Among the few great statesmen to emerge in Asia, Jawaharal Nehru achieved a national metamorphosis in some ways even more astonishing than that of another towering patriarch, Mao Tse-tung. Not only did he wrest from the British their most prized and dearly loved Imperial possession and give his people independence, he brought his culturally rich yet economically improvised nation into the twentieth century as a force to be reasoned with. The first volume of Sarvepalli Gopal’s remarkable biographic, covering Nehru’s youth and ending with Independence in 1947, is written from first-hand knowledge of the man who served for ten years in the Ministry for External Affairs and from the unlimited access granted him by the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to her father’s private papers.

Judith Brown explores Nehru as a figure of power and provides an assessment of his leadership at the head of a newly independent India with no tradition of democratic politics.

Jawaharlal Nehru has won the admiration of the people of India and the world as a national leader, as a writer, as a humanist etc. Anyone who wishes to understand the controversial aspects of his personality would do well to peruse this biography. This work also traces the history of the freedom movement in India.The occasional glimpses of the family life of Nehru are enlivening. He was the most remarkable statesman, a man who enthralled everyone with his magical personality; a leader who was literally hero-worshipped and an orator of the order, who, once he climbed the rostrum and took the microphone in his hand, became one with the audience and held them spellbound. The colourful and complex personality of Nehru is viewed through Indian eyes a fact which makes the book all the more interesting.

The third and final volume of Sarvepalli Gopal’s biography of Jawaharlal Nehru covers the last eight years of his life and Prime Ministership. It deals with his efforts to sustain economic and social advance of the Indian people and not to lose hold of the principles of his foreign policy even while relations with China deteriorated, culminating the large scale aggression in both the western and eastern sections of the long boundary between the two countries.

Jawaharlal Nehru, 1880-1964, first prime minister of India.

Connecting the domestic and international aspects of Nehru's political and ideological life, this engaging new biography places Nehru in the context of the issues of his time and dispels many myths surrounding the figure.

India's first seventeen years of independence were dominated by the goals and dynamic leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru. In this authoritative biography, a renowned expert on the history of India examines the life of the country's foremost politician.