I initially opened this book out of idle curiosity. The author’s father, Minoo Masani, was a name that resonated from childhood because my father had been hugely influenced by him and was briefly an active member of the short-lived Swatantra Party that Masani formed with the brilliant C Rajagopalachari in 1959.
My family felt the legacy of my father’s political associations during the Emergency, one of the turning points in Zareer Masani’s own disillusionment with Indira Gandhi, because — thrillingly for me — our phones were tapped. So it was a surprise to learn that Masani, that formidable and upright grey eminence of my childhood memories, had had a turbulent private life that was closely linked to his politics.
His long-drawn and very public tensions with his wife would have been the stuff of page 3 gossip columns, had they existed in those days. At any rate, the family divided politics were the source of headlines at the time.
But any prurient element to this story is dissipated by the son’s frank, affectionate and dignified memoir. This is not just an intimate portrait of a short-lived love marriage and a 17-year battle for divorce between Zareer’s parents but the saga of a family divided by opposing worldviews — the author compares them to Montagues and Capulets.
Minoo Masani came from a conservative middle class Parsi family. He rebelled against his father’s pro-British leanings and, like many educated men of his generation, his politics swung left. Unlike many, he saw through Soviet Communism early. He founded the Swatantra Party on pro-market, free market ideologies many decades before India embraced it — as the author writes, “it is ironical that our present Prime Minister from the Congress Party, Dr Manmohan Singh, acknowledges Minoo Masani as his main ideological inspiration, rather than Pandit Nehru.
Zareer’s mother Shakuntala came from an affluent UP Kayasth home. Her father was an affluent textile businessman, an “arch Empire loyalist” and member of the viceregal councils of Linlithgow and Wavell. She, too, rebelled against her father’s politics, joining the Quit India movement. Later, she left home to work as a journalist in Bombay, where she met Masani.
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Attractive, gifted but mercurial, she instantly fell in love with the much-older, twice-married, glamorous if taciturn Minoo, a rising star in new India. The strong familial opposition to their union strengthened a bond between these two basically incompatible personalities.
Zareer was born in November 1947, an event that probably marked the beginning of the end of his parents’ marriage. As an only child, he was thoroughly spoiled by all except his remote and taciturn father: “Father ... always saw me as a spoiled and indulged Mummy’s boy, a ‘cissie’ as he put it, and insisted on trying to discipline me. Mother and I acted like thwarted lovers…plotting against our mutual oppressor. Fairness and rationality didn’t come into it.”
The turning point was when Masani left Nehru’s Congress and stood for elections from Ranchi under the Swatantra Party. For Shakuntala, playing political hostess in Lutyens’ Delhi was one thing; accompanying her husband on gruelling campaigns quite another. She began to fill her days with “a disparate and discordant band of male admirers” (JRD Tata, for whom Minoo once worked as chef de cabinet, among them).
By 1960, Masani asked for a divorce and Shakuntala resisted fiercely. Zareer writes, “Mother fought an intense rearguard action …she had an entirely irrational terror of it, partly as an emotional rejection and partly because she feared its impact on her social status”.
Zareer not only had to come to terms with his parents’ troubled marriage but his own leftist leanings and, not least, his homosexuality. Back home from Oxford and casting around for a career, his tensions with his father were accentuated by the crisis in Congress and the emergence of Indira Gandhi, who announced a snap election in 1971.
“I identified increasingly with Indira, whom Father by now saw as a pro-Communist, would-be dictator. We argued heatedly, both at home and at dinner parties, and Mother usually took my side.” The personal became political when Zareer joined the Indira Congress and his mother canvassed for her candidates, just as her husband was trying to together a principled opposition.
Shakuntala’s downfall began when Indira won by a landslide and the opposition was routed (Masani lost his seat too). As Zareer shrewdly observed, “Father’s defeat was more of a blow to Mother than to him. At one stroke, it wiped out her value for the Congress and Mrs Gandhi. She was no longer the principled wife of an even more principled and formidable Opposition leader. Instead, she began to look increasingly like a political turncoat…”.
With Zareer back in Oxford, Shakuntala lobbied Mrs Gandhi for employment — and was grudgingly appointed member-secretary on the Committee for the Status of Women, a job in which her enthusiasm and intelligence was dissipated by infighting. By now, she no longer lived with her husband but continued to fiercely contest any attempt to end the marriage.
Shakuntala’s behaviour swung erratically between paranoia (people want to kill her, she consults astrologers) and hysteria (importuning her estranged husband to take her back) — her son suggests that modern psychiatry might have labelled her bipolar. When the marriage finally ends it does so only by the slightest accident of fate.
Zareer writes with clarity, a certain shrewd humour and poignant honesty, sometimes devastatingly so. As a mea culpa — he blames himself for the breakdown of the marriage —the book probably serves him well. For the reader, it’s as rivetting both for the personal story and its up-close description of a seminal period in Indian politics.
AND ALL IS SAID
Author: Zareer Masani
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: xii + 236
Price: Rs 299