HIS STORY

GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI PENS A MONUMENTAL PERSONAL HISTORY OF INDIA AFTER INDEPENDENCE

- Bhavya Dore

Gopalkrishna Gandhi has led a varied and storied life—as a civil servant in India, as a diplomat abroad and as the grandson of both Mahatma Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari. Three years ago, David Davidar of Aleph approached him with the idea of writing a personal history of post-independence India. “I was nobody to write about India or my fellow Indians,” he mulls in his introduction. “But I could think of questions that had been with me over the years, defying answers.”

Those questions, experiences and memories have now come together in The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India. This sweeping account is an easy, breezy read, and rarely flags despite being around 600 pages long. In an email interview, Gandhi, 80, says a “straightforward memoir” would have been “a tedious impudence”.

“But a recollection of events outside or beside my own lived memories, supported by archival material and contemporary records, is a different thing,” he says. “This is where the genre called ‘a personal history’, which is neither autobiographical nor historical, was worth turning to. A boring guy like me can have some not-so-boring memories of life as it shaped itself outside his own.”