On April 22, 2020, I had posted a thread on Twitter (then not yet X) marking “the 75th birthday of one of the most remarkable living Indians: Gopalkrishna Gandhi, public servant, diplomat, writer and scholar”. The thread spoke of his contributions to his country, the grace and dignity of his character and, in the end, of then personal debt I owed him. Gopal Gandhi, I wrote then, “has taught me more about modern Indian history and Mahatma Gandhi than anyone else”.

Five years on, on the eve of his 80th birthday, Gopal Gandhi has placed me (and many other Indians) even more emphatically in his debt by gifting us with a rich, nuanced, enjoyable, and immensely educative book on the progress – as well as the regress – of the Republic whose journey has run parallel with his own life.

The narrative interweaves personal memories with descriptions of larger historical events, the latter drawing on his formidable range of reading and his deep understanding of India. The prose is enriched with an array of wonderful, and often never seen before, photographs of the principal actors and incidents in the tumultuous journey of the writer and his country. And there are many tender references to individual films (made in Hindi, English, Bengali or Tamil); clearly, cinema has shaped Gopal Gandhi’s life as much as literature, scholarship, and public service.

Childhood influences

The book, bearing the title, The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India, begins with a vivid account of the first, fraught years of Independence, featuring Mahatma Gandhi’s last fasts and his death, and the Nehru-Patel rift and their reconciliation. The narrative then proceeds chronologically, each year marked by a short, crisp chapter devoted to it, ending with a consolidated chapter on the last decade-and-a-half.

Born just before Independence and Partition, growing up with the Republic, Gopal Gandhi’s mind was shaped by his quietly patriotic parents, Devadas and Lakshmi. Their influence on him, as of his equally remarkable siblings, Tara, Rajmohan, and Ramchandra, is sketched with love and care. Hundreds of other intriguing or influential characters people the pages of the book, from celebrated and controversial prime ministers to previously unsung teachers and social workers.

A central figure in the book is the author’s maternal grandfather, C Rajagopalachari (“Rajaji”), a freedom-fighter who held high office in independent India, before leaving his once beloved Congress to found an Opposition party named Swatantra, which forcefully articulated the need to free the economy from the shackles of the state.

Gopal Gandhi terms Rajaji “the single biggest influence on my life”, from whom he “came to perceive the idea of a fair and just Constitution, a democratic republic based on equality and freedom of speech, and of a state that values above all ‘the liberty of the subject”.

A second individual who appears at repeated intervals is the peerless classical singer, MS Subbulakshmi, a family friend whom Gopal Gandhi came to love as a little boy, and whose music and personality had an enduring impact on him.

A third major influence was the socialist and social worker, Jayaprakash Narayan, whom the young Gopal revered for “his patent sincerity, his calm eloquence, his great looks. And yes – his sophisticated English.”

At his admirer’s invitation, JP came to lecture at Delhi’s St Stephen’s College at the height of the India-China conflict. “In a slow, measured, tone, he spoke extempore in the first half of what nationalism had meant in the years of the struggle for freedom – decolonization, the retrieving of self-respect, self-reliance, self-confidence with non-violent disobedience as its instrument. And in the second half of what nationalism had come to mean now – sabre-rattling, neighbour-threatening jingoism with intolerance as its fuel.”

This recollection speaks directly to the present, as does the account of the government of India’s attempts to eradicate English from official use in the 1960s. “I felt miserably torn,” writes Gopal Gandhi: “I loved Hindi, hated its imperial pretensions. And being influenced by Rajaji’s strong position on the subject, came soon to be irrevocably opposed to the proposed move.”

Moving stories

The country’s journey dominates the narrative, with major incidents and controversies narrated with accompanying commentary. In the background, playing the role of the violinist to a vocalist in a Carnatic concert, is the author’s own journey. There is a charming set-piece on Gopal Gandhi’s first posting as an IAS officer, in rural Thanjavur, where he worked with a Syrian Christian, a Tamil Jaina, and a Muslim.

He writes with keen insight of his more elevated assignments (including as secretary to the president and as governor of West Bengal), and of his representing the country abroad in five separate postings, in four countries in three continents. His descriptions of South African and Sri Lankan politics are especially valuable.

As the book demonstrates, Gopal Gandhi understands and knows all of India, although perhaps he understands and knows the Tamils, the Bengalis, and the Dilliwalas best of all. Notably, the troubled borderlands of the Northeast and Kashmir also get their due in the narrative.

The Undying Light contains many moving stories. One relates to a visit made by Rajaji and his daughter, Namagiri, to Hyderabad after that recalcitrant feudal state finally became part of the Indian Union. The Nizam presented the daughter of the governor-general with a diamond-studded necklace. Rajaji returned it, saying such ostentatious jewellery was inappropriate to a widow, whereupon Namagiri chastised her father, saying that he should have instead told the Nizam that “we are Gandhi’s disciples and do not own costly things”.

Another telling tale relates to Rajaji’s old friend and political rival, E Ramasamy (“Periyar”), who asked Rajaji to be a witness to his second marriage. Rajaji refused; had he agreed, says Gopal, “a great healing would have occurred in the Brahmin versus non-Brahmin discourse in the Tamil countryside.”

Gopal Gandhi is deeply aware of his privileged family background, and how this often helped and occasionally hindered him. Reflecting on his childhood and the dazzling array of extraordinary individuals who came in and out of their home in New Delhi, Gopal writes that “our family with the inherited halo of ‘Harijan sewa’ over its head, did not count among its close friends, any Dalit. Not one. It had Muslim, Christian, and Sikh friends. It had friends from the black communities of the US, Jewish friends from across the world, but not one Indian Dalit.”

The author’s reflective wisdom also manifests itself in some larger historical judgements. Here are some: “Nehru, Patel, and Ambedkar would all three be amused, dismayed, and alarmed, in turn, if they were to see how the country adulates images of them today without bothering to study their minds and messages.”

“The transition from Nehru’s to Indira’s India was a shift from the age of earnest striving to that of fidgety acting, … from the person – Nehru – being billeted to serve India to India being roped into the service of the person, Indira.”

[On Narendra Modi’s tenure as Prime Minister]: “He was not a new captain in the old boat, S.S. India, but a new helmsman in a new boat, S.S. Bharat. The older vessel had been powered by two jets of steam: democratic republicanism and secularism, the new one by those of majoritarian nationalism and Hindutva.”

Reading this took me back a couple of hundred pages (and 30 years) in the narrative, to some excerpts from Gopal Gandhi’s diary, which, with reference to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, has the comment: “After 30 January 1948 this I think is the darkest moment in India’s history”, and then the question: “Are we on the brink of a civilizational collapse?”

In his concluding pages, the author identifies some major problems that India faces today, among them rampant environmental destruction, sectarian hatreds, the eroding autonomy of institutions, and the weaponisation of the past. These pose enormous challenges to the ideals of the Republic that Gopal Gandhi absorbed in his youth and has so nobly embodied all his adult life. Nonetheless, the book ends with this quietly hopeful line: “India’s light can dim; it cannot, will not die.”

This article first appeared in The Telegraph.

Ramachandra Guha’s latest book, Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, is now in stores. His email address is ramachandraguha@yahoo.in.