The Reinvention of Nehru; A new biography hails the Indian leader's virtues.("Nehru: The Invention of India")(Book Review)

Byline: Nisid Hajari

Unlike his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who was not beyond using the coincidence of her name to identify herself as the embodiment of her nation, Jawaharlal Nehru never claimed to be India. Though he devoted himself to the liberation of his compatriots, he knew that his wealthy, Westernized upbringing distanced him from most of them; as Shashi Tharoor points out in his new biography of the Indian leader, Nehru even penned a pseudonymous warning against those who would put him on a pedestal. So the title of Tharoor's "Nehru: The Invention of India" (282 pages. Arcade) is a touch misleading: his is the tale not of a country told through a man, but of a man with as many flaws as extraordinary qualities, one buffeted by his times even as he shaped them.

That complexity is in large part what makes Nehru an interesting and accessible figure--unlike a Gandhi, say, shrouded in hagiography. Tharoor, the United Nations under secretary-general for communications and a contributor to NEWSWEEK, is best when he picks apart the contradictions that plagued his subject. Returned from England a young firebrand, Nehru is seen tempering his provocations of the colonial authorities, largely out of deference to his political mentors--his natural father, Motilal, and his adopted one, Gandhi. "He had no taste for patricide," notes Tharoor. The author has a keen eye for Nehru's blindnesses--the secular upbringing that prevented him from seeing how religious identity had become paramount for India's Muslims; the stints in prison, some of them almost willful, that prevented him from understanding how eager the British were finally to leave.

Unfortunately, the best of this kind of analysis comes toward the ...