India (From Curzon To Nehru And After)

Pages: 499 (9 B/W Illustrations)

About The Book
This Book is a Fascinating and wholly absorbing contribution to the History of the twentieth century.This fast-moving, lively and independent account of politics and international affairs is enriched by intimate, perceptive and critical sketches of great leaders, such as Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Desai and Patel. Perhaps no other book reminds the reader so firmly that politics, even at its most exalted and dramatic, is about people. Certainly, no one who is interested in India, in the history of British imperialism, or in the realities of present-day Asia, can neglect this gold mine of a book.
Foreword
Perhaps no period of Indian history has been so packed with significant and exciting events and outstanding personalities as the sixty- eight years of the twentieth century. This period has seen the end of an empire as well as of an epochcolonialismafter a political struggle whose repercussions were felt far beyond Indias shores and which acted as a beacon for the aspirations of other nations in Asia and Africa and Latin America under foreign rule.

It is this historical panorama, spreading from the fledgling years of the freedom movement beginning with Curzon and embracing the succeeding pro-consuls of Britain on the one hand and the torch- bearers of the freedom movementfrom Tilak to Gandhi and Nehru on the otherand the years that followed x5th August, 1947, the great watershed of Indian history, that is chronicled in this volume of personal memoirs.

It is fitting that this chronicle should come from the pen of my friend Durga Das, whom I first met in 1921. We are contemporaries and I have been intensely interested in the period the memoirs cover, although I was most of the time outside the current of politics. To mention only two reasons: he was born in the first year of the century and he therefore grew up along wit