[In the following review, Pal contends that although An Indian Dynasty: The Story of the Nehru-Gandhi Family “was written and produced in less than six months, it is well documented, generally accurate and very readable.”]

Thirty years ago, the non-aligned movement was born in an obscure town called Bandung in Indonesia. The chief architects of that conference were four remarkable men of this century: Tito of Yugoslavia, Chou en Lai of China, Nasser of Egypt and Nehru of India. Tito and Chou were rulers of communist governments; Nasser had come to power through military rather than democratic means; only Nehru was the freely elected leader of what was then—and still is—the largest democracy in the world. All four men died some time ago, and neither in the communist countries nor in partially democratic Egypt has any of the descendants of Tito, Chou or Nasser staked a claim to their country's political leadership as their birth-right. Ironically, only in the world's largest “democracy” has there been a perpetuation of dynastic rule for 34 years of its 37-year existence.

Tariq Ali's book [An Indian Dynasty: The Story of the Nehru-Gandhi Family] narrates the strange saga of perhaps the most extraordinary dynasty of modern times. Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) was the first prime minister of independent India from 1947 until 1964. Except for a brief interregnum of a few months, he was succeeded by his only daughter Indira (1917-1984), who ruled longer than her father and, like him, died with her boots on, though not of natural cause but by bullets. Within a few hours after her assassination on Oct. 31, 1984, she was succeeded by her only surviving son, Rajiv Gandhi (1944-), whose claim to the throne at the time was based solely on heredity rather than merit or political experience. It must be pointed out that Indira and Rajiv Gandhi have only a surname in common with Mahatma Gandhi, who led India into freedom and was assassinated in 1948. Indira Nehru's husband Feroze Gandhi, who predeceased her by many years, was a Parsi (a non-Hindu minority who are descendants of Persian Zoroastrians who emigrated to India many centuries ago), while the Mahatma was a Gujarati Hindu. The two were not even remotely related, contrary to what most Americans think.

The book is undoubtedly timely, for India has been much on the American mind, thanks to unfortunate events that the mass media have reveled in reporting (the Sikh problem, the storming of their Golden Temple in Amritsar and consequent assassination of Indira Gandhi, and the even more tragic man-made catastrophe at Bhopal) and thanks as well to such cultural events in this country as David Lean's (rather than E. M. Forster's!) A Passage to India and the much touted PBS soap opera about the Indian jewel in the British crown. Indeed, as the book's American publisher's news release admits, it was commissioned by Ali's British publisher immediately after Mrs. Gandhi's death no doubt to cash in on the current India craze.

Considering that the book was written and produced in less than six months, it is well documented, generally accurate and very readable. A few minor errors are surprising though not crucial. Prayag is certainly much older than AD 600, and Alexander was not “stopped by the Indian ruler Chandra Gupta (sic), not far from Allahabad.” Much less excusable is the statement that “Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan are monarchies of a sort.” Surely, Ali knows that the ruler of Sikkim was shamelessly dethroned three years ago by the very Mrs. Gandhi who has been characterized as the “Empress of India” in the heading of the book's fourth chapter. As a matter of fact, it is somewhat surprising that Ali ignores this ignominious episode in Mrs. Gandhi's political career.

Nevertheless, the author has deftly sketched the political portraits of four generations of Nehrus against the background of India's turbulent history of almost the entire 20th Century and has tried, on the whole, to be objective and impartial in his assessments and comments, by no means an easy task when reviewing one's own time. One must also admire Ali's restraint, for as Salman Rushdie, the author of Midnight's Children, writes in an incisive introductory essay to the book, “It has often seemed that the story of the Nehrus and the Gandhis has provided more engrossing material than anything in the cinemas or television, a real dynasty better than ‘Dynasty,’ a Delhi to rival ‘Dallas.’”

Ali could easily have given us more titillating accounts of Nehru's apparent loveless marriage to a bride chosen by his patrician father, or of his later “affair” with Lady Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India. He could have written at greater length about Kamala Nehru's attachment to a much younger, witty and entertaining Feroze Gandhi who later married her daughter. He could have probed further into the reasons why Indira Gandhi “did not like but loved Feroze” and yet abandoned him to devote herself entirely to her father. Hardly the appropriate behavior of an Indian wife, and yet she was exalted by the populace as a goddess! Her strange and obsessive devotion to her sons, her paranoid fear of losing power, her dependence on astrology, her paradoxical insecurity despite enormous popular support, her arrogance and her ruthlessness—all these make her one of the most intriguing and fascinating personalities in history. One can also ask why in a country of 700 million people (roughly 200 million of whom are literate) no other family in two generations has produced a single political personality to challenge the Nehrus.

Ali's emphasis has been more on the political rather than on the personal lives of his heroes and villains; actions and decisions are explained in political terms rather than with psychological insight. The personalities, therefore, seem somewhat dehumanized. Nevertheless, the book is well worth reading, for it clearly demonstrates the insidiously corruptive game of power, in which ultimately there are no winners.