Pandit Nehru, India's first prime minister, right, with the Dalai Lama in New Delhi. Photograph: Central Press/Getty ImagesGreat dynasties of the worldIndira Gandhi
Just before midnight on 14 August, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru rose to his feet in the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi to deliver his first speech as India's prime minister. "Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time has come when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure but substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom." At the striking of that midnight hour, India also awoke to the long rule of the Nehru-Gandhi family.
Jawaharlal – which means "precious stone" – was born into a wealthy Kashmiri family in 1889. He was educated in England, at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge. His father, Motilal, was twice president of the Congress Party of India, and on his return in 1912, Jawaharlal soon became involved in politics. He was a proud socialist and a reformer. In a 1933 pamphlet, Nehru asked "Whither India?", and answered, "Surely to the great human goal of social and economic equality, to the ending of all exploitation of nation by nation and class by class."
Nehru was prime minister for 17 years, until his death in 1964. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, became prime minister in 1966. (The Nehrus are not related, note, to Mahatma Gandhi's family – Indira simply happened to marry a man named Gandhi. Felicitous choice.) Indira Gandhi was the first woman ruler of India since Sultana Razia in the 13th century. She served four controversial terms as India's prime minister, before being assassinated in 1984.
In 1980, Indira's younger son, Sanjay, had died in a flying accident, and his brother, Rajiv, entered politics. So it was that Rajiv was appointed prime minister after his mother's death. He ruled from 1984 to 1989, and then in 1991 he, too, was assassinated. But the descendants of Motilal Nehru were by no means defeated or deterred.
In 2004, Rajiv's widow, Sonia, led the United Progressive Alliance to election victory: Manmohan Singh, India's current prime minister, is Sonia Gandhi's appointee. Sonia's son, Rahul Gandhi, was elected to parliament in 2004. Sanjay Gandhi's son, Varun, is the secretary of the Bharatiya Janata party. And there continues to be much speculation about the political future of Sonia's daughter, Priyanka Gandhi.It is, by any standards, an incredible story. Indeed, Salman Rushdie has described the saga of the Nehru-Gandhis as a kind of "collective dream". "We have poured ourselves into this story," Rushdie writes, "inventing its characters, then ripping them up and re-inventing them. In our inexhaustible speculations lies one source of their power over us."
Tariq Ali, in his book The Nehrus and the Gandhis (1985), attempting to explain the family's continuing pull and power, suggests: "The personality cult that surrounds a leading political family is ... a convenient way of preserving the electoral and social status quo." Jad Adams and Phillip Whitehead, in their book The Dynasty: The Nehru-Gandhi Story (1997), make a similar point, though with the opposite emphasis. "Observing the family through this troubled century shows not only how exceptional they are as a family, but how typical: Indira Gandhi's long-standing resentment of the aunt who treated her mother shabbily; Jawaharlal's hostility towards his daughter's husband ... these are not the stuff of greatness but of the commonplace, and therefore one of the appealing aspects of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty."
Perhaps the only real difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary family is power, fame, and money. What Jawaharlal Nehru would have made of his legacy one can only imagine.