Dear to Behold: An Intimate Portrait of Indira Gandhi

From the jacket: "May you grow up into a brave soldier in India's service," Jawaharlal Nehru wrote from prison to his daughter Indira when she was thirteen years old. Dear to Behold is the story of that growing up and of the later years when the "brave soldier" became the Prime Minister of her country. It is told by Indira Gandhi's aunt, Nehru's younger sister, who was only ten years older than Indira, and her companion and confidante over the years. The book begins with a portrait of the Brahmin family into which Indira was born. They were distinguished and immensely wealthy. Mahatma Gandhi brought a turnabout in the tenor and direction of their life as a new India arose. Indira began to participate in this revolutionary way of living when, at the age of twelve, she organized the "Monkey Army" that was made up of youthful undercover agents who listened to and reported conversations, transmitted secret messages, and posted unlawful signs. In addition to her famous father, other members of Indira's family were activists, doing their turns in jail and risking their lives in the early and dangerous days of the movement. Her mother, young, beautiful, dying of tuberculosis, was an ardent worker in the Congress party. In the emergent new India, women were taking their rightful place, welcomed by men to share in the tasks that lay ahead. Indira's personal life is a very important part of Dear to Behold-her feelings for her mother and father, her student days at Oxford and at Rabindranath Tagore's university, her marriage to Feroze Gandhi and their separate careers, her widowhood, her role as mother and keeper-of-the-house. Interwoven with this personal life is the story of her growing importance as a political figure. Then in 1966 and again in 1967 she was elected Prime Minister, the first woman in history to head a nation of almost half a billion people. Jacket design by Menten, Inc.