The Undying Light: Gopalkrishna Gandhi's memoir on modern India's making

Business Standard

06-05-2025

THE UNDYING LIGHT: A Personal History of Independent India
Publisher: Aleph
Pages: 624
Price: ₹999
The 1940s was a historically important decade for the Indian subcontinent because it set the foundations for independence from colonial rule. The generation that was born in that decade (or slightly earlier), therefore, can trace the history of independent India, or at least a version of it. Former diplomat and administrator Gopalkrishna Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and C Rajagopalachari, has decided to offer a deeply personal account of the struggle for Indian independence.
Divided into eight chapters, each of them covering a decade or so from the 1940s, it begins with an amusing incident concerning Gopalkrishna's birth in 1945. Born to Gandhi's youngest son, the author was the fourth child to Devadas and Laxmi. After they had had three children, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur wrote to Gandhi saying his son was being irresponsible by having so many children, to which he suggested that she should talk to him about it. The author feels relieved that he was born seven years after the third child, so he wasn't grouped with the others whose birth was possibly deemed to be a result of 'blind lust'.
The focus of this memoir is to present parallel but overlapping stories between the author's life and key historical events, allowing us to walk beside the author. The result is a perspective that is both interesting and instructive. As India came closer to attaining independence, communalism engulfed the region and his grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi rushed wherever he was called. The author describes how despite the personal danger, Gandhi visited Noakhali in East Bengal where a communal clash had led to the exodus and forced conversions of Hindu Bengalis. He went on to visit several villages and held prayer meetings every evening with both Hindus and Muslims. He aimed at shaming the guilty and offering forgiveness to those who had committed violence. This surely underlines the difficult conversations that Gandhi readily posited to the people, an element that is missing in today's political discourse where simplistic narratives trump complex realities.
The author's proximity to those who shaped the formative years of independent India also offers an up close and personal view of the making of the modern nation-state. Mr Gandhi refers to several familiar landmark events that set the benchmark for the kind of country to which we aspire. The resignation of Lal Bahadur Shastri as Union Minister of Railways after the tragic Mahbubnagar and Ariyalur rail accidents in 1956 is one example. Then Congress President U N Dhebar described Shastri's action 'a landmark in the annals of democracy'. It didn't just indicate ownership of responsibility by a Union minister of a newly formed country but also underlined his commitment to the South.
The author's experience in different fields is visible in his writing, setting out in the process a blueprint of a modern constitutional democracy. In recent months, as constitutional issues between the governor of Tamil Nadu and the elected government were being played out in the Supreme Court, the author talks about a period in the 1980s when he was the secretary to S L Khurana, then governor of Tamil Nadu. His verdict on the governor-chief minister relationship is that it should neither be too close nor too formal, which would indicate distrust. Perhaps his experience as governor of West Bengal (2004-2009) came in handy in making these judgements.
For all the careful prose, Mr Gandhi minces no words in some of his judgements either. He discusses how his maternal grandfather C Rajagopalachari was distraught with the way the Congress, which was trusted to be the first to form a government in the country, had turned into a one-man party, an emotion echoed by Rajkumari Amrit Kaur in a letter written to him. He unequivocally states that Congress politicians were directly involved in
the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and says newly elected Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's comment about it ('When a big tree falls…') was awful in every sense of the word.
He goes on to candidly express how he was approached to contest elections against Narendra Modi in 2014 and while this action touched him, he refused, describing himself as 'timid' when it comes to participating in political action. From a cursory glance, one might imagine this book to be just another elite rendition of someone's superficial understanding of Indian history. But Gopalkrishna Gandhi in this 600-plus page monolith isn't trying to establish himself as a historian; instead, he is presenting a personal view of history and openly sharing it for the readers to dissect. He admits, for instance, that his upbringing limited his worldview in his formative years but reality struck hard as soon as he became a civil servant. As a personal glimpse of a significant period in history, The Undying Light must go down as an important read.