POLITICAL PEDIGREE

In reviewing Indira Gandhi’s rise to power, one first needs to search her family’s past and consider her rise from within a generational framework. It is useful to consider this from the perspective of a “telescoping of generations,” which Faimberg describes as the unconscious narcissistic link between generations, in which the identity of the individual can be influenced to incorporate the hopes, wishes, and traumas of prior generations.

The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has been the predominant political family in India since 1958. Indira was born to Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru in the home of her paternal grandfather, Motilal Nehru, in Allahabad, a city known to be a prominent cultural hub in northern India. The Nehru clan belonged to an exclusive community of high-caste Hindus. Motilal’s father was a respected police chief in Delhi who died three months before Motilal was born.

Motilal was a natural leader, and the admiration he received from others ultimately led him to become a member of the Indian National Congress. It was said that he had “the exquisiteness of attire which symbolized the clean fighter and the great gentleman and that impressive face, deeply lined and careworn, on which character and intellect were so deeply imprinted . . . Eminent as a lawyer, eminent as a speaker, and in the first rank as a political leader, he could not but take the foremost place wherever he might be.” At the age of 26, Motilal was thrust into the position of family caretaker after the sudden death of his brother. He rapidly became more prominent in Indian society, and he was truly looked on as a secular and worldly individual in Allahabad.