With her thinly arched eyebrows, flowing mane of black hair and polished English, the journalist Tavleen Singh looks very much the part of the upper-class New Delhi socialite, a set into which she was born and in which she moves with ease.
Yet unlike most members of this fast-fading network of genteel affluence, who abide by a strict code of discretion, Ms. Singh has broken ranks by writing a memoir, “Durbar,” transporting readers into these privileged cocoons. Centered on the tumultuous years between 1975 and 1991, “Durbar,” which means a ruler’s court in Hindi, serves up Ms. Singh’s recollections of hobnobbing with Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi and their friends, including assorted scions of influential families who went on to wield considerable power in later decades.
Published earlier this month, the book is causing waves because Ms. Singh’s unique vantage point offers a small glimpse into the lives of the Gandhis and their circle. Despite the fact that the family has dominated Indian politics for over a century, and certainly since the country’s independence, the public has little knowledge of their private lives. Amazingly, there are very few hard-hitting, incisive biographies by Indian insiders about Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi.
“Durbar” may not qualify as one, but the book’s fly-on-the wall details mean it is being devoured by readers from India’s social and political elite nonetheless.
Languid lunches, nightclub outings, drawn-out dinners where politics was never a main subject — Ms. Singh entered this circle when she was 24, when New Delhi was still a sleepy little town of few cars, permeated with the air of a down-at-heels country club.
“We were just hanging around, who knew that Rajiv would be prime minister?” the 62-year-old Ms. Singh recalls with some wonder even after all these decades. Wearing a bright orange and pink silk sari, she recalls going to a “disco in the Maurya hotel where they wouldn’t let us in because we were too many people and we kept whispering, ‘But this is the P.M.’s son!’”
Today a syndicated political columnist who writes in both Hindi and English, back then Ms. Singh was a rookie reporter with the Statesman newspaper. An ironic stroke of timing–Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency a month after she started work–helped Ms. Singh become more politically aware. “When I saw what a politician could do to a country, that’s when I realized I was interested in political reporting,” she says.
Newsrooms across India were still male-dominated, but because of the emergency, Ms. Singh was propelled into political reporting. Her insider status gave her access that most journalists, young and old alike, would have killed for (she once scheduled an interview for one of her bosses, the editor M.J. Akbar, with Rajiv Gandhi).
“Durbar” is peppered with anecdotes and obscure details about India’s first family. One example: Naveen Patnaik, an old friend of Ms. Singh’s and current chief minister of Orissa, once complimented Sonia Gandhi on her white dress, asking if it were a Valentino, to which Sonia replied, “I had it made in Khan Market by my darzi (tailor).”
Ms. Singh says the book “has been received well by my journalist colleagues and people who have read it and very badly by the court, so I must have achieved something.” By court, she means Sonia Gandhi’s inner circle. “Tavleen is like a fly on the wall that doesn’t get swatted,” says Suhel Seth, a brand consultant and man about town who arranged a book reading for Ms. Singh in Mumbai recently. “She was the first insider to move away from the concentric power circle and squealed,” he says.
In the end, that squealing may not be very significant. Unverifiable gossipy tidbits about Ms. Gandhi aside (shopping sprees, a sable coat redesigned by Fendi), Ms. Singh herself admits that she left out personal details and intimate chats because “a lot of people would be very hurt.” But she says she regrets not taking more notes – which makes it somewhat surprising to hear her cite the example of Robert Vadra, Mrs. Gandhi’s son-in-law and a recent media target over alleged improper land deals, when commenting on the state of the press today. “Robert Vadra didn’t have a chance,” she says. “Once you get on TV channels and you get this wall-to-wall coverage, what is he going to say?”
In her 40 years as a journalist, Ms. Singh’s antisocialist, antigovernment voice has earned her plaudits and criticism alike. She earned her credentials with shoe-leather reporting across India, covering terrorism, wars, famine and elections, but a visceral hatred of dynastic politics — made apparent in the book as well as her weekly columns — is what motivated Ms. Singh to write this book. “I don’t think leadership is genetically passed on,” she says. “I believe the concept of feudal democracy at the very top is emulated. Political ideas are very weak at the grassroots level.”
Her solution? “Political parties should start having elections within the party. I travel a lot, I meet very able people who do not get a chance to be in public life, the kind of people who would come up if you had elections within the party. We could learn a lot from the Americans if we had a kind of system of primaries.”
Always the iconoclast, in her late twenties Ms. Singh fell in love with a married Pakistani. (They had a son together, Aatish, a novelist, now 32.) “It was a doomed relationship from the start,” she says. The man she fell for, Salman Taseer, eventually joined Pakistani politics, becoming governor of Punjab Province in 2008. He was assassinated in 2011. “If I had a choice, I would’ve stayed with Salman and had 10 children and not been a journalist,” Ms. Singh says with a laugh. “I was 29 years old and in love and maybe it would’ve been a terrible mistake, but who knows? It’s not that you make those choices, those choices are made for you.”
