Indira
The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi
-
- R$ 49,90
-
- R$ 49,90
Publisher Description
The definitive and first non-partisan biography of one of the most formidable political figures of the twentieth century (voted Woman of the Millennium in a BBC poll, 2000)
Indira Gandhi’s life, from her birth in 1917, through partition and up to her assassination in 1984, was dominated by the politics of her country. Always directly involved in India’s turbulent twentieth-century history, once she accepted the mantle of power, she became one of the world’s most powerful and significant women. This biography, the first to be written by an unpartisan, Western woman, will focus on Gandhi’s role as a female leader of men in one of the most chauvinistic, complex and politicised cultures in the world.
Comprehensive, yet also personal, Frank’s biography will deal with power and how this often isolated woman handled it, alongside her family and her emotional life. It will be the definitive book on one of this century’s most powerful and important women.
Reviews
Praise for The Life of Lucie Duff Gordon:
‘This biography stands as a masterpiece in its
own right’
‘Frank has admirably unearthed the substance
here… painting an unforgettable picture… and
orchestrates her account with depth and
subtlety’
About the author
Katherine Frank, who was born and educated in the United States, is the author of three acclaimed biographies, of Lucie Duff Gordon, Emily Bronte and Mary Kingsley. She has taught at universities in West Africa and the Middle East as well as Britain. During six years of researching and writing Indira she spent extended periods in India. She now lives in England.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The most striking aspects of Frank's readable, well-wrought biography are Gandhi's sad childhood and her reluctance to enter politics. She attended upwards of seven schools in Switzerland, England and India and was often separated from her family her tubercular mother died when Indira was 19; her father and many family members were in and out of jail during the Independence Movement. Indira herself was sickly (she spent 10 months in a sanatorium in Switzerland during WWII), and, at 37, she wrote to a friend, "I am doing a tremendous amount of work these days but I have not discovered my m tier yet." Schoolmate Iris Murdoch remembered Gandhi as "very unhappy, very lonely, intensely worried about her father and her country and thoroughly uncertain about the future." Only after the deaths of her husband, Feroze Gandhi; her father; Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first leader; and Lal Bahadur Shastri, his successor, did she come into her own politically. Not a political biography, Frank's book (via letters and conversations with close confidants) comes closest to showing the human Indira who joined politics because she felt duty-bound to uphold her father's secular, inclusive vision of her homeland. Frank (A Passage to Egypt: The Life of Lucie Duff Gordon; etc.) shows that Gandhi's increasing isolation, loss of confidence and closeness to her son, Sanjay, caused her later to impose the Emergency (suspending civil liberties and jailing opponents) and play castes, religions and political groups against one another contrary to her father's ideals. But she is far less knowable in the book's second and third sections, when she becomes the paranoid, ruthless leader remembered for her despotism. 12 pages b&w photos not seen by PW.
