Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny.

• Author: ROCHER, LUDO
• Position: Review

Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny. By STANLEY WOLPERT. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. xii + 546. $35.

To his biographies of Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Jinnah of Pakistan, 1984) and of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan, 1993) Wolpert now adds a volume on Jawaharlal Nehru.

The subtitle of the hook also serves as the title of the first chapter, which contains a running commentary on passages from the unforgettable speech that Nehru delivered before India's Constituent Assembly at midnight August 14-15, 1947: "Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge."

More than any of several biographies of Nehru I have read--starting with Frank Moraes' Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (1956) and Michael Brecher's Nehru: A Political Biography (1959), when Nehru was still alive--this is the most personal one: in Wolpert's narrative Lord Mountbatten is most often referred to as "Dickie," Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit as "Nan," Krishna Hutheesing Nehru as "Betty," etc. Wolpert, as usual, does not hesitate to speak his mind about events and characters in his book: in 1917 "the idiot governor of Madras" had Annie Besant arrested (p. 37). Occasionally the book leans toward sensationalism. For example, about the "ramshackle affair" with Bharati Sarabhai who "like several others ... imagined and even believed that someday he would ask her to marry him" (p. 191). Nehru's meeting with President Kennedy in 1961 "proved most frustrating to his young host, who also found infuriating Nehru's focus on his wife and his inability to keep his hands from touching her" (p. 480; cf. the photograph facin g p. 261). A lot of attention is paid passim to Nehru's affair with Edwina...