The Sanjay Story: From Anand Bhavan to Amethi; by Vinod Mehta.

This book could have been benefited with a newer edition to add information after the famous first ever defeat of congress government in India, because the subject of the book not only died suddenly and accidentally soon after this, but far more happened, much of the events of eighties related to the family and the nation woven intricately together as it then used to, that could have put a lot more in perspective. For reasons perhaps not that obscure, this wasn't done.

Much of what is here was known to most who lived through those times, especially those connected in any way with India, especially those that lived in India, even if press was silent for most part about negatives related to the family. This was so not merely during the emergency when political silence was imposed, but also before and after, when personal details of non exemplary nature were kept off. Indeed that was so until the Times motto, very characteristic of a GWTW English era, of "all news that is fit to be printed" was replaced with another set of values and style, especially in film journalism where gossip and dirt was brought in in seventies and paid news replaced it all parading as all news and thought there could be. In non film journalism and indeed in officialdom people still did and do cater to power, which is perceived as intricately related to this family albeit the winner branch of it rather than the thrown out wife and son of the subject of this book, who remain mostly ignored but for the opposition generosity in giving them space in the party. That the family is for now out of power even as opposition, while opposition is a strong winner and ruling party, has changed only a little of that equation as far as most press and other officialdom go.

Mehta here gives little that is not known, and leaves out much that is known, which he states could have filled another book but was not included for reasons of journalistic integrity, specifically for lack of substantiation - so most of this is a reliving through the known and few unknown details. He mentions the big theft, but leaves out the real mccoy that was change of name due to the incident overseas, and instead claims the subject of his book left the Rolls Royce apprenticeship due to being no longer interested.

What is really interesting is that he leaves the book and the reader, after meticulously cataloguing all the unsavoury details of Sanjay Gandhi's exploits and misdeeds known and less known in detail, is that he makes one question instead if the guy wasn't so much a villain as a character out of place and out of his time, and would have been instead seen as a saviour and unquestionable prince and king benefic and loved by his people if only time and place were different. This may or may not have been his intention - after all his very meticulous balancing of the book might not have been all that merely due to integrity of journalism, but more of a safety precaution, since one couldn't even then have been certain of just how long congress and the family would be not in power. Indeed they were back in two years, except for Sanjay who was no longer quite the unopposed prince and died before he could come back to that position.

This impression, of a man out of his time and place but not intrinsically bad per se as much as
simply lacking the circumstances that could have instead made him look very different, is perhaps all the more stronger if one has just finished reading about the various royal families and persona of Europe, One gets the impression they got away with much including deaths of millions, being not personally responsible for events they presided over as heads of nations, and more.

Indeed the author leaves one with the impression that the one single characteristic of the man was that he was autocratic in his style of thought and decisions, and while he heard and understood others when he did meet or hear them, he gave little importance to what he did not consider worth taking into account. In the process much was discarded that could have benefited him, from school education to the final routing at elections due to not listening to those that knew better.

One might wonder if there was more in this line - after all various despots of many nations did flourish quite long and well under a benevolent eye from a superpower, due to their ability to agree to just that much; that some of them cheated on the agreements successfully and were never punished is yet more evidence that perhaps downfall of this young man, fortuitous for the nation or not, was not all due to his serious flaws as much as due to faults that put him out of ever being supported by a superpower.

Mehta mentions Sanjay's own family but little, makes no mention of death of his father in law and the Sikh problems that the nation and more specifically the family faced after the death of Sanjay Gandhi and especially more so after the events that unfolded post his death. All that of course happened after this book was published, but he has added only a new forward to the book, mentioning only the death of Sanjay Gandhi and no more.

All in all one wonders if the author was all along merely in a fortuitous circumstance as people in higher positions during and post British times tended to be, rather than earning it with merit. One expected much more of the book on this subject, more than this, better than this, due to his name and position of being a well known top journalist and editor of decades of top magazines.

One of the examples where it fails or at least falls very short is the infamous Turkman Gate episode of emergency misdeeds - Mehta describes it as a slum, deserving of being razed to the ground, and only badly done as in human terms: Tavleen Singh, another journalist of excellence, has explained it differently, in her book Durbar. And while Mehta does give a lot of details about the whole operation making one cringe as one reads it, it is the crucial difference in describing it merely as a slum that is a serious discrepancy at the very least if not outright mistake.
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So Mehta wrote the book soon post emergency, and the subject and his mother being still very much then alive, didn't take chances but wrote so meticulously that it comes across as all documentation of what most others either wrote or said until then, or could find easily enough, with - as he very explicitly and pointedly mentions - much withheld. He really hasn't said anything that could help them persecute him legitimately, if and when back in power, which they did come soon enough, even though Sanjay died very soon and suddenly in an accident with a plane he was flying crashing near his home that was the home of his mother, then again the prime minister of India. 

The effect is to make one wonder if he really wished one to take a startled second look at whether the guy was not a villain but a much misunderstood visionary out of time and space and role, with much that was blamed on him being not his fault, much that was his fault not being held up for him to be accountable to but minor stuff, and much that was his accomplishment being lost in the sycophancy during the emergency.

One small detail comes to mind much later post having finished the book and been busy at other stuff, which - the detail - is interesting in its shedding light on the author.

He has made it a point to give details of how he was asked, with no uncertainty, by henchmen of the power during emergency, to give publicity favourable to Sanjay Gandhi via articles and editorials, which other publications did readily enough (he refrains from mentioning the chief publication that stood out against it all, funnily enough!) - which he meticulously mentions he had not until then complied with, and later fortunately didn't have to, due to emergency being lifted.

And therein lies the secret of why he gives detailed description of the circumstances and wedding of the parents, Indira Nehru and Feroze Gandhi, pointing out and specifically mentioning that the ceremony might not have been legal or legitimate, at all. Most people would satisfy themselves using a small one word. But Indian culture being unlike that of west, no such words exist in India for children of parents who might not be married to one another, and the concept of such stigma for children is borrowed or imposed via colonial rules of foreign origin over a millennia, as are the small words.
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Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor; by Anne Edwards.

The title is slightly misleading, in calling Queen May a matriarch, and then painstakingly being accurate in how she was first and foremost a devoted loyal monarchist - for, being a queen consort and not a Regina, not born to rule, her being a matriarch is halfway at best, and that limited to how she brought up her children and held power over her brood - which was only by setting example they all looked up to and some tried to aspire to, at best. As the author establishes over and over, she was not very maternal, mothering at best at a distance and certainly not when her brood was young, so much so her first two sons suffered as babies at hands of their then nanny and it went undetected for years, enough to perhaps leave a mark that defined them for ever, until the famous abdication by the elder and the suffering of the second in having to take over.

Matriarch is a title that best fits Queen Victoria of course, clear in her role almost at or soon enough after birth, and a Regina, but one that directed the course of European history with her matchmaking between her brood and other royal houses of Europe, and preferably between cousins so the ties of familial loyalty binded them, which did not always succeed as she wished - since familiarity and familial ties can do just the opposite, but succeeded enough that all royal houses of Europe were and are related closely. That few survived as royal is another story.

Queen May, born Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, was none of that, however close a relative of Queen Victoria and however admiring of royalty, or beloved of her people and her descendents. What she certainly was is the queen that defined the monarchy and the British royal family for future generations, The author repeats over and over how royal, how queenly she always was, far more so than those that were more royal. This is more a trait of character of course, and rarely acquired by mere will, or even due to birth and training. May was born in and brought up in an impecunious family, her father being the son of a morganatic marriage and thereby deprived of the benefits of the Teck and other estate holdings, and so at mercy of the greater royal relative Queen Victoria. If May was as royal as, or more royal in her bearing than, Victoria, this was certainly due to her own persona.

What examples she set have survived a few generations, and only Princess Diana was different in ways that were remarked about, in her keeping her children close and showing affection openly in private and public - and this perhaps is one of the few ways where emulation by example of a beloved and revered ancestor and Queen was not always the best idea. Queen May was uncomfortable with babies although she had six, never was close to them until they were adult if then, and this had a negative effect best not discussed - and it isn't, even in this book, albeit one might be given the impression there was no such taboo. One cannot help being oneself, of course, but bringing up babies is vital and leaving it to care of nannies quite so much can and often enough does have effects not possible to countermand later, and one has to reflect how much superior the joint familes of Asia and other older cultures are in this respect where grandparents and other relatives are not far away sporadic visitors but on hand to spare the young mother and babies of the stress. In this case the grandparents of May's children were Prince and Princess of Wales, later King Edward and Queen Alexandra, usually not far away but limited by European or English tradition of not being everyday presence, and thus not able to detect the hurt to the young princes their grandsons.

So there are comparisons, inevitably brought to mind, with more recent royals, and this is perhaps not an accident or unintended effect but even so much as the very purpose of the book - the repeated references to the beauty of Princess and later Queen Alexandra, her identity as the beauty, her vanity, her attachment to her children and especially to her first and second son, are just a tad too often enough to make one wonder if this is yet another attempt by royals to get the people to not quite love and revere the beloved recent Princess of Wales, Diana.

There is more - there are references often and frequent to various women the princes, and especially those who were Prince of Wales at one time or another, played with - and were loyal to, for years; which does make one wonder, is the reader being subliminally suggested to play the game as the people of England then did, accepting and loving the prince no matter what, and more - since Princess of Wales and later Queen Alexandra played her role as required, is the reader suggested to follow the example of the royal family in censuring Princess Diana for not doing so, and instead attempting to live rather than complying and following the example, to be a decorative living fossil in a palace?

Inevitably also the comparison of Edward eighth and his abdication which his mother disapproved of enough to receive him rarely thereafter, and his wife never, is unmistakable with the present circumstances with question about whether succession should pass directly to Diana's son William who inherits his mother's popularity and looks, or is the reader being again subliminally suggested to adhere to English tradition and approve, indeed love, the erring ex husband of Diana, as Edward was even when he abdicated and only visited rarely as Duke of Windsor?

Whatever the truth of that, and those are not small considerations, one does enjoy reading this, due to the times and the scope of the subject, and in that it disappoints in more than one way. - of the most interesting events and persona there is but fleeting reference on the whole, except as it affected the royal family and England. So the world wars first and second are referred to a bit more than the Russian events, latter more in that the then King of England failed to save his cousins and their children, which is blamed conveniently on Lloyd George, and as for India, the longer references are to the royal visits, while the millions starved due to harvests being taken away for soldiers is not mentioned other than as a quirk of India millions dying of famines, Jalianwala is a passing mention, Gandhi is a nuisance (author might have used another word, or not), and independence of India with the hurried and badly done partition resulting in ten million deaths due to British taking flight in a hurry is not mentioned at all.

One does get copious descriptions of clothes and jewellery worn by various persona royal or otherwise, and there are photographs not as satisfactory as found elsewhere, but then perhaps the book was commissioned for the subliminal purposes and might just do the job, of making people accepting substitutes preferred by husbands - Alice Keppel was, would be the royal diktat, and look at how everyone suffered only because Wallis wasn't, would be another subliminal suggestion.

One comparison not mentioned is inevitable though, of the present queen being a lot more like her grandmother in looks and bearing, albeit more like her mother in other respects.