Making Meaning Out of a Lifetime: The Life and Times of Indira Gandhi

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the life and times of Indira Gandhi, a phenomenal political leader, and the first and only woman prime minister of India. It dwells upon her early life as a child of a family that has come to be known as India’s first family and how her early life was embroiled in India’s historical freedom struggle. Her relationship of closeness coupled with separation and distance, from time to time, with her father, and with her ailing mother, and the experiences she had within the extended networks of her family set the tone for her individuation and metamorphosis into adulthood. Being at the helm of public life at all stages of the lifespan, she exhibited unique strength, stubborn resolve, and an often contested “method to the political madness” around her. Resistance was a continuing underlying theme in her life on the personal as well as on the public front. Through her life leading up to her political career, this chapter demonstrates how resistance is built up through a life course. An additional dynamics arises on account of the fact that Indira Gandhi shares Mahatma Gandhi’s family name. In her life and career, although she deeply admired Gandhi, her political strategies gradually developed very differently from the Satyagraha (Insistence on truth, Gandhi’s ideology for the freedom struggle in India) which was Gandhi’s method of political struggle.

“This is what the painter does, and the poet, the speculative philosopher, the natural scientist, each in his own way. Into this image of the world and its formation, he places the centre of gravity of his emotional life, in order to attain the peace and serenity that he cannot find within the narrow confines of swirling personal experience.”

Albert Einstein (doi: http://101sharequotes.com/quote/albert_einstein-variant-translation--one-of-the--384382).