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Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny. By STANLEY WOLPERT. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. xii + 546. $35.
To his biographies of Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Jinnah of Pakistan, 1984) and of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan, 1993) Wolpert now adds a volume on Jawaharlal Nehru.
The subtitle of the book also serves as the title of the first chapter, which contains a running commentary on passages from the unforgettable speech that Nehru delivered before India's Constituent Assembly at midnight August 14-15, 1947: "Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge."
More than any of several biographies of Nehru I have readstarting with Frank Moraes' Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (1956) and Michael Brecher's Nehru: A Political Biography (1959),...