Indira Nehru (her maiden name) was both India’s third Prime Minister, the daughter of its first and mother of its fourth. She was born in late 1917 just as the high tide of Gandhian nationalism was about to break over India. It is ironic that one to whom the sobriquet Mother India was so readily attached, was, in reality, Daughter India – not simply Nehru’s only child, but sole scion of a great dynastic political family, born into the political fray and never to escape it. Expectations of her were high and the very earliest – that she be a boy – she could never fulfil (though tellingly she adopted the alter-ego and nick-name of Indu-boy as a young adolescent). Despite this initial disappointment, she grew up freighted with ‘destiny’. The first lines of Glimpses of World History, written by Nehru for his daughter, portentously noted that she had been born on the very same day as the Russian Revolution and the nationalist poet, Sarojini Naidu, hailed her birth as the coming of ‘the new soul of India’. Her earliest memories were of the Gandhian bonfires of foreign goods during the non-cooperation campaign, flames to which her own favourite clothes and dolls were consigned. At the age of four she was dangled on the knee of her grandfather Motilal during his first trial of civil disobedience, as a knowingly manipulated symbol of the new India. A celebrity from an early age, she was recognised wherever she went and a photograph of a 13-year-old Indira in Gandhi cap and khadi uniform flanked by her parents became a Congress icon. Closely acquainted with the Mahatma from infancy, it was she who squeezed the orange juice with which he broke his famous Poona fast-unto-death. Despite these highlights, her childhood was largely blighted by the nationalist cause. Her parents were frequently absent, either campaigning or in jail, the family finances were neglected and ultimately ruined and she herself finally experienced the rite de passage of all Congress luminaries spending a gruelling nine months incarcerated during the Quit India rebellion of 1942. ‘Politics is the centre of everything’, she told the New York Times in the year she first became Prime Minister and for her, this had been quite literally always been true.

Her mother, Kamala, was a very young woman from a high caste, but less westernised background than her father. Kamala was despised by some of the other women in Nehru’s family for her lack of sophistication, though she soon learnt English, took an active role in Congress politics and, indeed, became something of a feminist. She was ill for most of Indira’s life and died of tuberculosis when her daughter was only 17. The neglect and condescension that Kamala suffered at the hands of her father’s family rankled, fostering a bitterness that fed Indira’s depressive, introverted personality and sense of being undervalued. Nehru himself was a fond, absent and extremely demanding father. Indira was the recipient of his many jail-penned letters (written for publication), in which she was enjoined to study closely the careers of Joan of Arc, Garibaldi and Socrates, among others. And, although it seems likely that she too suffered from tuberculosis until her 40s, he also chastised her for enjoying indifferent health. He had the highest hopes of her, as he confessed, though his idiosyncratic views on education meant that hers was erratic and disrupted....

She certainly had an artistic bent and was extremely well-read, though Nehru’s own works, with the exception of the Discovery of India, which she proof read, did not figure among her favourites (indeed she complained that his Glimpses of World History, dedicated to her, was too bulky and unwieldy). Nevertheless she had, by her late teens imbibed her father’s internationalism and centre-left leanings. She was not, however, her father’s stooge. In the late 1930 she had become a strong anti-fascist and rowed with Nehru when he insisted that they visit the right-wing appeaser Lord Lothian. But the precise nature of her ideological proclivities is hard to discern, and as an active politician, her decision-making seemed guided principally by pragmatic calculation rather than conviction. She always professed to be on the left, and as a young woman in London in the late 1930s she came into the orbit of the group of radical and communist Indian students for whom the brilliant, if unstable Krishna Menon was the focal point. One of these was Feroze Gandhi, who had become an acolyte of her mother Kamala many years earlier, and whom Indira was later to marry.

Her husband Feroze Gandhi, was an exuberant extrovert of Parsi background and the marriage was controversial. Indeed, like everything in her life, it soon became a public issue and heated debates ensued in the national press about Feroze’s suitability. Nehru was opposed and even the Mahatma himself became involved (he approved, but suggested that the marriage should be celibate). But Indira showed iron resolve and the marriage was made and produced two sons. Feroze became an MP in 1952 and joined Indira in the prime-ministerial residence in New Delhi, where she had been living as political consort and domestic amanuensis to Nehru since the late 1940s. Relations between the two were not good. Feroze was a womaniser, who, moreover, adopted an oppositional stance to his illustrious father-in-law, and was prominent in exposing the high-level corruption scandals that dogged Nehru’s last ministries. He and Nehru did not get on; one lunch guest at Teen Murti reported that Feroze sat in complete silence over lunch except to contradict each and every opinion proffered by Nehru, ranging from the quality of the food to the trajectory of international politics.

Mrs Gandhi appears however, to have been at her happiest as Nehru’s help-meet, organising official dinners, bringing up her sons (she took a great interest in theories of child-rearing), and managing the family zoo. Inevitably, however, her proximity to power drew her into the political realm. Nehru himself seems to have decided by this stage that Indira was not the right material for a high-level political life and she herself toyed with the idea of leaving India altogether and moving to England where her sons were being educated in the early 1960s. But others had very different ideas. Many, like Nehru, underestimated her ability and will-power, indeed she had to endure endless insults, condescension and derogation both before and after she entered politics. Tired perhaps of the various dismissive or insulting labels, ranging from dumb doll to evil genius, she once quipped that since no one could agree on her identity a seminar should be held to establish whether she was ‘Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or George III’. But clearly to many it was her own name that made her a priceless political asset. From the mid-1950s she was encouraged by various people on both the left and right of Congress to dip a toe into active politics. She began in earnest in 1958 when she consented, with genuine reluctance, to stand for the Congress presidency. Indeed, she seems to have been goaded into agreement by reports in the press that she wasn’t up to it. She won the election easily and at the subsequent celebrations concluded her inaugural address with a quote from a popular Hindi film song:
We are the women of India
Don’t imagine us as flower maidens
We are the sparks in the fire.