Beyond the Lines by Kuldip Nayar; Roli Books; Price: Rs.595; 420 pp One of the few positive developments in these depressing times is the coming of age of India’s book publishing industry. Within the past decade, this industry has evolved with the ready publication of memoirs and autobiographies of captains of industry, political leaders and activists positioned to provide insiders’ perspectives of the confusing history of post-independence India. Among such new genre books welcomed on this page for enlightening perspectives and the grist they provide to serious historians are the memoirs of construction magnate K.P. Singh and the late Union minister Arjun Singh, and the non-fiction works of Katherine Boo (Beyond Beautiful Forevers) and banker-economist Ruchir Sharma (Breakout Nations). To this list, add Beyond the Lines by veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar. The merit of this book diligently written over 20 years by its octogenarian author, are its vast sweep and unique insider’s insights provided by a dogged, self-made individual who lost all material advantages in the horror of the partition, and through sheer effort and tenacity rose to several prestigious positions in government, journalism and the diplomatic corps. Two parallel narratives trace the career graph of the author and his unique — indeed unprecedented — interface with modern Indian history and leaders who shaped it. For the past six decades, Nayar has been reporting from the heart of the Delhi imperium, and offers close-up and usually unflattering portraits of the men and women who botched independent India’s high-potential national development effort. Dispossessed of all ancestral property in Sialkot where his father was a successful medical practitioner and beginning his life as a refugee in India with a capital of Rs.120, Nayar began his career as a reporter in an Urdu-medium daily. The personal strand of the narrative traces his switch to English journalism which began when he was an officer in the Central government’s Press Information Bureau (PIB). Despite a degree in journalism from the prestigious North-Western University, USA he couldn’t land a job in any English language newspaper. This proved a blessing in disguise as he was deputed to serve as the information officer of Union home minister Govind Ballabh Pant and later Lal Bahadur Shastri who succeeded Jawaharlal Nehru as India’s prime minister in 1964. Nayar’s stint in PIB in the early years of independence enabled him to acquaint with a variety of powerful and emerging politicians including Nehru, Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, JP and numerous state-level political leaders. Keenly aware of prevailing ideas and events, Nayar emerged as the official chronicler of the times, providing first-hand information to newspapers subscribing to the United News Agency of India (UNI) started by Nayar. Simultaneously, the personal narrative is interspersed with political history. It comprehensively traces the formation of the socialist Nehruvian state, the jockeying for power after Nehru’s socialist fantasy ended in the humiliation of the Indo-China border war of 1962, the succession of Shastri as prime minister, his untimely and suspicious death in Tashkent and the succession of Indira Gandhi…
