglect and penury until his persistence found him patrons for a shoestring stipend, a clerical job — and the letter to Cambridge that transformed his life.

It is appropriate that the film should be an Indo-British collaboration. The partnership between Ramanujan, a short, dark Tamil with a pockmarked face and glowing eyes, and Hardy, a Fellow of Trinity College, cricket player, and perfectionist who prided himself on the “uselessness” of his purist mathematics, was as unlikely as it was productive. Papers flowed from them amid the ravages of World War I; Hardy polished the rougher edges of his partner's genius and ensured its public acceptance. Ramanujan came up with a succession of astonishing insights that others have proven since. Eminent scholars have devoted decades to the study of Ramanujan's notebooks, and the task is still unfinished. Ramanujan's work retains a compelling relevance; his theorems have found applications in a variety of fields, from computer science to cryptology, particle physics to plastics, statistical mechanics to space travel. President Abdul Kalam has even presented the filmmakers with a paper he has written on Ramanujan's theories on secure communications.

I hope the filmmakers will include among their scenes my favorite stories of Ramanujan's genius. Attending his first Cambridge lecture and asked by a professor whether he wanted to add anything, Ramanujan went to the blackboard and wrote results the professor had not yet proved — and which he could not have known before. In one episode, Hardy visited his ailing protégé in a nursing home and commented that the license number of the cab he had come in, 1729, was “rather a dull number.” Ramanujan reacted instantly: “No, Hardy. It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”

Ramanujan was convinced, from reading the lines on his palm, that he would die before he was thirty-five. Auto-suggestion in such a religious man could well have had a powerful effect; Ramanujan always saw mathematics as a divine gift, bestowed upon him by his family deity, the goddess Namagiri, in his dreams. Loneliness, neglect, and poor eating habits in an unfamiliar climate also took their toll. Tuberculosis was a common affliction among Indian students in England, and Ramanujan, obsessed by his work, unable to find vegetarian food in an England of wartime shortages, simply wasted away. The enormity of this preventable loss is unbearably moving.

Ramanujan had, in Hardy's words, “a profound and invincible originality,” but he was still heir to an ancient Indian mathematical tradition that has given the world its misnamed “Arabic” numerals, that invented the zero in the second century B.C., and that flowered in the theorems of Aryabhatta in the fifth century A.D., Brahmagupta in the seventh, and Bhaskara in the twelfth. Yet he would never have approached the eminence he did were it not for his discovery by (or perhaps one should say of) Hardy. Poverty and colonialism can well be blamed, but today's India must do better at identifying and nurturing new Ramanujans.

It took an Englishman, J. B. S. Haldane, to observe: “If Ramanujan's work had been recognized in India as early as it was in England, he might never have emigrated”—and might have lived to achieve even more. It is a shame that the handful of Indian-born Nobel Prize — winning scientists all triumphed abroad rather than in the land of their birth. Perhaps the film will help change that.

33. The Other Saint Teresa

SHE DIED SEVENTY YEARS BEFORE MOTHER TERESA, in the unre-markable Kerala village of Puthenchira, far from the flashbulbs of a celebrity-seeking press. Another Servant of God, another woman who found her calling in ministering to the sick and dying, another unforgettable heroine to the forgotten. But there was no state funeral for her, no Nobel Peace Prize, not even a profile in the big-city papers. Mother Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan died, aged fifty, of a banal wound that would not heal because of her untreated diabetes.

Seventy-four years later, she was beatified in St. Peter's Square by Pope John Paul II, the penultimate step toward sainthood. I sat shivering under a gray Roman sky in the Vatican, among tens of thousands thronging the square for the outdoor ceremony. The atmosphere was a cross between a baptism and an Oscar Awards presentation. Five venerable servants of the Church were to be beatified, and as their names were called out raucous cheers rose from their supporters in the crowd, many of whom were draped in scarves bearing the colors of their would-be saint. There was a particularly noisy Latin American contingent, and a surprisingly voluble Swedish group bearing the blue and yellow of their national flag (fortified rather unfairly, I thought, by a large number of Indian nuns wearing Swedish colors). When Mariam Thresia's name was announced, a ragged little round of applause emerged from the handful of desis sporting the orange-and-yellow scarves of her “party.” Then the pope shuffled in, and the pomp and magnificence of the Vatican took over, as the organ music swelled and sonorous Latin chants melded with the raised voices of the congregation singing the praises of their Lord. And then the curtains parted to unveil five immense tapestries hanging from the Vatican balconies, the last of a stern Mariam Thresia in her nun's robes, clutching a crucifix and regarding the worshipers with an ascetic eye.

How did this woman transcend the obscurity of her geography and genealogy to receive beatification at the hands of the pope in the Jubilee Year 2000, only the fourth Indian ever to have been beatified? The story of Mariam Thresia is a remarkable one. Born in 1876 into a family in straitened circumstances — the result of a grandfather having had to sell off all his property to get seven daughters married — Mariam Thresia was one of three daughters. Her father and a brother reacted to adversity by turning to drink; Mariam Thresia turned instead to faith. Moved at an early age by intense visions of the Virgin Mary, she took to prayer and night vigils, scourging herself in penitence, donning a barbed wire belt to mortify her own flesh, forsaking meat and “mixing bitter stuff in my curry” (as she later confessed in a brief spiritual autobiography). She took to standing in a crucified position, and blood appeared spontaneously on her hands and feet — the stigmata of Christian lore. Like Saint Teresa of Avila centuries earlier, she suffered seizures during which she levitated: neighbors would come to her family home on Fridays to see her suspended high against the wall in a crucified pose. The Catholic Church was initially suspicious; the local bishop wondered if she was a “plaything of the devil,” and in her late twenties she was repeatedly exorcized to rid her of demons. But nothing shook her faith, and soon enough her exorcist, the parish priest of Puthenchira, became her spiritual mentor and ally. Before she turned forty she was allowed to found her own order — the Congregation of the Holy Family — with three companions. By the time she died in 1926 the three had grown to fifty-five; today there are 1,584 sisters in the order, serving not only in Kerala but in north India, Germany, Italy, and Ghana.

Mariam Thresia was driven not only by her intense visions of the other world but by an equally strong sense of responsibility for the present one. She made it a point to seek out the sick, the deformed, the dying, and tend to them. She bravely nursed victims of smallpox and leprosy at a time when they were shunned even by their own families, caring for people whose illnesses were hideously disfiguring and dangerously contagious. In a caste-ridden society she insisted on going to the homes of the lowest of the low, the poorest of the poor, and sharing her food with them. When these outcasts died, she buried them and took charge of the care of their orphaned children. Her devotion to good works won her a devoted following: it was said she emanated an aura of light and a sweet odor, and that her touch could heal. But she could not heal herself of a wound caused by a falling object. She died just as her tireless work was achieving visible results in the growth of her congregation.

The path to sainthood in the Catholic Church has to be paved with miracles, and many have been attributed to Mariam Thresia. One in particular was thoroughly investigated by the Church and resulted in her beatification. Mathew Pallissery, born with two clubfeet into a family too poor to afford surgery, crawled and hobbled on the sides of his deformed feet till his teens, when his family embarked on forty-one days of prayer and fasting dedicated to Mariam Thresia. On the thirty-third day, he dreamt that Mariam Thresia came to him and rubbed his right foot. He woke and found it had straightened — he could walk on it. A year later, the family prayed and fasted again; this time, on the thirty-ninth day, it was his mother who dreamt of Mariam Thresia, and when she went to her sleeping son she found his left foot had straightened, too. There are “before and after” photographs, x-rays, and the expertise of orthopedic specialists to confirm that the cure could not be explained medically and was, in fact, more complete than surgery could have achieved. Today Mathew is forty-four, employed, married, and the father of two. He was in Rome to witness firsthand the beatification of Mariam Thresia.

Sainthood requires a second miracle, and though Mariam Thresia's followers have produced another case — also of a clubfoot cured through similar prayer — the Church rules are inflexible: only miracles occurring after beatification can lead to sainthood. So Mariam Thresia fans will have to wait for fresh miracles. But her chances of becoming the first Indian Catholic saint — ahead of her better-known near-namesake from Calcutta — appear bright. After all, she did more than help the dying to die with dignity, as the illustrious Nobel Prize — winning nun did.

K. P. Fabian, India's kind and wise ambassador in Rome, and a practicing Catholic himself, wryly remarked to me that Kerala has had Christianity for two thousand years but has only begun producing saints in the last hundred. Clearly, the Church has only recently started to recognize the faith of its darker-hued adherents as equivalent to that of the white originators of their religion. Faith can produce miracles; Hinduism and Islam are replete with similar stories of the lame being able to walk, the blind enabled to see. It is belief that matters, not the particulars of that belief. But the beatification of Mariam Thresia (and of a Colombian alongside her) is an acknowledgment that the future of the Church lies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where it finds fertile ground in the intense devotion of ordinary people.

It is this that provides a different context to the unseemly “conversion controversy” of last year. To hear Malayalam recited in St. Peter's alongside half a dozen European languages is, in its own way, satisfying. I am not a Christian, but I rejoice in the magic an Indian woman has brought to Christianity. Perhaps one day it will not just be an Indian saint the world honors in Vatican Square, but an Indian pope. Only the most narrow-minded of our homegrown fanatics would fail to take pride in that.

34. A Polymath's Politics

WHEN PROFESSOR AMARTYA SEN RECEIVED THE NOBEL PRIZE in Economics in 1998, most Indians could barely contain their pride and satisfaction at the honor he had so deservingly earned, and at the near-universal approbation with which his selection was received around the world. By honoring him, most Indians felt, the Nobel Committee reached out to recognize “one of us”—a man steeped in the Indian culture and tradition into which he was born, a citizen of the world who has never relinquished his Indian passport, a Harvard and Cambridge eminence who has always maintained an abiding interest in the nature and future of India.

But Amartya Sen is not just one of us — his contribution to humanity is too great to confine him to that description.

I am not, I am happy to say, an economist. I have tended to keep a safe distance from that dismal science, whose practitioners were once described as people who “knew the price of everything but the value of nothing.” Economists as a group were widely seen as people obsessed with arcane theories and endless disputations; George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they would never reach a conclusion.”

The famous disconnection of most economists from everyday realities has even spawned a series of jokes. My favorite one is about the group of five men — a carpenter, a tailor, a sailor, a priest, and an economist — marooned on a desert island, who are trying to figure out a way to escape. “I could chop down the tree there,” says the carpenter, “and make a raft.” The tailor says he can stitch a few sheets into a mast; the sailor says he can navigate by the stars; the priest says he will pray for favorable winds. All they need now is to chop down the tree. “That's easy,” says the economist. “Assume an ax.”

Amartya Sen is of this tribe and yet has risen above it. His credentials as a theoretician are impeccable; from his now classic Collective Choice and Social Welfare to his extensive work on economic inequality and development, Sen has firmly established himself at the pinnacle of the academic mainstream of his discipline. (So much so that his theoretical work formed the basis for one of the few negative articles on his Nobel, a pernickety piece by Gene Epstein in the New York investment weekly Barron's which faulted Sen's “fetish for math-as-method.”) Yet, despite being an economist, Sen does reach conclusions — powerful and compelling ones, which have not merely enhanced his scholarly standing but have had direct relevance for public policy in the real world.

Most notably, his work on famine has brought insight and wisdom to the world's understanding of this recurrent tragedy. Sen never forgot his own shattering experience as a nine-year-old during the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, when three million died while precious food either rotted in hoarders’ warehouses or was diverted to the British war effort. “I would remember the harrowing scenes vividly,” he later recalled, “when more than three decades later I tried to do an economic analysis of the causal antecedents and processes of famines.” Sen's work, informed by compassion as well as solid quantitative research, has established the now widely accepted doctrine that famines are nearly always avoidable; that they result not from lack of food but lack of access to food; that distribution is therefore the key; and that democracy is the one system of government that enables food to be distributed widely and fairly. No democracy with a free press, Sen pointed out, has suffered a famine, whereas tyrannies and colonial regimes have.

All this is admirable, but it does a disservice to Sen to honor him merely as an economist. “I believe that economic analysis has something to contribute to substantive ethics in the world in which we live,” he modestly suggests. And he has demonstrated the truth of this assertion not merely by the strongly ethical content of his own economic analysis, but by going beyond it into fields that have nothing to do with economics as such. Amartya Sen's writings and lectures on Tagore and Ray, on Indian secularism, on human rights and “Asian values,” have all testified to the breadth of vision and the depth of humanity of this remarkable polymath.

One Indian, the old joke goes, is a monologue; two Indians is a debate; three Indians, two political parties. That Indians are argumentative seems beyond dispute. But it takes an economist of the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's standing to convert that proposition into a magisterial book—The Argumentative Indian—that attests to the depth and eclecticism of his intellectual range.

Amartya Sen is now clearly one of the foremost public intellectuals of our time. “I've always liked arguing with people,” he tells me from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in between trips to New York and Florence in his dizzyingly peripatetic (and just as dizzyingly prolific) life. Appropriately enough, he was born (in 1933) on a university campus, that of Vishwa-Bharati, founded by the great Nobel laureate in literature, Rabindranath Tagore, in the West Bengal village of Santiniketan. It was Tagore who prophetically chose the name Amartya (“immortal”) for the only other Bengali who has so far emulated his Nobel Prize. Sen won it in economics, though, as his work demonstrates, he could just as convincingly be described as a sociologist, a historian, a Sanskritist, a political analyst, or a moral philosopher.

“I wanted to be a physicist,” Sen says, “but my political interests led me to economics.” Two things moved him the most as a child: the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, which killed thousands while plentiful harvests ripened in the fields, and the religious violence that preceded the Partition of India in 1947. The teenage Amartya saw a bleeding Muslim laborer, Kader Mia, stumble into his Hindu family's home after being knifed in a communal riot; the man had only ventured into the “wrong” neighborhood because he needed work to feed his family. Kader Mia was rushed to hospital by Amartya's father, but died. Economics, politics, and morality intersected in those episodes, indelibly marking Amartya Sen's growing mind.

Initially, like virtually every Calcutta collegian, Sen's politics were leftist, but leavened by an abiding faith in freedom and an early interest in philosophy. His pioneering work as a “technical economist” in welfare economics and social choice theory (how the wishes of a society can be aggregated from the diverse views of its members) was cited by the Nobel Committee. But he has become better known to a wider audience for his work on famines (in particular the proposition that there has never been a famine in a functioning democracy) and on “development as freedom,” which argues compellingly that it is more important to be free than to be rich, and that different kinds of freedom — political, economic, and social — enrich and reinforce each other.

His fame is growing. “I opened the New York Times last Sunday,” Sen recounts, “and found a full-page ad featuring Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, with a headline quoting me! It was on the importance of women's education. When I first started working on gender issues in development, it was treated as an eccentricity.” Sen's concern for the impoverished, undernourished, and marginalized, especially women, comes through strongly in his essays. His Nobel Prize money has largely gone to two trusts he founded, in India and Bangladesh, focusing particularly on education and health care for the poor. The Nobel citation also lauded his restoration of “an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems.” Though he says he is not interested in the philosophy of economics, a profound moral sense is never absent from his prose.

The Argumentative Indian is not, however, about economics, except tangentially (there's one essay about class in India). It is instead a powerfully constructed case for India's political and cultural heterogeneity, and of the “reach of reason” in India's intellectual traditions. “It's something which has been in my mind for a while,” Sen says. He is particularly critical of the Western overemphasis on India's religiosity at the expense of any recognition of the country's equally impressive rationalist, scientific, mathematical, and secular heritage. The son of a professor of soil chemistry, he vividly recalls going to the lab with his father, “testing hypotheses, seeing whether experiments worked out or not.” That “scientific spirit of inquiry,” he says, has its roots in ancient India. He likes to cite 3,500-year-old verses from the Vedas that speculate skeptically about creation, and details India's contributions to the world of science, rationality, and plural discourse, fields treated by Orientalists as “Western spheres of success.”

But debunking Western orientalists who have seen India as an exotic land of delirious worshipers is not Sen's only concern. His targets are homegrown as well. “My view of India is of a very broad civilization, which I've seen being miniaturized by sectarians,” he says, alluding to the Hindutva (Hinduness) movement, which has sought to promote a narrowly Hindu identity for India. Sen's book attacks such a “narrow and bellicose” interpretation, while reaffirming his own “capacious idea of India” as an authentically plural and tolerant civilization with a long tradition of intellectual heterodoxy.

Indeed, Hinduism is the only major religion with an explicit tradition of agnosticism within it. Equally important is the tradition of secular tolerance practiced by such rulers as the Buddhist emperor Ashoka and the Muslim emperor Akbar 1,800 years apart. Sen points out that Ashoka's edicts promoted the human rights of all in the third century before Christ, a time when Aristotle's writings on freedom explicitly excluded women and slaves, an exception the Indian monarch did not make. At the time of the Inquisition, when the Catholics of Europe were persecuting Jews and heretics, the Mughal emperor Akbar was proclaiming in Delhi that “no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.” Unlike in the West, Indian secularism has tended not to be about the separation of church from state, but rather about tolerance of a multitude of religions, none of which is favored by the state. To Sen, “The Hindutva movement has entered into a confrontation with the idea of India itself.”

Sen has argued that “the need for an intellectual challenge to the sectarians is also important politically.” That sense of passionate engagement with India informs much of his writing. On Indian democracy, he is both reasoned and critical. While hailing India's success in preventing the famines that occurred with depressing regularity under British colonial rule, he stresses that this does not mean the problem of chronic and endemic hunger (“a much more complex task”) has been solved.

Back at Harvard after serving six years as the first non-English Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Sen — film and theater buff, cricket fan, and voracious reader — embodies the yearning for eclectic learning. “Teaching is very important for me,” Sen says (his official Nobel biography lists, with pride, the accomplishments of many of his students over the years). As a young man he translated a number of George Bernard Shaw's plays into Bengali, but mislaid the manuscripts; perhaps they will turn up, he imagines, in his recently deceased mother's trunkfuls of papers. His most recent book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, rests on the seemingly simple proposition that ascribing “singular identities” to people (for example, calling someone a “Muslim” while overlooking other aspects of his individual makeup) leads to the “miniaturization of human beings” and the “belittling of human identity.” Sen argues passionately against reducing individuals to a “choiceless singularity” (few people, after all, have a choice about the religion they are born into) when all of us have so much more complexity to our identities. As he rather wittily explains: “The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theater lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English).”

Sen's book is concerned not only with the multiplicity of our identities, but also with the way the illusion of a solitary identity, increasingly defined in terms only of religion, has been used to cultivate violence in the world, not least by Islamic terrorists. He inveighs strongly against the Huntingtonian thesis of a “clash of civilizations,” pointing out that the argument for the primacy of an individual's religious identity, to the exclusion of other affiliations and associations, ignores the demands of other (explicitly nonreligious) commitments. The separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan, after all, occurred despite their common religious identity, because an ethnic and cultural identity (Bengali) came to mean more than the purely religious label (Muslim). But there is a bigger issue at stake here than intellectual argument. Sen's rejection of Huntington's categorization of humanity in terms of artificially (and religiously) segmented “civilizations” is based on his fear of the political consequences of such an analysis. He sees an implicit alliance between Western parochialism and Islamic extremism in ignoring, or at least undervaluing, the broader history of secular tolerance in Islamic civilization. Too many Westerners, he says, fall into the trap of seeing science and “a sense of individualism and a tradition of individual rights and liberties” as quintessentially and uniquely Western. Instead, Sen argues, they should be celebrating the fact that ideas on mathematics, science, literature, architecture, or tolerance have repeatedly crossed the boundaries of distinct “civilizations.”

Western understanding of Arab history ignores Arabic math and science, including algorithmic reasoning, derived from the name of the ninth-century Arab mathematician Al-Khwarizmi (from whose book Al-Jabr wa al-Muqabalah the term algebra is derived). “If the political leadership of the Arab Muslim world has been shifting toward a greater hold of narrow Islamism, in place of the more old-fashioned pride in the broad achievements of Arab countries,” Sen recently argued in an online exchange with the American scholar Robert Kagan, “parochialism in the West has been a substantial contributor to the process.”

Similarly, “The Western world has no proprietary right over democratic ideas,” he writes in his book. “While modern institutional forms of democracy are relatively new everywhere, the history of democracy in the form of public participation and reasoning is spread across the world.” Though Sen writes knowingly of the long traditions of tolerance in Islam, from Saladin to Akbar, he does try to come to grips with the obvious counterargument: the violence of Islamist terror. He argues first that Muslims who pursue peaceful and constructive lives vastly outnumber the rest, and second, that to interpret such violence (which is deliberately cultivated by the terrorists as a political tool) as evidence of an inescapable clash of civilizations would be like claiming from the evidence of twentieth-century history that Germans are doomed to be Nazis. Religion, he avers, is not destiny, and Huntington's civilizational “partitioning” fails to capture the complexity of the world and indeed of each civilization.

I agree with all this — and yet when Amartya Sen asks whether a “religion-centered analysis of the people of the world is a helpful way of understanding humanity,” it is fair to say that ignoring religion as a factor in identity is not wise either, especially when so many — from the jihadists of West Asia to the Hindutva chauvinists of Gujarat — continue to harp on it as the basis for their appeal to people's sense of community. We need to understand why so many today, in privileging one among the many identities they could lay claim to, have fallen back on religion. Why are so many political grievances, real or imagined, articulated in religious terms? The answer surely lies in the primordial nature of religious identity. When other avenues of identity mobilization are either restricted (in autocratic states) or difficult (in societies where political patterns are entrenched and admit few interlopers), ordinary people tend to fall back on the one identity that seems basic to them. Secular intellectuals like Amartya Sen may give equal weight to the tag of being a cricket fan or an Oxbridge don to being born in a Hindu family. But we are a minority in today's world, and there remains a great danger to our value system from the larger numbers of passionate sectarians who will never read his humane and enlightened arguments.

Yet a conversation with Amartya Sen underscores the extent to which his Indianness and his cosmopolitanism coexist. He traces his convictions to sources as far-flung as Condorcet and Chakravarti, enjoys a variety of cuisines, and says he cannot think of any one place as home. “I feel very at home in Santiniketan, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Cambridge, England, in Italy. If I were told I had to choose one of them and live there only, that I would regard as a very serious loss.” Yet he would never contemplate giving up his Indian passport, because it is what entitles him to express political opinions about his own country. He has “never been out of India for more than six months at a stretch” and manages a visit there several times a year. “In our heterogeneity and in our openness lies our pride, not our disgrace,” Sen writes. “Satyajit Ray taught us this, and that lesson is profoundly important for India. And for Asia, and for the world.”

Amartya Sen has spoken out with courage and conviction about the issues that matter in our country and the world — and he has done so with grace, style, and sharp intelligence. This is what non-economists like myself would have honored him for, whether or not his principal vocation had attracted the attention of the Nobel Committee.

When Amartya Sen was to receive what is officially known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, with a check of $960,000, I wrote in a national newspaper that there should also be a simpler, unbankable prize in the name of the country he has remained so passionately committed to. He has honored our land with his intellect and his heart; he is truly a “jewel of India.” Should the country not recognize this, I asked, with the Bharat Ratna? I cannot presume to trace cause and effect, but within three weeks of the appearance of my column, the announcement came from New Delhi that Sen would be so honored. Of course, such decisions take longer to gestate, and columnists should not give themselves airs. But just suppose — perhaps somebody high up in the government of India actually reads the newspapers…?

35. Art from the Heart

IT IS NOT ALWAYS THAT I FIND MYSELF TRULY REGRETTING an event I have had to miss because of pressing official commitments elsewhere, but recently my “regrets” at turning down an invitation were not just genuine, they were heartfelt. The event in question was the inauguration of an exhibition in the Peabody Museum in the small Massachusetts town of Salem — an exhibition of M. F. Husain's Mahabharata paintings. The irony of this celebration in America, at a time when Husain has been hounded from his own country by the threats of Hindutva chauvinists, did not escape me. So I was all the more sorry to miss this opportunity to pay him tribute, and show him solidarity.

The only time I properly met the incomparable Husain (discounting, that is, the occasional fleeting handshakes in crowded gatherings) was in New York in 1993, over dinner at the home of the Indian then ambassador, Hamid Ansari. Sitting before the book-laden coffee table in the ambassador's Park Avenue living room, I recounted to the master the famous story of what the immortal Pablo Picasso used to say to aspiring artists of the avant-garde. Disregarding their slapdash cubes and squiggles, Picasso would demand: “Draw me a horse.” Get the basics right, in other words, before you break free of them. Husain loved the story; he promptly opened the book in front of him, a volume of his own work from Ambassador Ansari's collection, and proceeded to sketch, with astonishing fluidity, a posse of horses on the frontispiece. I have never forgotten the moment: watching the artist's long brown fingers glide over the page, the horses’ heads rearing, their manes flying, hooves and tails in the air as Husain left, in a few bold strokes, the indelible imprint of his genius.

So to collaborate on a book with Husain, as I have once done, was an extraordinary privilege. And to do so on the subject of my home state, Kerala, on which Husain has just completed a series of astonishing paintings, made it a special pleasure as well. For horses, in our volume, read elephants. They are everywhere in Husain's extraordinary evocation of Kerala: crashing through the dense foliage, embracing supple maidens with their trunks, and, in miniature, held aloft by triumphant womanhood. The elephants cavort by the waterside, drink, play, gambol, lurk. They are the animal form of the grandeur and gaiety of “God's Own Country.” Elephants are indispensable to every Kerala celebration, from weddings to religious festivals; there is nothing in the world like the Thrissur Pooram, when hundreds emerge, bedecked with ornaments and flowers, to receive the homage of the Malayali people. Elephants infuse the Kerala consciousness; they feature in the state's literature, dance, music, films, and art. It is said that the true Keralite can tell one elephant apart from another just by looking at it. In their myriad shapes, sizes, and colors, Husain's elephants embody the magic of Kerala: the extraordinary natural beauty of the state, its lagoons, its forests, its beaches, and above all the startling, many-hued green of the countryside, with its emerald paddy fields and banana groves, and coconut and areca trees swaying in the gentle breeze that whispers its secrets across the land. And in their strength the elephants capture, too, the resilience of Kerala, its defiance of the Indian stereotype, its resolute determination to progress, and above all, its empowerment of women.

What can one say about this remarkable work and its remarkable subject, in this curious collaboration between a great artist who has signed his name in Malayalam, a language he cannot speak, and a writer who traces his roots to Kerala, a homeland he has only visited on his holidays? The Marunaadan Malayali—the expatriate Keralite — is so widespread and so common a phenomenon that the phrase has entered the Malayalam language. And here I am, one of the tribe, inspired by the paintings of a man who is the most “inside” of outsiders, seeking to capture in far too many words the insights into Kerala that he has illuminated with the dazzling fluency of his brush.

To get back to the opening I missed in Salem (though I later did go to see it): that M. F. Husain, as a preeminent modern Indian artist, and one of the country's best-known Muslims, should have derived inspiration from an ancient Hindu epic is not in itself surprising. Husain has always felt free to find his images and symbols in the cultural heterogeneity of his native land, and the Mahabharata, unlike its sacred twin, the Ramayana, is essentially a secular epic. It also occupies a unique place in the Indian national consciousness, one that lends itself remarkably well to artistic reinvention. The epic allowed Husain to take characters and images that are laden with epic resonance, and to alter and shape them to paint a contemporary canvas.

As a novelist who did something similar in my own The Great Indian Novel, I would argue that the Mahabharata is an ideal vehicle for a creative artist's efforts to affirm and enhance an Indian cultural identity, not as a closed or self-limiting construct, but as a reflection of the pluralism, diversity, and openness of India's kaleidoscopic culture. The first of Husain's paintings in this series was created in 1971, a time of great turbulence in India, with the looming crisis over refugees from Bangladesh that would lead, by year's end, to war with Pakistan. What Husain did in 1971 (and again in later paintings) was to recall, through images starkly familiar to Mahabharata-conscious Indians, the kinds of stories Indian society tells about itself. There are images of battle and conflict, neighing horses and howling elephants caught up in the confusion of Kurukshetra, bloodshed and terror in every brushstroke; but there is also the timeless image of Ganapathi the scribe, merging in Husain's imagination with the sage Ved Vyasa, the epic's author, setting down the transcendent wisdom of the epic that would speak across the ages to the Indians of Husain's time.

In much of Husain's work, Hindu myths and epic narratives both contribute to and reflect the national consciousness that his own creativity has done so much to influence. In reiterating the epic, the artist and his audience both reaffirm the shaping of their own cultural identity. This is an important statement for Husain to make as a Muslim and an Indian: he is staking his claim to a heritage that some chauvinist Hindus have sought to deny to those not of their own persuasion. In recent years these zealots have sought to challenge Husain's right to use Hindu imagery, attacking exhibitions in which he has depicted nude goddesses, denouncing him for sacrilege in his borrowings from the epics. The vast majority of India's art lovers and intellectuals have rallied to his defense — and with the Mahabharata they have rightly asserted that Husain has no case to answer. For, there is nothing restrictive or self-limiting about the Indian identity the Mahabharata asserts: it is large, eclectic, and flexible, containing multitudes.

This is why I have been particularly happy to add my name to the petition circulated by many of our country's leading artists and writers, asking the president to confer upon Husain the highest award of the land, the Bharat Ratna. A number of creative artists have already been so honored: Satyajit Ray, M. S. Subbulakshmi, Ravi Shankar, Bismillah Khan, Lata Mangeshkar. Husain unarguably belongs in this illustrious company. The petition argues that Husain's “life and work are beginning to serve as an allegory for the changing modalities of the secular in modern India — and the challenges that the narrative of the nation holds for many of us. This is the opportune and crucial time to honor him for his dedication and courage to the cultural renaissance of his beloved country.”

Looking at the Mahabharata-inspired work in this exhibition, it seems to me that Husain is simultaneously honoring and appropriating the epic. If there is a message to the work that features in this exhibition, it would be that of the continued relevance of the stories, issues, and images he has derived from the Mahabharata. That, in turn, is a twofold message: first, of the need to reexamine the received wisdom of the epic in today's India, to question the certitudes, to acknowledge the weight of the past and face its place in the present; and second, to do so through a reassertion of the epic's dharma, defined not as religion but as the whole complex of values and standards — some derived from myth and tradition, some derived from our history — by which India and Indians must live. In offering his vision of the Mahabharata to India and the world, Husain has paid a fundamental tribute to his own civilization, one which he has, through his reinvention of the past and his reimagining of the present, immeasurably enriched. He deserves the Bharat Ratna.

36. Carrying His Bat

THE BABY LYING IN THE CRIB assigned to Sunil Manohar Gavaskar gurgled happily in his sleep, but Narayan Masurekar was suspicious. The previous day, July 10, 1949, he had visited his newborn nephew and noticed a minor blemish — a small hole near the top of the infant's left earlobe. Now, on the next day, a male baby was sleeping in the crib, but something seemed different about him. All babies look like a cross between Winston Churchill and ET, but Masurekar decided to look more closely. His verdict was stunning. “This,” he proclaimed, “is not my nephew.”

A frantic search followed. Every male baby in the hospital was examined by desperate seekers for the telltale hole. Finally, the missing infant was found, sleeping beatifically by a fisherwoman. The babies were swapped, and history was made. The child who, had the mistake not been detected, might have revolutionized Indian fishing, grew up to haul in a different kind of catch (108 of them in Tests). For he developed his talents in a cricket-loving middle-class Bombay family instead of a seafarer's shack far from the maidans. Were it not for Narayan Masurekar's eagle eyes, somebody else, and not Sunil Gavaskar, would now be known as India's greatest batsman of all time.

Of the many legacies in which the British Raj took pride in leaving to India — railways, universities, the English language, the “steel frame” of the administrative system — the one that has most captured the Indian imagination has been the game of cricket. And on any list of the cricketers who have left their stamp on the national psyche, one name is bound to figure at the top: Sunil Gavaskar.

His plethora of records tells one part of the tale. Statistics can be mind-numbing, but one can no more measure the achievements of Gavaskar without figures than one can describe Mount Everest without them. For those who are interested, a devotee has created a Web site (The Gavaskar File) which comprises no fewer than twenty-one tightly packed pages of statistics, figures, and records held by Sunny Gavaskar.

But though statistics, like book jackets, reveal a great deal, they can only hint at the most interesting parts — those parts that live in the imagination long after precise figures and dates have faded from memory.

How can one explain to today's cricket-crazy generation — weaned on India's winning the World Cup in 1983, used to one-day successes and mammoth private sponsorships, habituated by glowing references to Indian players as being among the world's best bats-men, feeling entitled to expect at least a chance of victory every time India takes the field — what Sunil Gavaskar meant to India when he arrived on the Test scene?

Of course, we had talented cricketers, but their weaknesses were legend. Our batsmen were notoriously suspect against pace even on our benign Indian wickets, and when the selectors met to pick the squad to tour the Caribbean in 1970–71, no Indian opening batsman had scored a hundred in India's preceding nineteen Test matches. So the selectors, preferring ability to experience, picked four opening batsmen for the tour: Ashok Mankad, who did not open for Bombay till that season; Syed Abid Ali, who had not opened for Hyderabad at all but had done so for India; K. Jayantilal, who had had one good season for South Zone; and a twenty-one-year-old Bombay prodigy with four Ranji matches behind him, Sunil Gavaskar.

Gavaskar was not a complete unknown to cricket fans. He had made mountains of runs as a schoolboy, including against the touring London Schoolboys team, and stories abounded about his excellence. As a boy playing street cricket in the Bombay suburb of Chikalwadi, his prodigious talent resulted in a special handicap being devised for him: whereas others defended the usual three stumps chalked on the garage door, Gavaskar would be given out if the ball hit the door at all. He was soon starring for Bombay University (a team stronger, in those days, than most Indian first-class sides). In the 1967–68 season he made his debut for Bombay in the Irani Trophy, aged eighteen, in what was virtually a trial match for the Test tour of Australia and New Zealand to follow. I watched that game at the Brabourne Stadium: two attractive opening batsmen, K. R. Rajagopal and P. K. Belliappa, who had been considered near-certainties for the tour, failed to gain selection after being tormented by the pace and swing of Bombay's Ramakant Desai and Umesh Kulkarni. Instead, Desai and Kulkarni got picked instead, even though they had not been in the list of thirty “probables” announced earlier. The match ended the national hopes of Rajagopal and Belliappa, but in all the drama everyone overlooked the failure of the rookie Gavaskar, who made just five and zero and was promptly dropped by Bombay for the next season.

Recalled nearly two years later for the last two Ranji matches of the 1969–70 season, Gavaskar began with a duck and ended with a century. Two centuries followed in three innings in the 1970–71 season, but surprisingly Gavaskar was not picked for West Zone in the Duleep Trophy. Instead, he captained Bombay University in the interuniversity tournament and made successive scores of 226, 99, 327 (a university record), and 124. That was enough for the new Indian captain, Ajit Wadekar, whose own record Gavaskar had broken in the course of his 327, and for the chairman of selectors, Vijay Merchant. Sunil Gavaskar, who had played just five matches for Bombay and had never even represented West Zone, was picked for the West Indies. Merchant publicly praised Gavaskar for never being content with just a hundred; his seniors, the chairman added, could learn from that.

If Gavaskar felt any pressure as a result of Merchant's comments, it did not reveal itself. Instead of a swollen head, though, the young batsman developed an acutely swollen middle finger on his left hand. A New York specialist, consulted en route to Jamaica, decided to operate immediately; one day's delay, he said, and gangrene would have set in, obliging him to amputate the finger. So Gavaskar, his hand swathed in bandages, missed the first Test. But in those more leisurely days there were other first-class matches to play oneself into form, and he proceeded to score 71, 82, 32 not out, 125, and 63 in his first five innings on the tour. Selection for the second Test at Port-of-Spain was assured.

I remember, as a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, praying that Gavaskar would score a hundred, and then retracting my prayer because none of the seven Indians who had so far scored a Test century on debut had ever scored another one. (Viswanath, Azharuddin, Sourav Ganguly, and Virender Sehwag would later become exceptions to this jinx, to which Surinder Amarnath and Praveen Amre also succumbed.) As it happened, the young batsman batted with remarkable maturity and composure in his first Test, but did not get to a century. His 65 and 67 not out were, however, stamped with class, and helped steer India to an astonishing victory.

From then on it was magical. A century (116) and 64 not out duly followed in the third Test. In the first innings of the fourth, Gavaskar fell, in atrocious light, for one, and Indians wondered if the fairy tale was over. There was no need to worry: in the second innings he scored 117 not out. National jubilation at the unearthing of this gigantic talent knew few bounds. Exhilaration was everywhere; cricket was page-one news across India. Gavaskar went into the fifth Test with 430 runs to his name at an average of 143.33. No one would have believed that the best was yet to come.

Certainly not Gavaskar himself, since he developed a painful abscess in a tooth on the eve of the Test. Denied painkillers because they might have made him drowsy, unable to eat properly or enjoy a cold drink, sleep deprived from tossing and turning in his pain, Gavaskar batted in excruciating agony throughout the six-day match. Despite each run jarring the infected tooth, he scored 124 out of an Indian total of 360 in the first innings. It was not enough; the West Indians, aided by some dubious umpiring, piled on the runs. Opening the second with India 166 runs behind and after twelve hours fielding in the hot sun, Gavaskar became the first Indian since Hazare in 1948 to complete a century in both innings of a Test, and the first Indian ever to score four centuries in a series. The tooth still ached, but he kept going: India was barely 30 ahead when he crossed that landmark. Sobers, the great West Indies captain, tried seven bowlers, but no one could get a ball past Gavaskar. A Trinidadian calypso was composed on the spot by “Lord Relator”: “It was Gavaskar/The real master/Just like a wall/We couldn't out Gavaskar at all/Not at all.” He finished with 220 in eight hours and twenty-nine minutes. He hadn't given a chance. Most important, he had saved a Test India had looked likely to lose, and helped clinch a series win against the mightiest Test team in the world.

If Gavaskar had done nothing else in his life, that extraordinary series alone would have written his name in the hearts of his compatriots forever. It is impossible to describe the pride he instilled in our hearts. We had got used to losing, to accepting a sort of perpetual second-class status. We were accustomed to rejoicing in great moments rather than great matches. We were reconciled to batsmen producing flashes of brilliance and fading away. We had even learned to celebrate stirring feats of heroic defiance in a losing cause, like Pataudi's 148 at Headingley in 1967 or Jaisimha's 101 in Brisbane in 1967–68, both magnificent efforts ending in the inevitable defeat. But heroic defiance, brilliance, consistency, and victory all together had never been an Indian combination. Gavaskar showed us for the first time that it could be, and so transformed the nation's sporting psyche. By his heroism, he expanded the realm of the possible in Indian cricket. He undid the shackles that had kept us chained to mediocrity; he freed a spirit that soared in countless imaginations across the land.

So Gavaskar did not need to do anything else to leave his stamp on independent India. But he did. After a brief hiccup in his next few Tests — as if to confirm that he was, after all, mortal — the centuries flowed again; the records tumbled; greatness became a quality we learned to take for granted. There were the extraordinary thirteen centuries against the West Indies’ feared pace batteries. There was the dazzling 102 in Trinidad in 1975–76 to steer India to an astonishing victory with the then highest-winning target ever successfully chased in a Test. There was the 221 he made against England at the Oval in 1979 when India nearly pulled it off again, chasing an even higher total. There was the 340 he made in 1981–82 in one remorseless inning in the Ranji Trophy. And then, in 1987, after one of the best innings ever seen on an Indian cricket ground — a sublime 96 against Pakistan on a vicious turner at Bangalore — Sunil Gavaskar retired, at the peak of his powers. He wanted to leave when the world was asking “why?” rather than “when?”

I remember Gavaskar in his pomp at the crease, all five foot six inches of him rapt in concentration; the white shirt immaculate, its top two buttons undone, a glint of gold around his neck; the dark eyes steady in their gaze under a wide-brimmed floppy sun hat; the boyish charm supplanted by a wary stillness, ears cocked, knees and back bent, every sinew tensed but ready. And then the calm deliberateness of the stroke, the eyes never leaving the ball: the solidity of the defense, the precision of the offdrive, the liberating punch through midwicket, the sudden unleashing of the cut. He could do it all, and he knew what not to do: it was once said of him, on a spiteful pitch, that his best stroke was one he did not play, at a rearing delivery that a lesser batsman would have edged. When Sunil Gavaskar stood at the crease, it was as if a wall had been constructed across the wicket, and captains and bowlers knew they would have to work very hard for their reward. In 198 Test innings, Gavaskar was bowled just thirty-three times, and on fewer than half those occasions did he miss the ball altogether. In other words, in a career in which he faced some thirty thousand deliveries, he was beaten and bowled by perhaps twenty of them. That is a measure of his skill, of his concentration, and of the impregnability he brought to the top of a fragile Indian batting order. As Sir Gary Sobers reminded the world, his achievement is all the more striking in that he could not make any easy runs off the amiable Indian bowling attack.

Of course, not everything in Gavaskar's career was perfection. Having nearly broken his mother's nose with a hard-hit shot in a game of corridor cricket at home in his boyhood, Gavaskar developed a wary cautiousness that Freud could have explained better than Cardus. It too often translated itself into excessive defensiveness, so that, for all his high scores, Gavaskar never threatened to tear apart an attack. Rather, he frustrated bowlers into submission by wearing them down. His one-day record is, by his standards, modest: an average of 35.13 in 108 matches, with only one century, a tale forever blighted by that bizarre inning in the 1975 World Cup at Lord's when he made 36 not out in sixty overs. (Gavaskar himself gave four reasons for his appalling performance, each of which is worse than the previous one: “1. I didn't play sixty overs myself. 2. I couldn't force the pace and couldn't get out even when I tried to. 3. As soon as the ball was delivered, my feet would move to a position for a defensive shot. 4. The awful noise made by the crowd didn't help my thinking.”)

For a man whose temperament at the crease was so calm and measured, Gavaskar also lost his cool surprisingly often in print and on the field. His highly readable but tactless book Sunny Days was marred by intemperate references to West Indian crowds (as “savages” who should “go back to the jungles” whence they came) and English umpires (“David Constant was constant — in his support of England”), which caused great offense in those countries. (The resulting hostility to him in the Caribbean led to his pulling out of the 1979–80 tour of the West Indies, which was then canceled.) Worse still was his attempt in Melbourne on the 1980–81 tour of Australia to walk out and concede the match when he was given, as he thought, unjustly out. His action in calling his opening partner, Chetan Chauhan, off the field with him was not only thoughtless, it disrupted Chauhan's concentration, costing him his wicket shortly thereafter, and it looked even more foolish when India won the Test that Gavaskar had had to be prevented from throwing away.

This episode aside, Gavaskar was also a disappointing captain, leading the side without imagination or vision, showing very little feel for the pace or direction of a game, and proving himself on more than one occasion a particularly poor judge of a declaration. His role in the dropping of Kapil Dev for the Calcutta Test against England in 1984–85 (for “disciplinary” reasons) and his tactics in grinding that match down to one of the most meaningless draws in Test history, led me to attack his captaincy in a cover story for The Illustrated Weekly of India that winter. The Weekly unfortunately emblazoned their cover with the dramatic query “Is Sunil Gavaskar one of the worst captains India has ever had?” which was a bit over the top. My main point was that as a captain obsessed with drawing matches, and as one who rewarded restraint but punished adventurousness, Gavaskar had shown a profound contempt for the paying public for whom, after all, the game was being played. I added, somewhat unnecessarily, “In the words of a perceptive English critic, Gavaskar has done more than any other person to kill [Test] cricket as a spectator sport in India.” With hindsight, the criticism — however perceptive the now-forgotten English critic might have been — seems absurdly overstated, though it is no accident that Gavaskar holds the world record for draws, too (no captain has drawn as many Tests [thirty] as he has)! Within a month of my article, Gavaskar led India to victory in the World Championship of Cricket in Australia — and resigned the captaincy.

One journalist told me that my Weekly piece had been a major factor in Gavaskar's desire to quit. I did not believe it, because it was typical of Gavaskar to leave on a high note, with the “World Championship” a symbolic raised finger to his critics. Years later I met Gavaskar socially and was horrified to discover that not only had he read the piece, it still rankled with him. So if that article did hurt the Little Master, this essay is a humble attempt to make amends.

For all his flaws put together do not stack up very high against the immensity of Sunil Gavaskar's contributions to Indian cricket — and more, to India itself. He gave us a self-belief that had been lacking before. He brought in a conscientious professionalism, including on issues of fair monetary reward, that transformed the nature of the sport in India. He gave millions of fans a reason to hope that, with Gavaskar at the helm, nothing was impossible. And if there had been moments of pettiness in his captaincy, the greatness of the man was nowhere made more apparent than off the cricket field, after his retirement — above all in the courage with which he intervened personally during the tragic Bombay riots of 1993 to save a Muslim driver from sectarian assault in his neighborhood.

Gavaskar has always had time for the basic verities. His close and mutually admiring relationship with his contemporary and brother-in-law Gundappa Viswanath is rare at the highest levels of any sport. The touching sincerity of his decision to name his son Rohan Jaivishwa after the three batsmen he most admired (Kanhai, Jaisimha, and Viswanath) is another measure of the simplicity of the man. Nor does Gavaskar consider himself above the concerns of ordinary people. One journalist quoted a letter sent to Gavaskar in 1986 by the father of a paraplegic son: “My son is your great fan, but of late he is not taking his medicines at all. He is getting hysterical and uncontrollable. I request you to kindly send him a letter of encouragement.” Gavaskar did.

Imran Khan listed Gavaskar highest among the three batsmen he hated bowling to (ahead of Boycott and Greenidge): “His perfect technique makes him the most difficult batsman alive to dismiss.” But technique was not all. Gavaskar's boyhood idol, M. L. Jaisimha, wrote that the qualities Gavaskar brought to his cricket were those that would have made him successful in any walk of life—“concentration, dedication, single-mindedness of purpose and willingness to learn.” In this Gavaskar was a true professional in a country where sport had for too long been the domain of the gifted amateur.

When he was a boy, Gavaskar used to visit his uncle Madhav Mantri, and run his fingers lovingly through the former Test player's India pullovers. But when he asked for one for himself, Mantri was strict: “The Indian colors,” he said firmly, “have to be earned.” No one has earned them more deservingly than Sunil Manohar Gavaskar. He will always be, in his own way, an embodiment of our coming of age as an independent nation.

37. The Dear Departed

I cannot omit, from a section on the people who made up my sense of “my” India, Indians who are far from famous, but who profoundly touched my life and mind, none more so than my own father.

MY FATHER'S HEART

IT WAS IN 1993, WHEN I WAS THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD and a father myself, that the telephone call I had been dreading for twenty-five years — ever since my father, then thirty-eight, had his first massive coronary — finally came. On October 23, 1993, Chandran Tharoor's heart had finally given in.

For a quarter of a century I had feared this moment. I had grown up thinking that every unexpected call at an unusual hour, every unannounced visitor, was to convey the news that my father had suddenly been taken away. Three times in the previous ten years, I had called home — three of my hundreds of regular, routine, anxious calls home — to discover he was in the hospital. Each time he had pulled through. Once, a decade ago, I had brought him to the United States for open-heart surgery and had experienced the very different anxiety of the hospital waiting room, the awful moment when the doctor emerges and you scan his face for the slightest sign of bad news before he speaks. At that time, too, the outcome had been positive. But the time had come when surgery could afford no new solutions. We hoped that my father's zest for life would itself open up the flow to and from his heart. Certainly, there was nothing in that booming voice, that irrepressible spirit, that boundless type-A do-it-all enthusiasm, to suggest that life was ebbing away, that each day his heart was failing, coming closer to admitting a defeat that my father's own manner had never acknowledged.

I was barely twelve when my father first fought for his life in hospital, while I battled fear and bewilderment and prayed for him to recover. He was the only security my mother and little sisters and I had in the world. His work, his income, his drive, kept us in style, fed and clothed us well, sent us to the best schools in Bombay. I loved him: the word games we played together, the cricket matches he took me to, the magic of his irresistible smile as his warm brown eyes lit up at me, even the daily (and all too uncritical) encouragement he provided my writing. But I also understood that my father's survival was intimately bound up with my own, that his dreams for me could founder on his own mortality.

With each passing year, of course, this became less true. As I finished my studies at breakneck speed (always fearing my luck — his health — would run out before I could attain my goals) and embarked on a career, I shed my material vulnerabilities. But the fear of his loss had become so deeply entrenched that it continued to dominate me, my own heart shuddering whenever the faint hollow whine on the telephone suggested an unexpected international call.

Now it had come, and when at last I put the phone down and stood up shivering, the words that came were, “Forgive me, my father. Forgive me.” For I felt that, in recent months, I had not tried hard enough to keep him alive. Into my mind I had admitted the possibility that he would go; and perhaps, in doing so, I had removed the last barrier of desperate need that prevented him from going. For my need of him, my need for his approval, his support, his help, had been diluted over time, while his need of my need had never changed. He had spent his life always being there for me, pushing me to new heights, nurturing great ambitions. He had had such great satisfaction in introducing himself at publishing parties as “the author's author.” And he was my author: the flesh-and-blood source of my skills, of the spark in my eyes that I knew mirrored his own, of the impulse to attain what his ambition had instilled in me, and of the haste to achieve what his frailty had intensified. But over the years, I had ceased to need him as much as before. I had allowed the urgency of our bonds to slacken, and now they had snapped for all time.

If my father had lived, I told myself, I would have demanded nothing of him, just the joy of seeing him mellow into rest. But because I had nothing to ask him for, I left him with nothing to give. And it was to give, to go on giving, that he had fought with such determination against successive assaults on his heart. My father stopped being able to live when he stopped being asked to give.

So I believed. Until I learned there was more to his giving than I, self-centered in mourning, had allowed myself to remember.

My parents’ apartment was overflowing with family and friends when I arrived. For days the phone never stopped ringing; the post-men staggered in with bundles of letters and telegrams; people made inconvenient journeys to Coimbatore to pay him tribute. Former subordinates called from distant cities to weep their regret on the phone; they had never, they said, worked for a better boss. (And indeed, I found among his papers copies of notes he had sent his own superiors, crediting his staff for his achievements.) Throughout my childhood I had been obliged to make room for a succession of young men my father supported while he helped them learn a trade and find a job. Letters poured in from them, and from others my father had helped. Their grief was palpable, for his great-heartedness had touched them financially, morally, and emotionally. But strangers wrote, too, on the letterheads of professional and cultural associations he had given his energies to, to say how much they had been diminished by his death.

“He was all heart,” many of them wrote without conscious irony. With these mourners, the principal reaction was one of disbelief. My father, a physically small man, had for all of them been larger than life; always there when he was needed, always accessible, always willing to try to help, always game for a drink, a party, a session of cards, a new venture, always full of an infectious energy and optimism, a sense of the infinite possibilities of life that he communicated to others. His heart was far larger than that of sturdier men. “I cannot bring myself to mourn for such a man,” wrote a much older friend. “I mourn instead for us, that we have lost him.”

As his son, I had framed his life within my own needs and fears, but its canvas had proved much broader than I had realized. I could now see that I had lived too long with the possibility of my father's death, while countless others had seen only the possibilities of his life. That, in the end, allows me a kind of celebration.

STANDING TALL

My sisters and I knew him as Valiachan, which in Malayalam is literally “Big Father,” for he was our father's elder brother, indeed the eldest. “Big” might have seemed the wrong adjective to apply to him, for Valiachan was a big man in everything but the physical sense: five foot two inches in his socks, with a prematurely bald head and thick-rimmed glasses, he spoke in a soft but rasping voice with a hint of eosinophilia in his pauses. But Valiachan commanded respect, even awe, in all who met him. Height was no handicap for Napoleon, nor was it for Tharoor Parameshwar. For he was one of those people who was not merely a self-made man, but one who had made others; rarer still, he had built institutions that would survive him. In 2004, at the age of eighty-six, Valiachan passed away in Bangalore, and for those who had been touched by his extraordinary life, it was as if an age had passed with him.

Valiachan was born, in February 1918, into a good family that had fallen upon hard times. Historians tell us that at the time of Vasco da Gama, the entire area around Palghat was known as Tharoor Swarupam, but the Tharoors had, over the centuries, been reduced to farming at levels little above subsistence. The usual Kerala solution had to be found to the problem: emigration. So young Param, a brilliant student, dropped out of school after tenth grade, learned typing, and moved to Bombay, aged eighteen, to look for a job. His father had been ailing for years and soon passed away, leaving the financial responsibility for his mother, four brothers, and three sisters upon the teenager. Valiachan found a place in the Ramakrishna Mission at the Bombay suburb of Khar where, in return for cleaning the premises, he was allowed to sleep on the floor and given one free meal a day. Each day he walked twenty kilometers to work in the Fort area and back, because he could not afford the bus fare. But he sent money home. Before he became an adult, Valiachan had become the savior of his family.

At the Mission he studied the sacred Sanskrit texts, memorizing slokas that he could recite well into his eighties. But he combined his spiritual inclinations with an utterly realistic sense of his material needs and obligations. After a few temporary jobs he was hired by the largest advertising agency in British India, J. Walter Thompson, as a stenographer. His intelligence, integrity, and drive soon shone through: within a couple of years he was the media manager.

After spending most of the war years in Simla as deputy head of the government of India's propaganda department — poverty had made Valiachan apolitical — he decided to set up shop on his own in London. Advertising was a profession Valiachan instinctively understood, and he knew the Indian media better than anyone. In those days most major Indian businesses were headquartered in London and the consumers were in India, so for five years he ran a successful operation from Fleet Street selling space in Indian newspapers and magazines to British advertisers. While doing this he not only supported his family in Kerala but brought his three youngest brothers to London to study and start their working lives. It was no accident that two of them followed Valiachan into advertising: one was my own father, Chandran Tharoor.

London lost its attractions after independence, so three years in Calcutta followed as advertising manager for the Amrita Bazar Patrika— the old war propagandist, in a nice twist of irony, having been hired by the Indian nationalist paper in London. In 1955 Valiachan returned to Bombay in triumph, as the founder publisher of the Indian edition of the Reader's Digest. It was a far cry from sweeping floors at the Ramakrishna Mission, but success had to be earned: he began with an office at home, his secretary operating out of the living room. But Valiachan's tireless energy, his matchless ability to persuade advertisers that space in his pages was worth buying, transformed the Digest’s fortunes in India. From representing a nominally “Indian” edition printed in the United Kingdom, he built a national brand that soon had its own Indian editors (starting with the gifted Rahul Singh) and local content.

Param was the Digest, and the Digest, in India, was Param. But when the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act of 1976 required the Digest to dilute its foreign shareholding to 40 percent, the parent company decided to sell out completely. Valiachan found buyers he hoped would uphold the values of the organization he had nurtured for a quarter of a century, but once he retired in 1981, the management of the Digest passed into unworthy hands.

Fortunately, the Digest was not Valiachan's only institutional legacy. He resurrected the Advertising Club of Bombay, presided over it for many years, and published its newsletter, Solus (to which my father contributed a pseudonymous column). Ironically, the club celebrated its fiftieth anniversary the very week Valiachan died, and the city's admen were reminded of how much he had done to recast their profession. He also took a keen interest in education, serving for many years on the Board of Governors of the Lawrence School, Lovedale, where he educated his three sons but — equally important — drafted a constitution, established retirement benefits for the staff, and reformed the school's management. He was an early and active member of the Lion's Club, both locally (he was the president of the Chembur club) and internationally. And after his formal retirement he brought his energies, in an honorary capacity, to professionalize the running of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan for many years.

All these institutions were transformed by his involvement, but he never took credit for his role. Quiet but authoritative, it was enough for him to leave his stamp on something whose possibilities he was usually the first to spot. The advertising guru Gerson da Cunha has written of Valiachan's knack for “perceiving competence and talent usually before anybody else did, then giving that person the opportunity and encouragement to occupy the full space of his or her potential.” Secure in his own self-esteem and iron self-discipline, he was happy to encourage others, serving as example and inspiration to hundreds. Valiachan was once asked for the secret of good public relations. He replied immediately, “Make friends before you need them.”

That he did, around the country. The boy who could not afford to complete his schooling, who walked twenty kilometers to work each day, ended a long and distinguished life as the patriarch of a highly successful and prosperous family, and the revered patron of an entire profession. He was indeed, in the profoundest sense of the word, a big man.

FRIENDS WHO LEFT A VOID

An authentic Indian hero died recently at the tragically young age of fifty-nine. His passing did not merit two lines in our country's papers, because it happened far away, in Pretoria, South Africa. And yet the death of Shunmugan Nganasamantham Chetty — known universally as “Shun,” though no one ever shunned him — ended a life of which every Indian should be proud.

Shun Chetty was a courageous lawyer in apartheid-blighted South Africa who fought bravely for the rights of the victims of tyranny until he was obliged to flee for his life in 1979. He had been the solicitor for Steve Biko's widow in a remarkable case charging the white government with responsibility for the Black Consciousness leader's death in prison. (Biko, in one of the most notorious episodes in apartheid's history of repression, had been shackled naked in solitary confinement and beaten to death, but the government had arranged for a white doctor to certify that the thirty-six-year-old anti-apartheid crusader had died of “natural causes.”) Chetty's courage was also foolhardy: he had been brave enough to take on cases others shied away from, defending the heroes of the African National Congress whose convictions were a foregone conclusion; he had been humane enough to visit them in prison to look into their conditions of detention; but now he had gone too far in trying to make the government accountable for murder. One did not buck the system beyond a point, and the apartheid regime put the word out: Chetty's number was up.

But Shun was not about to go quietly into the dark labyrinth of the apartheid regime's prison systems. Just after dusk one evening his wife, Fazila, a doctor, headed for the Botswanan border in her car, with an unusual cargo in her trunk. It was Shun, with only a blanket to cover him — yet more than Biko had been given on his last ride in a police van. Near the Botswanan border, Shun got out and Fazila, the daughter of a prominent Indian businessman, drove through the checkpoint while he swam across a river. She picked him up on the other side, and Shun Chetty soon arrived, still dripping, at the home of the British High Commissioner in Gaborone, where he claimed asylum. Though a dinner party was going on, he was expected, and welcomed with relief. South Africa's most celebrated solicitor was now a refugee.

I met him soon after that, when he decided to put his legal skills to good use helping other refugees and joined the organization for which I was then working, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Shun and Fazila were a warm and popular couple, gregarious and generous to a fault. Their marriage had crossed several of the fault lines in South Africa's notoriously stratified society: he was a Hindu and she was Muslim; he was an anti-government lawyer and she came from a family that had prospered under white rule (her father, Rashid Varachia, was the country's principal distributor of Coca-Cola, and a prominent cricket administrator). But they were united by something else South Africa had evoked in them, in reaction to the system in which they had been born and raised — their shared sense of a common humanity. It was this that endeared them to a wide circle of friends and sustained Shun in his passionate devotion to justice.

Though he worked for refugees in places as far afield as Sudan, Thailand, and Australia, it is in South Africa that his abiding legacy lies. Fazila sent me a sheaf of obituaries by black South Africans, and they brought tears to my eyes. One wrote of Shun's gentle demeanor, which “hid beneath it the steely resolve of a man determined not to bow to abuse.” The defense minister, M. Lekota, recalled how Shun had managed to get him married in prison and served as best man. The chairman of the Human Rights Commission, Barney Pityana, another former political prisoner, recalled Shun as “a counselor, a lawyer and caregiver all wrapped in one…. We trusted him without any reserve.” One columnist began his tribute with the words: “There were lawyers, and then there was Shun Chetty.” A letter writer to a Pretoria daily perhaps put it best: “Shun Chetty articulated an ethical doctrine that social justice and racial equality were achievable in our society through successful appeal to the conscience of the individual.”

That, of course, is a principle that holds true for all countries, especially ours.

There is so much I have not mentioned about Shun the man, from his passion about nature and wildlife to his obsession with cricket (which we indulged in every one of our international phone calls). But it would take more than a single column to introduce Shun Chetty to Indian readers, and this elegy will have to do.

It is true, of course, that Shun Chetty wasn't Indian; he never carried an Indian passport, though during his years of statelessness under apartheid he explored the possibility of acquiring one. (You need at least one grandparent born in India as defined in the Government of India Act, 1935, to qualify, and Shun's forebears had been South African for too long. But Shun did make one fruitless attempt to find the village in Tamil Nadu from which his ancestors had left a century or more ago.) Born a South African, he died an Australian in his beloved homeland. But a look in the mirror told him what, at heart, he really was: one of us. India had lost a distinguished son, and I have lost a friend.

*

While Shun Chetty was struggling for his life in a Pretoria hospital, I was unaware that another good friend, just fifty-one years old, also lay dying. Nina Sibal, diplomat and novelist, was a friend whose writing I had praised in print, suggesting her memoirs would be worth looking forward to. Those will never be written: breast cancer carried her away in her prime. It was less than a year since I wrote her a recommendation for a fellowship that would have allowed her to take time off from her job to work on a new novel. Now she had run out of time too soon.

Nina Sibal was an extraordinary woman: she had studied literature and law, taught at college, published two well-received novels (Yatra and The Dogs of Justice) and enjoyed a series of challenging diplomatic assignments, including as India's ambassador to UNESCO in Paris. She was a striking presence at the United Nations in New York, where she served as UNESCO's representative, an elegant sari-clad figure with a shock of black hair falling across her face, energetically pursuing such issues as the promotion of an international “culture of peace.” Nina was married to the Indian Supreme Court advocate and Congress Party parliamentarian Kapil Sibal, with whom she maintained a transcontinental relationship in which both spouses were able to pursue exacting careers.

As a writer, Nina Sibal told me, “I'm concerned with the terrors of attachment and how it destroys not only the person herself but everyone around her.” The novel she was intending to write would, she said, “probably involve a greater inwardness.”

A greater inwardness — no male writer would have said that. Nina Sibal's were books that only a woman could have written. An unusual and remarkable woman, she was a warm and generous — as well as gifted — human being.

Her death came at the end of a grisly six months in which I lost no fewer than seven friends and found myself becoming somewhat morbidly obsessed by the capricious cruelty of death. Nina battled cancer with courage and optimism, as well as remarkable dignity, but she knew the end was coming. In Shun's case there was no reason to anticipate the worst: after mild chest pains, he had gone to the hospital for a routine angiogram. The test revealed there was nothing wrong with him — no blocked arteries — but when the doctors removed their probe, they ruptured his heart. A freak accident, perhaps, but this was in the best hospital in Pretoria, capital of the country that gave us the world's first heart transplant. Massive internal bleeding followed, Shun lapsed into a coma and died without recovering consciousness.

Two of the other deaths I mourned the same year were equally unexpected and inexplicable. I had long known Ansar Husain Khan, author of the polemical The Rediscovery of India, which received excellent reviews when Orient Longman published it in 1988. Ansarbhai's was an exceptional story. One of the first Pakistani officials of the United Nations, he fought for years to obtain an Indian passport because of his rejection of the two-nation theory. When he finally obtained his Indian citizenship, it was at a high price in human terms; he was ostracized by his former compatriots, who refused him a visa even to visit his parents’ graves. A man of wide reading and great erudition, this secular Muslim offered me one of the best definitions I know of the Hindu concept of dharma: “That by which we should live.” He was living in retirement in Geneva, Switzerland, with his gentle Swiss wife, Anita — whom I often thought of as a better Indian wife than many of the Indian wives I knew — when he pulled out a gun one morning and shot her dead. He called the police, turned himself in, and succumbed to a heart attack in the police station — on, I am told, the very same day.

There are some stories you strain hard to believe, let alone comprehend. I did not even know Ansarbhai owned a gun, let alone that he was capable of using it. And against such a target — the kind, patient, and loving mother of his two teenage sons! What makes people snap, what drives them to acts of such horror that their own hearts cannot abide what they have done? I keep turning over the accounts I have heard of the incident and can find no answers in its terrible finality. For years we had been discussing a summer visit by the Khan family to New York, where I lived; I kept expecting to hear his cheerful voice on the phone, asking me to inquire about apartments available on short-term lease. Life itself, I realize, is something we each have only on a short-term lease. A moment of anger, of madness in a marriage, of carelessness in a hospital, of a rogue gene running amok in your cells, and your lease is up.

Three other dear friends left the world more peacefully in this period, at the culmination of lives full of accomplishment. One did not, strictly speaking, have an Indian connection, other than a great partiality to Indian food: he was a frequent habitué of desi restaurants in New York, ever ready to try a new one. Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, was a delightful companion (especially at the dining table, where he loved my former wife's Indian cooking), a witty and kindhearted man whose literary eminence never impeded his interest in younger writers, to whom he was unfailingly generous. One of my proudest possessions is a photo his wife, Valerie, sent me of Joe stretched out on his sofa reading my novel Show Business. A healthy and vigorous seventy-six, he died suddenly one night of a massive heart attack, depriving the world of a brilliantly original satiric voice.

And finally, two remarkable women whom I had known since my childhood passed away after long and debilitating illnesses. Sakuntala Jagannathan, the dynamic head of Maharashtra Tourism in the 1960s and a wise and accessible author (her book on Hinduism is a model of its kind), had written to chide me for giving, in an earlier column, all the credit for Kerala's literacy to its Communist rulers. She felt rightly that I should not have overlooked the earlier contribution of her grandfather, the formidable Dewan of Travancore, Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar. I promised to make this point when I next returned to the subject; sadly, I never expected it to be in an elegy for her. Pearl Padamsee, my mentor in theater and a close friend and counselor for many years, was someone whose bouncy vivacity I had written about. The last time I saw her, illness had reduced her to a wisp, but her strength of personality shone through. I can imagine her in heaven, organizing a cast of angels to mount a celestial production of Godspell.

If there is any consolation at all in the voyage of these seven friends to that undiscovered country from which no traveler returns, it can only lie in their own release from the burdens of this world. No one is truly happy, Euripides wrote two millennia ago, until he is dead. I hope these friends are happy wherever they are; it is us they have left behind who are filled with questions, longings, and regrets.