One wishes there were more politicians able and willing to write books. When political figures write tomes —- and many have done this commendable work in the past —- it is not only their intellectual abilities which manifest themselves but also their worldview. Of course, it is to be acknowledged that a politician will largely be drawn to reflecting on what he does best, which is politics. But within those reflections there often come shades of the literary and the historical in them, making it doubly interesting to go through their minds and the way those minds work.
In recent years, William Hague, once leader of Britain’s Conservative Party and subsequently Foreign Secretary, came forth with a brilliant work he called William Pitt The Younger. Anyone with a reasonable understanding of British political history will know the significance of the younger Pitt. And Hague, who as a teenager once impressed Margaret Thatcher with a brilliant speech in her presence, does a splendid job in this work. Not to be outdone, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave readers The Churchill Factor, a work which clearly illustrates his admiration for the wartime leader.
Closer to us is the brilliance of Jawaharlal Nehru which has generationally impressed people in South Asia. His The Discovery of India remains a powerful invocation to the history of the subcontinent. Written without malice and with objectivity, the work continues to be a rich reference for scholars of history in our part of the world. Nehru’s other works, including his letters to his daughter and his chief ministers, demonstrate the sparks which underscored his intellectual world. Much the same can be said about Winston Churchill, who to people’s amazement ended up earning a Nobel Prize in literature for his written works. His A History of the English Speaking Peoples has been unmatched by many political writers in his country.
The posthumous memoirs of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Oshomapto Atyojiboni or Unfinished Memoirs, are a happy reflection of the evolution of a politician destined to rise to global prominence in the times ahead. The work is a definitive part of Bangladesh’s history, as coruscating as Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s India Wins Freedom. Politics underpinned Bangabandhu’s and Azad’s works, but with Barack Obama, in Dreams From My Father, it was real life presented, one might suggest, as powerful fiction. Obama’s hold over vocabulary and his approach to the work are nothing less than literary. Likewise, The Audacity of Hope throws up a mind which, if not applied to politics, would have done well in the world of literature.
How many of us are there to reflect on Gandhi’s My Experiments With Truth? The apostle of non-violence brings into the study of his subject a charming combination of the spiritual and the literary. Profundity informs the work. At another end, his Autobiography takes readers to the circumstances which shaped the formulation of his ideas of class discrimination and politics. Gandhi’s works yet occupy good space on the shelves. One now can move on, to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose Profiles in Courage remains a brilliant study of the individuals the young author thought had made a deep impact on the American imagination. And then there was his Why England Slept, again for today’s generation a journey back to a decisive period in history, namely, the failure to prevent Hitler’s becoming a menace in the 1930s.
Vaclav Havel, the man who spearheaded the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, inspired his people with his plays and poetry. An unlikely revolutionary, he nevertheless succeeded in bringing about a change, though it left his country divided into two independent republics. But read his books, notably The Power of the Powerless, a vibrant exposition of the majesty which defines the strength inherent in people ready to inaugurate a pluralistic era for themselves. And while we discuss the merits of Havel’s work, let us go into Henry Kissinger’s incisive work Leadership. Much though Kissinger has been excoriated for his controversial role in upending politics in various countries, Leadership is a brilliant treatise on the careers of such men as De Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Anwar Sadat and Lee Kwan Yew. The present generation of global diplomacy enthusiasts will certainly gain insights into a world now in the past.
No discussion on political individuals coming forth with books on various themes will be complete without a reference to Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian-era British Prime Minister whose penchant for literature is not forgotten. He wrote fiction, notably Coningsby and Sybil, in which satire underpinned his assessment of the politics of his times. Disraeli’s literary works were unable to come close to what other and more professional writers were achieving, but that he was trying to bring politics and literature to his audience in compact form was quite noticeable. In our times, Richard Nixon wrote well, but fundamentally on foreign affairs. However, his Six Crises, written after his defeat in the California gubernatorial election in 1962, made for sad reading. It was a reflection on what he thought had consistently blocked his path to the political heights. It would be Watergate, the seventh of his crises, which would destroy him.
Jimmy Carter, who has just completed a century of life, has been a prolific writer of books on a diversity of subjects. In Beyond The White House: Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope, he provides an account of the philanthropic work he and his late wife Rosalynn engaged in after Carter left office in 1981. Another of his works, An Hour Before Daylight, is an account of his family —- his parents and siblings —- as it coped with Depression-era America. It takes one back to some of the worst times Americans have experienced in their history. And if one now turns to Hillary Clinton’s It Takes A Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, one has a positivist image of life which the reader is treated to. Clinton has written other books as well, specifically on her life and politics, but Village is the one a bibliophile would like to go back to more than once.
In the late 1960s, fresh out of Ayub Khan’s government, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto wrote The Myth of Independence, an argument postulating the idea that nations beholden to other and more powerful nations are essentially trapped in faux freedom. Decades on, the work continues to make political analysts and historians reflect on its theme.
And let Deshbandhu Chitta Ranjan Das not be forgotten. A consequential political leader in his times, C.R. Das was also into literary pursuits. His poetry, as it came encompassed in his work Malancha, reveals the poignant imagery he brought into his poetic imagination.
Enjoy the remains of the day, as the skies change colour.
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