There is a tendency to look at Sharmistha Mukherjee’s book, Pranab, My Father: A Daughter Remembers, on the late President as a political history of post-independence India through the prism of one man’s life, or as behind-the-scenes disclosures on what the famously discreet Pranab Mukherjee thought of these events, confiding to his diary.
Pranab Mukherjee as Union Finance Minister, in New Delhi, in 1984. | Photo Credit: N. Srinivasan
To consider her book only through these two prisms would be an injustice to the author, who, while using the late President’s extensive diaries as a primary source, has written a book from a daughter’s point of view — and it’s as much her memoir as it is her father’s.
Pranab Mukherjee’s three-volume memoir was a meticulously written chronicle, but, as he himself said during the launch of his second volume, there was much more in his diaries, secrets he would take to his grave. In that context, Sharmistha Mukherjee’s book completes the Mukherjee family’s journey lived through Pranab Mukherjee’s long public life.
Former President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: ANI
Friends and enemies
A poignant anecdote is her first recognition of fair weather friends in Delhi, especially in the aftermath of the Congress’s loss in the post-emergency polls of 1977. A Bengali journalist and his family who had been close to Geeta and Pranab Mukherjee drifted after having been a part of their family circle for long. When Mrs. Mukherjee pointed this out to Pranab Mukherjee, he dismissed them as “Basanter Kokil” (springtime Koel), a remark overhead by young Sharmistha who, along with her friends then nicknamed the journalist “Kuhu”, mimicking the koel’s call. With Pranab Mukherjee and the Congress’s return to power, “Kuhu” started visiting again, but was now held at arms length without the previous intimacy. The incident, Sharmistha Mukherjee writes, helped educate her on how growing up in a political family also means never being sure of friends and enemies.
President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina jointly inaugurating the Broad Gauge locomotives and wagons supplied under a $800 million line of credit extended by India, in Dhaka, in 2013. | Photo Credit: PTI
Her mother, Geeta Mukherjee, and Sheikh Hasina shared a special relationship, from the time that the latter was living in Delhi after the assassination of her father and Bangladesh founder Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and several other members of her family. At Geeta Mukherjee’s funeral, Sheikh Hasina’s tears were testament to that deep personal bond of friendship.
For me however, what Pranab Mukherjee wrote as his personal observations of big events, personal failures (his famous inability to sometimes keep his temper in check), and the way he interacted with Sharmistha Mukherjee, trying hard to insulate her from assuming that the privileges of his public role were permanent, are the real takeaways from the book. What he says about why he visited the RSS headquarters to why he pulled up Sharmistha Mukherjee for extending an impromptu invitation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to her dance performance at Rashtrapati Bhavan make one appreciate the structure of the book — the life of one of India’s most storied public figures and that of his family.
A lot of what has made news is of course interesting as well, but this is a family memoir too — it is as much a story of Pranab Mukherjee as it is a story of Geeta and Sharmistha.
Pranab, My Father: A Daughter Remembers; Sharmistha Mukherjee, Rupa, ₹595.
nistula.hebbar@thehindu.co.in
