Lord Meghnad Desai on India

 Tell me about your first book, Guha’s India After Gandhi.

 This is a very detailed account of India over the past 60 years in one single volume. It’s a sort of one-stop shop on India. It is pro-Nehru, so it is a very secular view. 

Jawaharlal Nehru was of course India’s first and long-serving prime minister, in power all the way from 1947 though to 1964, and an advocate for socialism and the public sector as the means by which economic development can be achieved by poorer countries. 

And everybody was always saying: “Oh, India’s going to break up. It’s too diverse, there’s too much poverty, you’re going to have dictators.” But again and again India continues as a democracy. This is a book about how it happened in a country as large as Europe with diverse languages and religions. How can a place like this hold on to democracy? 

 How can it? 

 Well, the Western model says you need a middle class, you need literacy, you can’t do it with so much inequality, but India sets the example of the fact that it is possible. It is still a democracy with 700 million voters, 400 million of whom actually voted. The numbers are just mind-boggling. Even when Indira Gandhi imposed emergency rule, for 21 months from 1975-1977, the good sense of the Indian public got it all back, all their rights, and they don’t give up. Since independence the traditions of agitation and peaceful demonstration have upheld democracy. 

 Would you agree that the author has brought India very much to life in this book? 

 Well, he’s an anthropologist and, yes, he is a very good writer. I like that. It is a good read. It’s a portmanteau book on India. If you are going to read one book on India, one fat book, it would be this one.

So your next choice is your own book about the Indian film star, Dilip Kumar? 

 Yes. Nehru’s Hero is about how you relate politics and cinema, how a non-didactic, non-academic medium reflects a political era. It’s about how film roles change, how the social aspect of life is always changing people’s idea of what India was and the ideal of manhood, what your hero should be like. 

 The “idea of Indian manhood” sounds very Soviet in a way. Like those posters of chisel-jawed youths holding sickles. 

 In a sense that’s right. I mean, Indian heroes often come from the Punjab or from Peshawar where people are tall and fair because everybody likes that look and he embodies that. But it’s not a macho ideal of manhood. He always has a soft side, a feminine side and he’s crying and being sorry. 

 And how did his roles reflect a changing India? 

 Well, his early films are tragic, he’s losing the woman and crying and groaning and singing. It’s all about forces beyond his control shaping his destiny. But later he is a do-something hero, facing challenges and getting the girl. He is fighting the world and succeeding. In the mid-50s India became more hopeful, I think. People felt they could do something about their situation. The question of “is there justice?” 

 Is there? 

 Well, it’s hopeful, yes. Kumar was close to Nehru and his ideals. His heroes are positive Nehruvian men. 

 And you note that he never plays a Muslim? 

 He never played a Muslim, no. Even though he himself was a Muslim. It’s just something I noted as being special while I was writing the book. That he never plays a Muslim. Well, he does once play a Muslim, in a historical film – he played Salim in Mughal-e-Azam – but not in any of the others. The film heroes he plays are always Hindu characters and this comes in again and again. The Hindu-Muslim question never quite goes away. Never.

Your next book, Darlingji, deals with the period of partition between India and Pakistan and is a love story. 

 Yes. It is by my wife and Darlingji is what they called each other, these people – Nargis and Sunil Dutt. Their love story has its roots in the partition. I met my wife when I was writing my book about Dilip Kumar, and Nargis, a very famous actress, was a contemporary of Kumar’s. My wife did a lot of research for this, looking at the personal diaries and letters and interviewing everyone about how they kept the romance a secret and what happened. Nargis was a fantastic actress. 

 The book starts before Nargis is born though? 

 Yes, it’s the story of three generations of singers. The grandmother was a child widow who eloped with a sarangi player and then their daughter Jaddanbai who moves to Bombay and becomes an actress. Her daughter is Nargis and the book is about the obstacles she overcame before she was famous. It is very much from a woman’s perspective. 

 Your wife helped you with your book; did you help her with hers? 

 She showed it to me, but I said: “I don’t want to co-operate on this – it is your book,”  and it is from that angle of being a woman. I would have intellectualised it. Although this woman was iconic she was treated like shit by her family and that’s a woman’s condition in India. 

 Still now? 

 Well, it gets better generation by generation, as the book shows.