I am not interested in things that only I am interested in,” Andre Malraux famously said when he wrote his anti-memoirs, recognising that some people’s pasts belong to history. Political autobiographies are a compelling genre, whether they seek to lay out a legacy or to persuade future voters, to set a controversial record straight or wield their revelations to embarrass others. L.K. Advani’s autobiography, My Country, My Life, is probably a bit of all this. But where are all the other Indian politician-storytellers?Having lived through events that affect history, public figures owe it to us to leave an account of their actions, their version of lived history. Compare this to, say, the United States, where everyone writes a book. Presidential memoirs, ranging from the banal to the momentous, all try to articulate a historical narrative. Both Clintons have written volumes that speak silences, while Barack Obama has already written two tell-alls about his life and thoughts. But with a few exceptions, the significant actors of recent Indian politics have rarely told us their stories in their own words. Their public statements and speeches are limited to the ephemera of newspapers, even in this age of high-advance book contracts. Perhaps it is because a strict sense of public record is missing in our political culture. There are no real penalties for inconsistency, and spinning statements to suit the shifting terrain of everyday politics or saying different things for different audiences is more or less acceptable in India. So perhaps this sense of expediency makes it harder for politicians to pin down the definitive version of their motives and actions. Also, our politicians rarely maintain a rigid line between the work of public office and their own political duties, so the idea of a ‘collected papers’ archived for posterity has never taken root in India. Nor do we follow the practice of declassifying state documents to gradually reveal the shape of a past just distant enough for some perspective. A pity, because tracing that torture of thought, the human logic that drove the critical, life-changing decisions of our country is fascinating for all of us interested in our own collective past.
