THE UNSEEN INDIRA GANDHI
Through her physician's eyes
K P Mathur
Konark Publishers
151 pages; Rs 470
The belief that drives most biographies is that famous people are more than the sum of their public personas, so aspects of their personalities that are unnoticed, unseen or unimagined are as important to form a more rounded understanding of them. Libraries overflow with books on Indira Gandhi. A strong woman, an iron-fisted politician, a heroine, a villainess - every memoir, biography and even fiction has established her as a milestone in independent India's history. And yet, there will always be more books "revealing" aspects that may appear familiar but add to the present portrait.
In The Unseen Indira Gandhi, K P Mathur, a 92-year old former physician of Safdarjung Hospital who served as the doctor to "a number of senior politicians, bureaucrats and other VIPs", offers yet another bunch of anecdotes and tales from the life of Mrs Gandhi. Dr Mathur was associated with Mrs Gandhi as her personal physician for nearly 20 years till her assassination in 1984, and witnessed many behind-the-scene incidents during some of her most defining moments - the Emergency, the war with Pakistan in 1971, the death of Sanjay Gandhi and the birth of her grandchildren.
He recounts the coolness of a prime minister as the nation went to war and how the same prime minister waited agitatedly as the "Buddha smiled" in Pokhran. We are offered a glimpse of a shaken mother after she loses her son in a plane crash and how she regains her composure within weeks. The dynamics of the Nehru-Gandhi family emerge - the daughters-in-law, the uneasy truce and a matriarch's constant efforts to keep her family bonded - never in great detail but through tantalising glimpses.
The narrative is neither sensational nor overtly intimate. Rather, it is a doctor's glimpse into a politician's life - clean, clinical, formal and distant. The author, however, is a family physician and, by that merit, more intimate with India's first family than most others. He tells us how Indira Gandhi spent her Saturdays in a more relaxed fashion, reading biographies of great men, solving crosswords and playing card games after lunch.
He talks about how Maneka Gandhi, thanks to her relative youth, found it more difficult to gel with her mother-in-law and how both women kept their distance from each other. We are told how the senior Mrs Gandhi was keen, anxious even, about getting her other daughter-in-law, Sonia, more involved in "the social and cultural life of the country".
We are also given a peek into a leader who suddenly finds herself out of power, after a long and eventful stint in the hot seat. "Initially, PM felt a bit lonely after losing the elections. She had nothing to do. No files would come to her… She had no office, no staff car or even a car of her own. The staff car allotted to her had been withdrawn and she had no telephone operator to help and she had forgotten the telephone numbers of friends," Mathur writes.
In The Unseen Indira Gandhi, we see her dusting her own room, ordering breakfast from South Indian Coffee House in Connaught Place, practising yoga and visiting numerous temples and religious places and meeting religious thinkers. We watch as she counts beads on the rosary of the rudraksha mala received from her spiritual guru Anandmayi Ma through trying times.
Yet, in all these, the reader will find a sense of incompleteness. Even as the doctor is present with the prime minister on the day of the secret Pokhran tests and finds Mrs Gandhi visibly agitated, the reader is not given a sense of the prevailing atmosphere in her household. The section on the Emergency has no behind-the-scenes insight to offer, as the doctor states what newspapers have maintained all these years. Sanjay Gandhi's death, however, provides some insight into the human that Indira Gandhi was, as she confides that her right arm has been chopped off. A similar human moment comes when Mrs Gandhi meets her British counterpart Margaret Thatcher and both "Iron Ladies" transform into "school girls" on vacation. Mrs Gandhi's assassination, too, is kept a low-key affair in the narrative, as the author bows out.
Infinitely more interesting are the small handwritten notes that the author adds between chapters as standalone one-page narratives. These notes - ranging from complaints of stomach ache to friendly chidings - are both a patient's queries to her doctor, as well as billets passed on to a confidant and friend. The black and white photographs of the author travelling with Mrs Gandhi similarly offer an interesting montage of the prime minister's tours.
The book nonetheless is refreshing in parts, especially when Indira Gandhi steps out of her hard shell, sometimes giggling, sometimes broken in an unexpected manner. For anyone who has not seen or felt the power of her public persona, these chinks would not amount to much. But for those who have, each single glimpse could be truly insightful.
