The Undying Light : A Personal History of Independent India by Gopalkrishna Gandhi

Amma was touched when an invitation came from Nehru to a lunch he hosted for the royal visitors in his residence. Amma recounted the event: ‘Panditji was graciousness itself. There was a small line-up of the invitees, and as my turn came, he took my hand in his and introduced me to the queen like this: “How do I introduce this lady? Her late husband was a distinguished journalist, editing one of our foremost newspapers for years. She is the daughter-in-law of none other than the Mahatma himself. And daughter of a statesman, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, the one and only Indian Governor General of India appointed by your father, to succeed Lord Mountbatten.” What could the queen say to this except “Very happy to meet you.” But Panditji, in a masterly way, had said everything there was to say about me in that introduction.’

Looking back, I cannot but think Nehru’s gesture in inviting Amma, a nobody in protocol terms, was, before anything else, about civility and also about his sense, a historian’s sense, of who the queen would like to meet. But somewhere in that invitation was an affirmation of the democratic culture he was trying to build in India.

India went all out to fete the royal couple. What was it proving? That India is hospitable? That it has forgotten or at least forgiven the excesses and, in fact, the very fact of the Raj? That it wants to have good relations with Britain as a member of the Commonwealth? Or that in the increasingly complicated relations with China, no less than with Pakistan, it values its ties with the West as much as those with the Soviet Union?

We are a Republic and a democratic one at that. But we are smitten by royals and their regalia. Diamonds and diadems, crowns and crests, titles and titularity awe us. A benign king, a kindly queen will always be a cut above the passionate MP or the committed MLA, the globally engaged prime minister. We are also and will always be deeply class-ruled. As the royal couple travelled, the wretchedly poor and semi-starved flocked around them, showing no resentment at the contrast they offered. Was that a greatness to be admired or an unawareness to be bewailed?

The band of the 39th Gorkhas struck up the national anthems of the two countries as the Queen and Prince Philip said their farewell. But this was the least challenging of the tasks that the Gurkhas of the Indian Army faced that year.

One part of India the royal visit had not covered was its northeast. There, in the hilly folds where the Nagas live, a deep discontent was spilling over. Proud of their identity, the Nagas baulked at the idea of being subordinate to anything or anybody outside of their own culture. A clash between the Nagas, who saw the Indian state as an imposition and the Indian state, that saw the Nagas as hostile, was inevitable. Towards the end of April, Captain Man Bahadur Rai of the 11 Gorkha Rifles was at the head of a platoon tasked to tackle a body of hostile Nagas. Leading the platoon at night through two Naga formations into the heart of their stronghold, he dislodged them. On 3 May, Rai was decorated with the Ashoka Chakra for his heroic action.

While the Nagas ‘rebelled’ and Indian Army jawans gave their lives to stop the rebellion, the rest of India remained largely unconcerned and uninvolved. The Nagas were, for most of us, a strange and distant people on the rims of India’s northeastern borders whom the Indian Army was keeping in check. In check from or against what? Even that was not quite clear to us. Generally, we thought, from creating ‘trouble’. There were exceptions, of course, foremost among whom being my all-time hero, Jayaprakash Narayan. He had been interested in the concerns of the Nagas and played a major role in persuading Nehru to create a separate state for them. With Nehru’s consent, he parleyed with Naga leaders for a ceasefire. Staying in Kohima for months in that year, he won the confidence of both army officers and Naga ‘rebels’.

I was moving from school to college that year. ‘English’ being the subject that fetched me my highest or least ‘middling’ marks in the school-leaving exams, I sought admission in St. Stephen’s College’s English Literature course for my BA Honours. Shakespeare was an early exposure. ‘Have you read any Shakespeare?’ my sister-in-law Indu, who taught Philosophy at Delhi University’s celebrated college for women, Miranda House, asked me. She knew what undergraduate aspirants were about. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘of course.’ She then asked me which plays I had read. I said, ‘All of them, I think.’ Unimpressed, she asked, ‘Really? In which edition...’ I said, ‘In Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare…’ Suppressing a laugh, she said, ‘Gopu, that is not the same thing. Start with reading Shakespeare’s plays as he wrote them…Start with Hamlet.’ I did as she asked me to. But if his plays—King Lear in particular—gripped me, so did his sonnets. Chinmoy Banerjee, one of the finest teachers of the subject in college, as also one of the cleverest, taught us the sonnets, singling out at a tutorial session, Sonnet 129 opening with the lines:

Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action... Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had Past reason hated

The lines made me think reflexively of something, but I checked my imagination with a ‘Dirty Mind, you! This is Shakespeare…The sonnet has to have a serious meaning’ only to be asked by Chinmoy: ‘So…What does Shakespeare mean by “spirit”?’ We were two or three of us in that session, and all of us stayed silent. ‘Human semen’, he said with the confidence of an oracle. We nodded in grim acceptance of the wisdom, I with relief at the revelation that mine was, after all, not so dirty a mind, the others with varying mixes of boredom and interest. I recalled my peer at school with the ‘falling sickness’, the very human form of ‘lust in action past reason hunted’. But I am now not sure Chinmoy was right. Shakespeare has had to have had a deeper thought in mind, encompassing the gamut of human relations, with ‘lust’ going beyond its basic meaning to cover human greed and avarice.

Anna in Madras took it upon himself to help me ‘remotely’ with my BA Honours study of English literature in a way Indu, my sister-in-law, would approve. ‘You should read at least a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays,’ he wrote to me, ‘if not all of them.’ And he got eleven of Shakespeare’s plays in annotated form from a second-hand bookseller in Madras and sent them to me. ‘Read all the plays as if they were detective stories read for amusement.’ And he sent a volume of only Shakespeare’s historical plays with a glossary at the end. ‘This will give you,’ he wrote, ‘a concrete story of the Kings of England from John to Henry the Eighth.’

That an eighty-three-year-old man should engage so intensively in a grandson’s education is interesting in itself, but that the man concerned was, at that time, in the thick of a demanding political battle against an entrenched political establishment makes his diversion into English literature more than interesting. But what has made, for me, Anna’s deep involvement in the history of Britain’s royal line and in the works of William Shakespeare memorable is the fact that here was a man who fought the British Raj with passion and spent terms in that Raj’s prison taking so objective a view of the colonizer’s history and literature.

Shakespeare’s As You Like It has Rosalind affirm her love for Orlando in the line ‘My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal’. That was about my only mental ‘link’ to the European state that had, for 450 years, no less, ruled over the small territory on India’s western seaboard, Goa. And of Goa itself, my knowledge had been confined to Ram Manohar Lohia’s satyagrahic actions to secure its liberation from Lisbon.

And so, when the great event of the year, the action taken by the Government of India to take control of Goa, took place, I was excited by its surface electricity, not by any sense of its historical importance. Portugal holding on to Goa and Daman and Diu was worse than an anomaly or an anachronism; it was an absurdity. It was only a question of time before the Portuguese colony returned to the rest of India in republican freedom. But India did not wait. In just thirty-six hours, land, sea and air strikes code-named Operation Vijay brought a 451-year-old rule over Goa and its enclaves to a close. Portugal had, to put it in slang, ‘asked for it’. Negotiations between the Republic of India and Portugal had failed to elicit any response. Lisbon was blind to the change in times, to the fact that colonialism was now old, discredited, and all but dead. But India at the time did not cover herself with glory. The use of armed strength, utterly disproportionate with the military resources of the Portuguese regime in Goa, made the action look ‘over the top’. Barring the Soviet Union, Ceylon, and a few other nations, the entire world said India had spoilt her name and lost her credentials as a nation that had won its freedom non-violently.

Communications in 1961 were not what they are today, but the fact that 4,668 personnel were taken prisoner by India—a figure which included military and civilian personnel, Portuguese, African, and Goan—was not lost on the world, nor the further detail that Goa’s Governor General Manuel Vassalo e Silva (1899–1985), recognizing the futility of facing a superior enemy, disobeying direct orders from Portugal’s dictator-for-life, António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970) to fight to the death and destroy Goa before leaving it, had honourably surrendered the day following the Indian entry. Vassalo e Silva refused to be repatriated (though his wife returned) and insisted on staying back with the Portuguese prisoners until they were all sent back.

Salazar had given Vassalo e Silva two orders. The first was to ‘prevail or perish’, which really meant not to surrender but let blood flow. In his words: ‘The consequences of carrying out the first order of defending Goa to the last man would mean the total destruction of Goa.’
The second is best described by the man himself thus: ‘I was asked to shift the holy relics of Saint Francis Xavier from Old Goa to Portugal. And why did I not shift the body of the Saint? I had enough consideration for the morale of the Indian troops not to disrespect the Saint. Also, the morale of the Goans would have sunk if the body had been removed from Goa. But most importantly, if the Saint himself was posed this question, he would have certainly objected to his body being taken to Portugal.’

Without the remains of Saint Francis Xavier, Goa would have been something different from the Goa its people know. Vassalo e Silva’s disobeying of Salazar has helped Goa stay Goa.
India, the land of hurts, is also a land that knows healing. Vassalo e Silva, in his eighties, was invited to India by the government and visited Goa, only Goa. He said he did not want to go anywhere else in India. He was hugged and hosted by the people of Goa in complete contrast with the treatment he got on his return to Portugal after his surrender. He had been disgraced in every conceivable way. But back on this visit to his former ‘realm’, e Silva said something which belongs to the annals of the highest political realism: ‘The liberation of Goa was in the interest of Goans. Though Portugal ruled Goa for 450 years, this territory had always remained a part and parcel of India, irrespective of some people who might feel otherwise. It was also in the interest of Portugal that Goa should go back to the hands of Goans.’

Nehru’s action was in effect not just seen as unGandhian but as politically opportunist for the action in Goa took place just days before the general elections of 1962 in which, along with the majority of Congress candidates, V. K. Krishna Menon won a resounding victory in North Bombay.

The right thing can be done in a messy way.

Two statesmen in India, risking unpopularity, criticized the action in no uncertain terms—who else but Rajaji and Jayaprakash Narayan. But more pertinently, Vice President Radhakrishnan, who was to become president the following year, disliked it. His son and biographer Sarvepalli Gopal (1923–2002) writes: ‘…on Goa Radhakrishnan made no secret of his dislike of military action… The action, he told the Prime Minister, was a mistake which distressed him…’ Gopal adds ‘…and Nehru confessed that he thought and felt the same…’

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Goa has now been a legal part of India to which it always belonged civilizationally. What the Indian military arms did was done in obedience to orders given to them by the Government of India.

Who gained immediately? One person, certainly: Defence Minister Krishna Menon, defeating in his seat Acharya J. B. Kripalani, whose presence in Parliament would have been a democratic counter to Nehru. The irony of it all is that Menon, hugely popular in his constituency, need not have feared defeat. He would have won that seat anyhow.

Be it Nagaland or Goa, Nehru’s India did what it did on its northeastern borders and on its western seaboard by its lights. But they were the lights of Nehru’s, not Gandhi’s India.
Rajaji, JP, Kripalani, Prasad, and Radhakrishnan were troubled by those lights.
And somewhere in the dark recesses of his lonesomeness, so was Nehru himself, though he could not show it.

Heroic Indians had fought for Goa’s liberation for years prior to 1961. The valour and patriotism of Lohia, Vishwanath Lawande, Narayan Hari Naik, Dattatraya Deshpande, Prabhakar Sinari, and Mohan Ranade, who had risked personal hurt and death, is remembered in Goa to this day. But insufficiently by the rest of India.

*****

Gopalkrishna Gandhi The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India, published by Aleph Book Company, 2025. Hb. Pp.624

This remarkable memoir, and history of India after Independence, by one of India’s most distinguished public intellectuals, begins with his memories of the assassination of his paternal grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi. He recalls his older sister, Tara Gandhi Bhattacharjee, carrying him in her arms: “…in her panic-stricken rush, as a fourteen-year-old, to Birla House in New Delhi, with two-and-a-half-year-old me clasped to her bosom, to reach the room where our grandfather lay on a length of white khadi.”

His maternal grandfather, the “single biggest influence” on Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s life, was Chakravarti Rajagopalchari (1878-1972), popularly known as Rajaji or C.R., Rajagopalachari was the last Governor-General of India, as when India became a republic in 1950 the office was abolished. He was also the only Indian-born Governor-General, as all previous holders of the post were British nationals. He also served as leader of the Indian National Congress, Premier of the Madras Presidency, Governor of West Bengal, Minister for Home Affairs of the Indian Union and Chief Minister of Madras state. Rajagopalachari founded the Swatantra Party and was one of the first recipients of India's highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna. According to the author, Rajaji “was sixty-seven when I turned up in 1945 and ninety-four when he died. From him, Anna, we called him by that Tamil word, I 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 about all ‘the liberty of the subject’.

The book expands into numerous encounters with personalities both Indian and foreign, ‘eminent’ as well as little known, and original insights into key events and turning points of modern Indian history, many of which he was an eyewitness to as secretary to presidents R. Venkataraman and K. R. Narayanan, and as governor of West Bengal and Bihar.

The book is divided into eight sections, in step with the major landmarks in modern Indian history. From India achieving its independence from the British in 1947 and the events that ushered in democracy such as the adoption of the Indian Constitution in 1950 to much, much more. As a bureaucrat, the author, was privy to key events in contemporary India. So, The Undying Light is exactly what it purports to be — a personal history of independent India. Along the lines of any good oral history testimony, this is a fine memoir that intertwines lived experience with that of other prominent incidents that were pivotal to shaping the Indian sub-continent as we know it today, in the twenty-first century. Seventy-five years after independence, we have a new set of challenges to democratic republicanism, federalism, and secularism by the majoritarian politics of the day. The Undying Light title has to be taken at face value too. The Indian sub-continent’s history shows that we can survive innumerable challenges and we will. This memoir demonstrates that in every sentence that is printed.

The extract that has been published here is an example of the way in which facts, memories, and modern Indian history are intertwined in this relaxed conversational style. It is a testimony that is worth reading.

Read The Undying Light.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi read English literature at St Stephen’s College, Delhi. A former administrator and diplomat, he has translated The Tirukkural from Tamil into English, Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy into Hindi, authored a novel, Refuge, and a play in English verse, Dara Shukoh. He is currently Distinguished Professor at Ashoka University.