Colonial History of India

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Quivering shadows of the real self

A bunch of old letters Selected and edited by Jawaharlal Nehru,
Penguin, Rs 750

<b>This is an Indian epistolary classic, first published in 1958, and now reprinted with a solid introduction by Sunil Khilnani.</b> In April 1958, Nehru felt “tired and stale” because as a prime minister he got “little time for quiet thinking”. So he retired to Manali for a holiday with his daughter, and took with him several bundles of “old letters” and plenty of books. In between reading and annotating Gunnar Myrdal, <b>Nehru sorted these letters chronologically, prepared explanatory notes, and what emerged was not only a personal history, but a complex history of the Indian freedom movement from a uniquely human perspective.</b> Apart from the Mahatma, Nehru’s correspondents include his father, Sarojini Naidu, Subhas Bose, Tagore, C.F. Andrews, Bertrand Russell, Edward Thompson, Amrita Sher Gil, Lady Astor, Mao Tse-tung, Stafford Cripps, Roosevelt and George Bernard Shaw. Nehru had once written to Indira that letters were the “quivering shadows of the real self...a strange and revealing amalgam of the two — the one who writes and the one who receives.”
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