Reviews

Akbar's journalistic treatment combines the biography of Jawaharlal Nehru with the history of the Indian Independence Movement from 1890 to 1948. What results encompasses shallow biography and an interesting interpretation of relationships between the British and Jinnah's Muslim League. Akbar takes the position that a British deal with the Muslim League in 1940 served as the springboard for an independent Pakistan. Here Akbar misses the point of British wartime desires to draw on the Muslim's martial qualities while dividing India under imperial rule. Throughout the work are vignettes of key Congress Party leaders and descriptions of their place in the Freedom Movement. The author's scattered anti-imperialist rhetoric should make the work acceptable to his native readership.-- John F. Riddick, Central Michigan Univ . Lib., Mount Pleasant

Published in the centennial year of Jawaharlal Nehru's birth, this massive, semi-adulatory, stodgy biography of India's first prime minister limns Nehru as a highly emotional idealist who transcended Hindu nationalism and Muslim revivalism to crystallize the cause of national unity. Critics have charged Nehru with a loss of nerve in 1947, when he rejected Gandhi's stance of ``no freedom without unity,'' but Indian journalist Akbar contends Nehru agreed to the partition of India and Pakistan because he was convinced that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, chief Muslim separatist, was capable of setting a torch to the whole subcontinent. Akbar, an Indian Muslim, offers a scathing portrayal of Jinnah, whom he accuses of pushing for partition in order to further his own political ambitions. We also get revealing glimpses of Churchill's vicious hatred of Indians, his unholy alliance with Jinnah and the famine the British did little to alleviate in the early 1940s. Though he minutely chronicles political affairs, Akbar ( India: The Siege Within ) says little about how Nehru addressed the vast task of rebuilding India. (Apr.)