Narendra Modi as Prime Minister will add an interesting facet to those interested in knowing how our leaders respond to the arts. The most literary-minded of India’s Prime Ministers was Jawaharlal Nehru, who only wrote prose. Mainly he wrote autobiography and history. Nehru wrote beautifully and with great skill even in the shorter form.
A book of his sprang out of letters to his daughter Indira from jail, which were compiled over time. These were written with help from others, it is true. For instance, the monumentally learned Abul Kalam Azad, who shared Nehru’s jail, gave much of the information that has gone into the writing of Glimpses of World History. But Nehru had both the craft of the writer and of the historian able to compile information from sources. This made him special.
Both Lal Bahadur Shastri and Morarji Desai were fairly dry men. Desai in particular, though he did write a three-volume autobiography that is unfortunately out of print. His great-grandson (who has now joined the Bharatiya Janata Party) has been trying to get it republished, without success.
Of the rest, the two men who stand out are P.V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Behari Vajpayee. The former was a genuine intellectual, despite his cleaving to superstitions of the crudest sort. He wrote a work of fiction, which has a lot of autobiographical material, and he wrote a history of the Babri Masjid disaster, though that is mostly compiled. Vajpayee had a reputation that was bigger than his talent. He was poetic in speech, but his poetry isn’t really any good, and the translations prove that.
Few Prime Ministers wrote their autobiographies, but one exception was Inder Kumar Gujral. He was seen as a sophisticated man, particularly because his brother was an artist, but his book is quite poor and full of clichés Indira and Rajiv Gandhi were both failures in Oxford and Cambridge respectively (neither was able to get their degree). They were neither expected to write well in the long form, and neither did they do so.
The doctorate-holding Manmohan Singh is more an academic than an intellectual. He is interested in poetry, but only the basic verse of Iqbal. His writing has been entirely of academic nature, and all of it before he became finance minister over 20 years ago.
This brings us to Mr Modi, our putative prime minister-in-waiting. Mr Modi has written three books and translated one. Few have read his first book, Sangharsh ma Gujarat (Gujarat’s struggle), which was written during the Emergency, when he was in his 20s. It could not have been a particularly good work and is no longer in print so far as I know.
His other three works all are, and they are, interesting. One (Patraruoop Shri Guruji) is a translation of M.S. Golwalkar’s letters. A second is a book of poems, named after the first work, Aankh aa dhanya chhe (These eyes, they’re blessed). The third book is the best of all, and is a work of biography. In it, Mr Modi has told us the story of 16 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leaders who have inspired him, and most of whom he has worked under.
Though these books are not of the highest calibre, they reveal something about him and his literary bent. He is unique in being someone who writes even when in office (the last mentioned book here was written during his years as chief minister).
We would be well served if, when he becomes Prime Minister, Mr Modi writes about his time as the leader of our country.
Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist
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