Nehru: A Political Life

Contemporary Review, April, 2004

Nehru: A Political Life. Judith M. Brown. Yale University Press. [pounds sterling]25.00. xvi 407 pages. ISBN 0-300-09279-2. The author accepts that Prof. Gopal's three-volume biography remains the best study of Independent India's first Prime Minister. The argument for this study is that the author had access to Nehru's political papers after 1947 and that the author has here given us a thematic approach to Nehru's political work.

She also has placed Nehru into the context of his age and region, rather than as an isolated 'great man'. The nature of international relations after independence has also been taken into consideration in evaluating the work of a man whose life was 'dominated by politics' and whose influence, through his own achievements and the creation of a ruling 'dynasty' shaped modern India. The book's five sections deal with Nehru's (and India's) 'imperial heritage', the conflicting stresses and ideals of the nationalist movement between 1920 and 1939, the problems brought by the Second World War and the horrors of partition, Nehru's work in creating the Indian Republic between 1948 and 1956, and, lastly, his final eight years in power. This is a 'life and times' biography on the grand scale of a man who 'was central to the making of modern India'. It is, in effect, the history of a country as well as the biography of a man. (R.T.E.)