And Godse may not have been convicted

This book has three outstanding speeches that will easily set it apart from all other recent publications of this genre. The first speech is the highly controversial statement read out by Nathuram Godse at the last leg of his trial for assassinating Mahatma Gandhi.

In spite of its controversy and the stigma attached to Godse (after all, here was a man defending his action to eliminate in cold blood the country's tallest leader who used peace and non-violence as weapons to seek India's freedom from British rule), it is a speech that every Indian must read. Not to sympathise with Godse, but to gain a better insight into Gandhi as a leader.

Godse projects Gandhi as a dictator, a man with whom nobody could differ. And anyone who differed with him got isolated because of the moral high ground that Gandhi always managed to occupy in all such debates. Godse dubs Gandhi as an unabashed lover of the Muslims and the newly created state of Pakistan. How otherwise Gandhi could impose on this country Hindustani, a hybrid language born out of a clumsy marriage between Hindi and Urdu, Godse argues though quite unconvincingly.

Godse believed that Gandhi's dictatorship and his intolerance of dissent had begun to cost India dearly. He admitted that the killing of Gandhi was a despicable act and he or his family would not be able to live that down. He did not seek mercy, but wanted the nation to know why he did the unthinkable.

Godse's was not an emotional speech, argued as it was with reason and conviction. You may not agree with all of it. But as the editor of the volume aptly points out in his annotations, Godse's statement was considered to be "the finest by a condemned man since Socrates's trial speech". One of the judges, G D Khosla, later wrote: "The audience was visibly and audibly moved ... It seemed to me that I was taking part in some kind of melodrama or in a scene out of a Hollywood feature film ... I have, however, no doubt that had the audience of that day been constituted into a jury and entrusted with the task of deciding Godse's appeal, they would have brought a verdict of 'not guilty' by an overwhelming majority."

The second notable speech, included in this volume, was delivered by India's best-known film maker, Satyajit Ray, in 1982. The speech is on the education of a film maker. It is by far the most lucid exposition of the various influences that worked on Ray, outlined by none else than the master himself.

How Ray discarded Santiniketan (where he was sent because his mother thought Tagore's school would have a therapeutic effect on him!), how

De Sica's Bicycle Thief had left a deep impression on his ethos as a film maker and how the first seven minutes of Charulata, arguably his best film, set the tone for the emotional drama that unfolds "" are all eloquent testimony to a great speech delivered to a spell-bound audience in Kolkata.

No less gripping is the speech novelist Vikram Seth delivered at Doon School, his alma mater. It was an unusual speech. He spoke of how uncomfortable and unhappy his days were in that school. Yet, he talked about the universal values that he, like all of us, imbibed from his school "" the spirit of equality and all-round education.

Did the school teach him lessons of leadership, character building and independence of mind? No, says Seth emphatically, but with a certain candour that demolishes such myths about most schools all around us. His advice to young students is equally refreshing: Accept that acceptance will be slow in coming, if indeed it comes at all.

Since the book has been published at around the same time as the Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches, a comparison between the two publications becomes inevitable. The Penguin book is more bulky and covers as many as 161 speeches made from 1877 and thematically grouped under 17 broad issues. It, therefore, strives for comprehensiveness "" a goal that is broadly achieved barring a few notable omissions (see Business Standard, August 3).

The book under review has no pretensions towards achieving comprehensiveness. Instead, the 49 speeches here are either those associated with historically significant developments or which have made a mark for themselves in terms of their intellectual content or freshness of ideas.

And unlike the Penguin book, not all the speeches included here are made by Indians. Thus, you have a speech by Salman Rushdie delivered in Cambridge in 1993, four years after the Iranian fatwa on his life. Expectedly, he speaks on human rights and the freedom an artist must enjoy. Similarly, there are speeches by Lord Curzon on the need for conserving ancient monuments as also on preserving wild life in India.

The book suffers from one major problem. It could have done with better editing. Silly spelling errors have marred what would otherwise have been an unalloyed reading pleasure.

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Great Speeches of Modern India

Rudrangshu Mukherjee (ed)
Random House India
Pages 454; Rs 395