Durbar by Tavleen Singh; Hachette India; Price: Rs.599; 312 pp The Delhi Gymkhana, perhaps the most elitist and pretentious club in the country, invariably presided over by defence service chiefs, and top retired civil servants, has an intellectual facade in the form of a book club. Every month the club management selects a recently published book and invites the author for an interaction with club members when copies of the book, signed by the author, are also available for sale. This monthly event usually attracts 30-40 members. Tavleen Singh’s Durbar, however, drew an audience of over 400. The hall was overflowing and extra chairs had to be hastily commandeered. Tavleen who writes a weekly column for the Indian Express and has authored three books (including one on Kashmir), is clearly a media celebrity, at least in Delhi. The irony is that the audience at the Delhi Gymkhana comprised the type of people Tavleen excoriates in her book, but who nevertheless lapped up what she had to say. This reviewer, who was in the audience, also found it rather odd that Tavleen, reputedly liberal and secular, heaped praise on hardline BJP Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. Be that as it may, Durbar is a memoir of her years in journalism, starting in 1975 and ending with Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991. She joined the Statesman as a reporter when she was 25 after working as a trainee reporter in Slough, UK for an obscure evening daily. When she began her career in journalism, prime minister Indira Gandhi had declared India’s first and as yet sole state of Emergency, when most opposition leaders were detained without trial, and newspaper censorship was imposed countrywide. Tavleen soon became part of an inner circle that included Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi. Others within Delhi’s charmed circle during the 19-month Emergency were Akbar (‘Dumpy’) Ahmed, Naveen Patnaik (now a long-serving chief minister of Odisha), designer Romi Chopra, Martand (‘Mapu’) Singh, his brother Arun (Rajiv’s closest friend and adviser, until they fell out during the Bofors gun scandal), journalist Suman Dubey (a Doon School and Cambridge University classmate of Rajiv) and Satish Sharma (who became Rajiv’s close friend when both were pilots and who went on to become an MP). Though she freely socialised with them during the dark days of the Emergency, in Durbar Tavleen can’t disguise her contempt for them. She describes them as “sycophants”, “colonized”, “deracinated” individuals out of touch with the realities of India. Editor M.J. Akbar, under whom she served in Sunday, is portrayed as petty and tyrannical and prone to swaying with prevailing political winds. “It was a closed circle of people who lived an upper middle class Indian existence. Nobody spoke Hindi well but that did not matter. What mattered was if you spoke the sort of English you may have learned in a public school in Dehradun. If some newly rich businessman drifted by speaking English with difficulty, he was instantly treated as an object of fun,” she writes. The author…
