FURTHERREADING
There are innumerable books on Jawaharlal Nehru. Many are too hagio-
graphic, or dominated by concerns with his personal life or his personality,
to be useful. Most of them do not stand up to academic scrutiny. There
are also several published memoirs of persons associated with Nehru at
various points in his or their careers – of uneven quality and varying levels
of usefulness. Much hard work has to be done on cross-checking sources
used and finding out what level of access the writer had to Nehru or his
circles, what axes he or she had to grind, and so on, before these works yield
anything useful.
The three-volume official biography of Nehru by the late S. Gopal,
Jawaharlal Nehru: a Biography(3 volumes, Jonathan Cape, 1975–84), is
still the standard work, though it fails to be adequately critical. Gopal, son
of the Sanskritist and later president of India, S. Radhakrishnan, was
allowed privileged access to the Nehru papers, which are closed to ordinary
researchers for the period after 1946. Gopal is also our main intermediary
for the post-1946 period, having edited the published selections from the
Nehru papers, the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, two series of which
have appeared to date (Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 1972–82;
1984–). It does not take a specialist to find that even these selectively
published works are often at variance with the views expressed in Gopal’s
official biography – which does him credit as a scholar when he takes off his
official hat. (Gopal has worn many official hats in his time – for instance, he
was the head of the team of historians appointed to find archival evidence
backing India’s case on the Indo-Chinese border question that eventually led
to the Indo-Chinese border war of 1962.) The first volume, dealing with the
pre-1946 period, is the most reliable; thereafter, his narrative is sometimes
clumsily partisan. Gopal’s is, despite these defects, still the best account in
existence.
There is a considerable body of work by B.R. Nanda, relating to Nehru
himself, his father Motilal, the Nehru years, Gandhi, and the relation-
ship between Gandhi and Nehru, which is generally reliable, if within a
centrist and nationalist paradigm: see in particular The Nehrus: Motilal and
Jawaharlal(Allen & Unwin, 1962) and Jawaharlal Nehru: Rebel and Statesman
(Oxford University Press, 1995). Two older critical biographies still worth
reading are those of Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography(Oxford
University Press, 1959, recently reprinted) and Michael Edwardes, Nehru:
A Political Biography(Allen Lane, 1971), although they are naturally not