Indira Gandhi in Paris, 1971

October 18, 2008 — drsubrotoroy

This is a photograph of Indira Gandhi emerging with Andre Malraux for a press-conference at the Embassy of India in Paris  in the Autumn of 1971.   (My father, pictured in the centre, had been posted to the Embassy  just a few weeks earlier in anticipation of the visit.  [My father recalls her asking him during or between one of these meetings, “Mr Roy, I am very hungry, can you please get me something to eat?”, and he went and grabbed a small hotel plate full of peanuts which she devoured…])  Indira was making the serious diplomatic effort that she did in world capitals to avert war with West Pakistan over its atrocities in East Pakistan.  War could not be averted and within a few weeks, in December 1971, Bangladesh was born.

 

“Indira Gandhi’s one and paramount good deed as India’s leader and indeed as a world leader of her time was to have fought a war that was so rare in international law for having been unambiguously just. And she fought it flawlessly. The cause had been thrust upon her by an evil enemy’s behaviour against his own people, an enemy supported by the world’s strongest military power with pretensions to global leadership. Victims of the enemy’s wickedness were scores of millions of utterly defenceless, penniless human beings. Indira Gandhi did everything right. She practised patient but firm diplomacy on the world’s stage to avert war if it was at all possible to do. She chose her military generals well and took their professional judgement seriously as to when to go to war and how to win it. Finally, in victory she was magnanimous to the enemy that had been defeated. Children’s history-books in India should remember her as the stateswoman who freed a fraternal nation from tyranny, at great expense to our own people. As a war-leader, Indira Gandhi displayed extraordinary bravery, courage and good sense.” (From my review article of Inder Malhotra’s Indira Gandhi, first published in The Statesman May 7 2006 and republished elsewhere here under “Revisionist Flattery”.)

 

“She had indeed fought that rarest of things in international law: the just war. Supported by the world’s strongest military, an evil enemy had made victims of his own people. Indira tried patiently on the international stage to avert war, but also chose her military generals well and took their professional judgement seriously as to when to fight if it was inevitable and how to win. Finally she was magnanimous (to a fault) towards the enemy ~ who was not some stranger to us but our own estranged brother and cousin.  It seemed to be her and independent India’s finest hour. A fevered nation was thus ready to forgive and forget her catastrophic misdeeds until that time….” (From  “Unhealthy Delhi” first published in The Statesman June 11 2007,  republished elsewhere here).

Posted in Andre Malraux, Asia and the West, Bangladesh, France, India's Bangladesh liberation war, India's Diplomacy, India's Foreign Policy, India's Foreign Service, India's Polity, Indira Gandhi, Pakistan's history, Pakistan, Balochistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Paris, Richard Nixon, US China policy, US Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Espionage, War, World History. 3 Comments »

Auguste Rodin on Nature, Art, Beauty, Women and Love

August 7, 2007 — drsubrotoroy

“For Art there is no Ugliness in Nature”

“I have arrived at this belief by the study of Nature. I can only grasp the beauty of the soul by the beauty of the body, but some day one will come who will explain what I only catch a glimpse of and will declare how the whole earth is beautiful. I have never been able to say this in sculpture so well as I wish and as I feel it affirmed within me. For poets Beauty has always been some particular landscape, some particular woman; but it should be all women, all landscapes. A negro or a Mongol has his beauty, however remote from ours, and it must be the same with their characters. There is no ugliness. When I was young I made that mistake, as others do; I could not undertake a woman’s bust unless I thought her pretty according to my particular idea of beauty; today I should do the bust of any woman, and it would be just as beautiful. And however ugly a woman may look, when she is with her lover she becomes beautiful; there is beauty in her character, in her passions, and beauty exists as soon as character or passion becomes visible, for the body is a casting on which passions are imprinted. And even without that, there is always the blood that flows in the veins and the air that fills the lungs.”

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), viz., Judith Cladel, Auguste Rodin
Pris sur la Vie, 1903, pp. 103-104, translated by Havelock Ellis.

My father was a senior diplomat in India’s Embassy in Paris 1971-1973, and I (who had gained admission at Haileybury College, Hertford, in England to do Natural Science at Advanced and Special levels) loved my visits to Paris, crossing the Channel by boat or hovercraft. We lived at 14 Rue Eugene Manuel and I came to know Paris as well as a 17-18 year old could. In 1978 I returned from Cambridge to Paris for an interview, and that visit allowed me to come to know better the magnificent and moving art of Rodin. I later found his aesthetic philosophy captured in the statement above, which seems to me to be summarised by this equation:

Beauty = Ugliness + Love

which implies

Beauty – Love = Ugliness

E.g. a beautiful woman who is unloved becomes ugly just as a plain woman who is loved becomes beautiful.

If DH Lawrence had known of Rodin’s statement

“some day one will come who will explain what I only catch a glimpse of and will declare how the whole earth is beautiful”

he would have found it resonant. Perhaps his own magnificent descriptions as a naturalist made Lawrence the successor whom Rodin had wished for.

Posted in Aesthetics, Art, Beauty, DH Lawrence, France, Love, Paris, Rodin, Sculpture, Women. 1 Comment »