“He spent a lot of time
Interpreting silences —
Before he went deaf”
From The Degradations of Bachchoo

A friend wrote a biography of Sonia Gandhi who has famously resisted all attempts to chronicle her life. Even in a publication last week Mrs Gandhi was dubbed “the Sphinx” — an enigmatic, towering figure.
I pointed this writer in the direction of journalist friends and others who could help her. I recalled seeing Sonia with Rajiv Gandhi when he was an undergraduate at Trinity, a year ahead of my batch at Cambridge.
My friend went to India for her research and returned with gigabytes of interviews and clippings. She now had to shape it. What she was dealing with was, I said, not the minutiae of Indian politics or its factional realities, even though these seemed to interest her Indian interviewees, but one of the most remarkable stories of our times. Here was a young woman, daughter of a man who had fought Mussolini’s war and been taken prisoner by Russians (she had traced this “fact”) who then went to England, worked her way, studied English, found love, joined a dynasty and ended up here decades later, through a series of unbearably tragic events, as the most powerful personality in Indian politics. Shakespeare couldn’t have made it up.
While she was writing her book full of quotes from the interviews she had painstakingly done over months in India, this biographer began to receive emails and calls from the people she had interviewed. They uniformly wished to withdraw the information they had, seemingly freely, given. They were not to be quoted, they said. They didn’t want their names mentioned in the book at all. They had spoken to her in haste and without due consideration. Some asked in a friendly way for their remarks, however anodyne, to be excluded or included without attribution. Others were a bit more intimidating: they hadn’t given her legal permission etc.
This deluge of denial was never explained. There was, says my biographer mate, no scandal in the information she had gathered. Yes, there were some strong opinions and the portrait that emerged was not of the Madonna and children, but it was a story of courage and certainly heroic in its endurance.
Having read a chapter or two as she had drafted it, I thought these withdrawals were a blessing in disguise. In my, perhaps useless, editorial judgement, there was too much material in quotes and very little of the voice and narrative opinion of the storyteller. Cutting out the attributions would make the reading easier. After all who were
“Mr Dodji” who said this or “Mr Kji” who said that?
I must protest that I didn’t read the manuscript as it progressed or when it was finished. I must point out that my friend, though she is of Sikh extraction, has lived most of her life in Britain and is not fluent in Hindi or Urdu. She finished the book and the Americans published it. It was widely reviewed in India. Unfortunately for her one of the reviewers picked up on the most absurd blunder she had made in the book. She had interpreted the phrase “aam janta” as the “mango people”. Now aam does mean common as well as mango, but what could she have been thinking? “Mango people” sounds like a tribe out of an Indian parallel (or parody) of The Hobbit or of The Wizard of Oz. Or perhaps she thought while including the phrase that it was like calling a city “the Big Apple”.
The howler is not copyright and I think I might use it when I write the Indian Wazir of Oudh or whatever.
One person who has used the phrase is Robert Vadra. There was, I have read recently, some question raised about certain transactions involving Mrs Gandhi’s son-in-law. It was then reported that he used my friend’s phrase in a tweet which attacked his critics as “the mango people in a banana republic” or some such.
The coordination of fruity adjectives is charming, though one doesn’t know how the nation will react to being labelled as less than the-most-dynamic-democracy-the-world-has-ever-known. It is highly likely that
Mr Vadra read the biography of his mother-in-law as published and picked up on the term from my friend’s
book.
My excuse for turning my attention to what some may think is a triviality is that I am compiling a word-book, a small personal register of Indo-Brit etymologies and verbal infelicities, transfers, mixed metaphors and even rhetorical statements that would bear further examination as to their meaning.
Now Mr Vadra is not strictly speaking “of the dynasty”, as the Indian tradition is that the married daughter is accepted as a member of the husband’s family rather than the other way round. I am aware that this pattern was not followed in Indira Gandhi’s case or we may have had a succession of Zoroastrian Prime Ministers.
My researches for the word-book brought me to Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous inaugural speech on Independence night, 1947. He says, if one needs reminding:
“Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
Now Panditji, a seasoned traveller, was certainly aware of time zones and of the fact that at the stroke of midnight in India, it would be daylight on the American continent and twilight in England and Africa and morning in Honolulu.
The “world” was certainly not literally asleep. Even metaphorically, one would have thought that the moment of decolonisation of India would have commanded the attention of the world public — so only the Chinese may have been snoring. Perhaps Panditji thought that the rhetorical impact of the phrase outweighed any literal nitpicking.