There was a time when the publishers of this book would have rejected a manuscript that was a scissors-and-paste job of essays that had already appeared in newspapers and magazines. David Davidar, the publisher at Penguin India at that time, was quite firm on this. He hated compilations of old material. Times have changed.
Of a Certain Age is made up of twenty biographical sketches of men and women the author has known over the years or was connected to through family ties. It is a personal take on these people, many of whom are illustrious figures. Gopalkrishna Gandhi has a distinguished lineage that few of us can match. His father, Devadas, was managing editor of Hindustan Times; one of his grandfathers was the last Governor-General of India while the other was the Father of the Nation.
That is a huge burden to carry on one’s shoulders and Gopalkrishna has done it admirably. He cleared a path of his own and on his own, unlike descendants of some other prominent figures in the freedom movement. There are no Bofors or other scams hanging over the heads of any from the Mahatma’s clan. Gopalkrishna joined the Indian Administrative Service and his postings included service as secretary to a vice-president. After retirement, he was appointed governor of West Bengal where he was popular with the masses but not with the state government.
Among those he has chosen for profiling are the Mahatma, Acharya Kripalani, the Frontier Gandhi and Pyarelal. Some of the older sketches have been updated. There is only one piece among the lot that has not been published before, the one on Jayaprakash Narayan. Two of the twenty are not Indians—the Dalai Lama, the only one still living, and Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the former prime minister of Sri Lanka, and the world’s first female head of government.
By far the most interesting sketch is that of the author’s uncle and the Mahatma’s eldest child, the wayward Harilal. There was an age difference of only nineteen years between father and the son. The child was left in the care of his mother in Rajkot when Gandhi went to study in England. The absence of the father in those formative years must have been traumatic. He is a tragic figure of heroic proportions who ended up as a mere footnote in the story of the Mahatma and the freedom struggle.
Harilal Gandhi was an alcoholic, a frequenter of prostitutes and, for a brief period, a convert to Islam. He was a rebel desperate for the attention of a father who had little time for him. For the greater part of his life, he was destitute and would turn up at the home of his brother Devadas ‘unwashed, unkempt and unsteady’. Just as suddenly, he would disappear again for months. Here is a story in search of a worthy biographer. Whatever little that has been written about Harilal so far has been largely by the Mahatma’s sycophants. Attempts to portray him on stage and screen have been unsatisfactory.
There is a good anecdote about the Mahatma in this book, though it may not be true. Once he ordered a new set of false teeth before starting on a ‘fast unto death’! Gopalkrishna clears up one common misconception: Harilal was not present at the Mahatma’s cremation; he turned up four days later. According to Sharada Prasad, the eminent public servant and columnist, Harilal came to the editorial office of National Standard in Bombay on the night of the assassination with a sheet of paper on which he had written his tribute to his father. He wanted it published but Prasad had other preoccupations on that fateful day. Astonishing as it may seem, he passed Harilal on to the chief reporter. No one seems to know whether the tribute from the first-born to the father appeared in the paper or not.
There is a sentence in this book that disturbs me, something Gopalkrishna wrote in 1987 and is reproduced. It is a clumsily constructed sentence and it is best I quote it in full: “Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the monumental leader and guide of the Pakhtoons, shares with Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, the writer, and Salim Ali, the ornithologist (both of whom passed away recently), besides their Islamic inheritance, an exemption from all prejudice—ethnic, religious or any other.” The meaning I get from the sentence is that these three Muslims are not prejudiced; the rest cannot be trusted. I don’t believe Gopalkrishna intended to say that.
