You can see so much more once you get your own nose out of the way. That’s what I felt as I closed Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s personal history of independent India, optimistically titled The Undying Light, released this month. It is no small achievement to look at big and small events, national and family drama, without placing oneself at the centre.

This self-effacement, to a fault, is not just a charming personal virtue. For Gopal Gandhi, this is a fly-on-the-wall method of reading and viewing history. To be sure, he is not attempting an objective history of India since Independence. So there are no fresh archival sources, no sensational disclosures (except one, to which we will come later), no attempt at offering a new theory of history. Nor is this a memoir. The book is what it says: A personal history, a history of the last 80 years, seen from the eyes of a person. A story of how big events of independent India unfolded in the life and mind of one Indian.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is not quite an unknown Indian. If your paternal grandfather was the Father of the Nation, and your maternal grandfather was the last Governor-General of India, you can’t possibly remain unknown. The great achievement of Gopalkrishna Gandhi (and also his siblings) is to remain sahaj with respect to his ancestry. Neither does the author flaunt this connection, nor does he bear it like a cross. Of course, that does not shield him from accusations of using his surname. He shares this snippet from an angry letter he received from an unnamed person: “You have always encashed the Gandhi cheque and wrangled plump cushy postings… You are a very mediocre, average Jt Secy level officer… don’t you have any self respect?”

I first encountered Gopalkrishna Gandhi in 2007. I had written an article (in this paper, as it happens) explaining the rationale for OBC reservation in educational institutions. A few days later, I got an envelope (yes, the postal department worked in those days) marked Raj Bhavan,

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