The Aandhi Rerun

Almost two decades after her assassination, she’s still competing with the world’s most famous mausoleum and is fast breeding memorabilia of all genres—like so many curio-shop Tajs. Outside 1, Safdarjang Road, her home-turned-museum and a top draw for tourists in Delhi, hawkers with green plastic viewmasters slung on their shoulders approach the tourists filing back into their buses with Indira souvenir books. "Dus rupaiya," shouts a hawker, one eye cast warily on the policemen with batons.

The busloads of tourists have already spent about an hour staring awestruck at the spare but artful display of her personal effects, photographs, a blood-smattered sari and a crystal-covered path that showcases the legendary story of her rise from shy, gawky girlhood to one of the world’s most powerful women and its violent end. But apparently they have not yet had their fill of Indirabilia. They reach for the souvenir album, looking much like the shoddily-printed numbers that sell outside the Qutub Minar, but with the tourist-grabbing title: Mother of the Nation.

Inside the museum’s souvenir shop—little more than a shack with a few paperbacks, a tray of Indira keychains (Rs 10) and a dusty set of hazy postcards of Indira Gandhi in a bright red sari and of the crystal-covered path where she was shot down (Rs 5 each), rolled-up posters of M.F. Husain’s famous painting of her as Durga (Rs 5)—sales are just as brisk. "We never sell less than Rs 2,000 worth in a day, but when there is a big crowd, sales go up to Rs 8,000," says the clerk at the stall.

And big crowds are no rarity at 1, Safdarjang Road. In the summer of ’86, the museum’s first few months, once over 40,000 visitors flocked to it in a day. "We thought it was going to be an all-time record," recalls curator V.P. Goswami. Instead, more than that number are disgorged from buses and trucks into the museum every day, especially on weekends, during summer holidays, on days of political rallies (including a recent one by the vhp!), during Urs, or any other of Delhi’s interminable public occasions.

Such continuing popularity with tourists has mystified officials from other better-stocked but less-visited museums, including the National Museum, Gandhi Smriti and Teen Murti’s Nehru museum. The National Museum, for instance, after sending a delegation to study how they do it, concluded that it is the tourist bus operators who are behind the spurt of interest in Indira’s memorial museum. They then persuaded the tour operators to include the National Museum on their route. But the experiment failed. "It’s the people who push the tour operators into bringing them here, not the other way round," explains Goswami. "Visitors take off their shoes at the monument (a polished granite slab on the spot where she was gunned down), some of them weep, others distribute sweets or fruits to all the visitors on her birthday. For them, she is a goddess."

Others are tapping into the idolatry. Says Kamleshwar, scriptwriter of Aandhi that climbed up the box-office charts on its faint resemblance to Indira’s life, and now writing another undisguisedly Indira film: "This is going to be a bigger hit than Aandhi because people are so nostalgic about Indira Gandhi. Wherever you go, people talk of her, wish she was here now. They are feeling the vacuum."

Just how hot Indira is as the subject for a film can be guessed, claims Kamleshwar, by the number of financiers who are coming forward to bankroll his film. The producer, Uttam Singh Pawar, came looking for him. Nor is the interest limited to Indians. "That’s why we are making it in both Hindi and English and plan to sell international rights." They are also planning to cash in on the audiotapes of the film’s dialogues.

Pawar is not the only producer to realise the potential of Indira as a filmic image. A Chinese production, Bandung Sonata, based on the Asian conference where a young Indira accompanied Nehru, is awaiting release. Says Perizad Zorabian, who plays Indira Gandhi: "She’s a secondary character but very predominant throughout." Indira’s life, points out Zorabian, is a readymade screenplay and is bound to spawn a clutch of formula films.

The formula books are already here. Rupa, hunting around like other publishers for potential Indira biographers, was first at the post with a picture-book quickie—Indira Gandhi: Courage Under Fire by Uma Vasudev. Vasudev’s two books on Indira, Revolution in Restraint and Two Faces of Indira Gandhi, both written while Mrs G was alive, are now out of print. But astute publishers are digging out old Indira books on their lists and selling them under fresh covers to meet the popular demand. Vision Books, for instance, has resurrected a paperback, Indira Gandhi—My Truth, a compilation of Indira’s quotes culled from her speeches and interviews done by Emmanuel Pouchpadas. Published in 1980 and quickly forgotten, the reprint has sold beyond the author’s wildest dreams at the recently-concluded Delhi Book Fair where it was given pride of place in the Vision book-stall, and continues to boggle the mind by its unquenchable demand at the museum shop.

Sharing the place of honour was My Years with Indira Gandhi by P.C. Alexander. Not to be outdone, even Penguin India has pulled out its sole Indira book from its old list, a biography by Pupul Jayakar. With a brand new jacket and fresh quotes on the jacket, the resurrected biography is selling as briskly as the others. So hot is the hunt for Indira books, old or new, that publishers are lining up before the doors of authors who have known her. H.Y. Sharada Prasad, despite his avowed resolution not to write an Indira book, is a much-pursued man. The prize publishers are seeking is an Indira biography for children he did for Ladybird. Out of print for long, rights to the little book are being fought over not only by publishers but by the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust as well.

Similarly, Inder Malhotra, author of Indira Gandhi—A Political and Personal Biography, now out of print, says at least four publishers approached him with requests to either write a new book on her or update his old one. He settled instead to write Dynasties of India And Beyond on the political families that still flourish in the subcontinent, devoting one-third of the book to the fascinating story of Mrs G.

According to Malhotra, there are many reasons why people continue to be fascinated by Indira: "The majority of Indians, being below 35 years, have no memory of the Emergency but have a vague notion that she won the 1971 war. Her socialism may have been a sham, but the poor still believe that she cared. Couple that with the high drama of her life, and can you wonder why she will soon overtake Mahatma Gandhi as the most written-about Indian?" To rise so indubitably from the "dustbin of history" that her detractors had consigned her to in 1977 is not merely Indira Gandhi’s triumph. It’s about the present mood of the nation, devoid of all hope, and its opinion about political figures, both past and present.