TBR @ 40 Looking Back

Biography, according to Lytton Strachey, is ‘the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing’. It is also a difficult art particularly when the story told is that of Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who strode the world like ‘a gentle colossus’ until very recently, and whose life was an open one, openly lived almost in ‘the glorious privacy of light’. The task is further compounded by the fact that the character of the hero is a complex mixture of the dreamer and the fighter, the aesthete and the politician, the thinker and the activist, the reformer and the revolutionary and the conformist and the iconoclast—all contained within the trembling general equilibrium of a rounded and integrated personality … Dr. Gopal has not embarked upon a Freudian exploration into the origins of his hero’s psychological make-up, but has adopted the historical method of biography. In a sense the method was determined by the nature of the subject matter itself and by the fact that the author is himself an eminent historian. Nehru was a man of immense reticence, … Though the author has eschewed the unprofitable psychological approach, the book contains a series of brief but penetrating glimpses and analyses of the mind and character of Nehru and of the formative influences that fashioned his personality and outlook. … The main substance of the biography is history, the history of the nationalist period as seen and enacted through Nehru.