Nehru: The Invention of India

Nehru is a book for today, not heavy and cumbersome, but sharp and witty, and relevant not just to India, but to other countries as well’ This short, beautifully written biography examines a great figure of twentieth-century nationalism from the vantage point of the beginning of the twenty-first. Deftly weaving personal facets with historical events, it tells the fascinating story of Jawaharlal Nehru aristocrat, socialist, anti-imperialist, foremost disciple of Gandhi, with whom he didn’t always see eye to eye, die-hard secularist and prime minister who sought to educate the Indian masses in democracy by his own personal example. Shashi Tharoor also analyses the principal pillars of Nehru’s legacy to India: democratic institution building, staunch pan-Indian secularism, socialist economics at home and a foreign policy of non-alignment, all of which were integral to a vision of Indianness that is fundamentally contested today.