When he fell out with "Madam" in the 1970s, a bright young Congress Party spark, who is now back in the party and high in its counsels, described Indira Gandhi's many faces with some bitterness. India's masses worshipped her as Durga, the mother goddess, he said, intellectuals found her enigmatic and foreigners were bowled over by her grace and charm. "But only those of us who work with her know she is the personification of sheer stark terror!" Something of that complexity emerges in Katherine Frank's biography, though on the whole it does not escape the stricture about foreigners. That is not surprising, for nobody could have sustained such a massive work without an intense personal commitment to the subject. Frank's Indira suffers from some of the disadvantages that Mrs Gandhi herself noted in Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi . It was "a spectacle", said Madam, with the central character transformed into a "superstar... messiah - not more than he was but rather less".
Here, too, we have a soap-opera heroine, warts and all, in a book that is as readable as a superior Margaret Irwin or Norah Lofts and deserves to be catalogued as historical fiction. There is too much gossip (the supposed pregnancy and abortion or the rumour of Sanjay's slapping his mother across the face six times), too much trivial speculation ("perhaps in remembrance of the strong autumnal colours of Kashmir, she chose a vibrant saffron-coloured sari"), and not enough examination of the social and political dynamics that shaped Madam for the narrative to count as serious political biography.
Additionally, it bristles with inaccuracies. Frank pins Indira badges on dhotis, unaware that this is a man's nether garment. She turns the Bengali C. R. Das into an Allahabad-wallah, delays the Bangladesh war by a decade to December 1981, confuses Delhi's South Block with South Bank, and further insults Mrs Gandhi's neglected husband, the hapless Feroze, by calling him the "maternal grandfather" of his son's son. Worse, she must have given Madam's loyal principal private secretary, P. N. Dhar, the shivers by foisting on him three seditious quotations from this reviewer's book, Smash and Grab : Annexation of Sikkim .
Presumably, she relied more on what people told her than on personally sifted evidence. Predictably, this means misinformation. Mrs Gandhi's cousin, B. K. Nehru, one of Frank's main informants, though he later dissociated himself from some of the views ascribed to him, emerges as far more important than he was. His charge that Maneka Gandhi, Mrs Gandhi's daughter-in-law, "did nothing" during Madam's political exile after her fall from power in 1977, which Frank faithfully regurgitates without allowing for family politics, ignores the courage with which Maneka's magazine Surya drummed up support for her mother-in-law in 1977-78 when Madam's unpopularity had plumbed such depths that Delhi taxi drivers sneered at fares to her Willingdon Crescent bungalow.