Dear to Behold

"Dear to Behold is a book I read long ago, but I still think about it. It’s a small book. It was written by Indira’s aunt, Krishna Hutheesing [Nehru’s sister]. What’s interesting to me is that it really gets at the psychology of Indira Gandhi. For example, when she’s young – the loneliness, the shyness, how that then plays out. The book was written before the [state of] emergency she declared in the mid-1970s. It really creates, from the inside out, a portrait of a woman who then became a very powerful leader. It gives you a nuanced understanding of who Indira Gandhi was and what made her do the things she did. I found that appealing. I read it in the mid-1970s, when I was myself a youngster. It was at the height of the emergency and I was already in the US. But it made an impression on me and I’ve gone back and reread it several times, to think about leadership models. One of the things that people don’t understand, and is one of the reasons to think about these books, is that yes, it’s true, Indira Gandhi could not have been a leader had she not been a daughter of a leader. The familial connection is very important. But at the same time, the difference is that in India, or even in Pakistan or South Asia in general, your class and your standing in society can, sometimes, trump your gender. So that once you are seen as a leader, and you have that position and you come from the upper class, nobody will question your leadership. I wrote a piece about this when Hillary Clinton cried in New Hampshire. Everybody [here in the US] was saying, “Oh now finally she’s being female”. That kind of question – is she being a woman or isn’t she? – just wouldn’t arise in India. You’ve got a position and that’s it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The other thing that people don’t realise is that especially in India, but also in Pakistan, women are already in their third generation [of women’s liberation]. So many women were involved in the independence movement with [Mahatma] Gandhi , especially women from the upper class, or educated families. They were already at the forefront of changing mores in the 1930s. So that’s my mother’s generation – she is 96 now. Whereas in America, you have the suffrage movement, but then the really big changes came in the 1960s. In India, I grew up in a family where my mother was a big freedom fighter. She helped found one of the first women’s institutions in India. She talked about being really independent, and what it means to be married but not necessarily encumbered by your husband, and things like that. Most Westerners have no clue about this. And that’s why that particular book is an interesting one. It takes it as a given that Indira Gandhi could be a leader. That was not the issue. The issue is what kind of a leader, based on her psychology and her upbringing."