[Mrs. Nehru typically stayed away from political matters, but she took the unusual step of confronting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, her close friend and cousin by marriage, when she believed that the state of emergency Mrs. Gandhi declared in 1975 had too severely rolled back human rights in India .]
By
Ellen Barry
Shobha Nehru, left, with President John F. Kennedy and Indira Gandhi in 1962.
Mrs. Nehru’s husband was ambassador to
Credit George Tames/The New York Times
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Her
death was confirmed by her son Ashok.
Mrs.
Nehru was known by her Hungarian nickname, Fori, but did not often speak about
her background. After marrying the Indian diplomat Braj Kumar Nehru in 1935,
she took the name Shobha, which was selected by her in-laws, dressed in saris
and was so thoroughly assimilated that acquaintances often took her for a pale-skinned
Kashmiri Pandit, like the Nehrus themselves.
As
a member of the Nehru household, she grieved beside the bodies of Mahatma
Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, all of whom were assassinated. And at a
key moment in the country’s history, she delivered a hard truth to an imperious
leader who rarely heard it.
Mrs.
Nehru typically stayed away from political matters, but she took the unusual
step of confronting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, her close friend and cousin
by marriage, when she believed that the state of emergency Mrs. Gandhi declared
in 1975 had too severely rolled back human rights in India .
She
later recalled presenting Mrs. Gandhi with a list of men who said they had been
forced to undergo vasectomies during a coercive mass sterilization campaign
spearheaded by her son, Sanjay. Expecting to encounter resistance from the
prime minister, she had asked each man for his telephone number.
“I
said, ‘Indu, you know I never talk to you about politics, never, no,’ ” Mrs.
Nehru said in an interview with Indian state television. “ ‘Please look at this
— these are all complaints about sterilization of young boys and old men. You
know yourself that there is no need to sterilize. Why?’ She listened, looked at
me. ‘But.’ What but?”
Mrs.
Nehru’s husband, in his own memoir, reflected that virtually nobody — including
himself — was willing to take the risk of alienating Mrs. Gandhi, who resented
any criticism of her son. He said his wife was less cautious, and “certainly on
more intimate terms with Indira Gandhi than I was.”
“I
guess she was like that,” Ashok Nehru said. “She felt she had to get the truth
across to her. It was a close family relationship, not a political
relationship. She felt free enough to do that.”
Mrs.
Nehru was 90 when she asked an Oxford classmate of her son’s, the British
historian Martin Gilbert, to suggest some reading material on the history of
the Jews. Mr. Gilbert wrote that he was perplexed by the inquiry, having always
seen her as “an Indian woman,” until she recounted the story of her childhood
in Budapest .
“Auntie
Fori wanted to learn the history of the people to whom she belonged, but from
whom, 67 years earlier, she had moved away, to the heat and dust and challenges
of India,” Mr. Gilbert wrote in “Letters to Auntie Fori: The 5,000-Year History
of the Jewish People and Their Faith,” published in 2002.
She
was born on Dec. 5, 1908 , into a prosperous, assimilated Jewish
family that had changed its surname from Friedmann to the less Jewish-sounding
Forbath. Her mother’s family, Mr. Gilbert wrote, was one of the few Jewish
families licensed, under the Austro-Hungarian empire, to use the aristocratic
prefix “von.” She rarely visited a synagogue except to collect her father after
services.
“She
used to say, ‘Both my sister and I didn’t believe in all this stuff,’ ” Ashok
Nehru recalled. “She said they would stand outside the synagogue, stamping
their feet in the cold.”
An
anti-Semitic tide was rising in Hungary , and the family was forced by law to revert
to the name Friedmann. In 1919, hoping to stave off a Communist revolution,
right-wing mobs roamed the streets, killing Jews.
“Once
a week my father would travel to the villages to get food,” she told Mr.
Gilbert. “He had a house on Lake
Balaton . One summer
we went there — by train — and I saw people hanging from trees. It was terrible
for us children to look at.”
By
the time she was 20, strict quotas had been introduced for Jewish students in
Hungarian universities, and her parents sent her to the London School of
Economics. There she met B. K. Nehru, a member of a distinguished Kashmiri
family, whose cousin Jawaharlal was already a leader of the Indian independence
movement (and would later become India ’s first prime minister).
Her
parents were skeptical of the match, Mr. Nehru recalled in his memoir: “How
could their beautiful and lovely daughter marry a black man in a distant
country of which they know nothing, and who, by his own confession, belonged to
a family of jailbirds?”
His
parents were skeptical as well. But when the two sets of parents met in Budapest , there was a sudden thaw, Mrs. Nehru told
Mr. Gilbert.
“They
were sitting in the sitting room,” she said. “I was crying in my bedroom. My
future mother-in-law had to go to the loo. She came by my room — saw me crying.
She said, ‘We must let them do what they want to do.’ ”
The
Hungarian bride stepped off the ship in a sari and never looked back.
As
part of a countrywide tour, she was taken by her future mother-in-law to the
prison where Jawaharlal Nehru was being held by the British. Seeing that she
was in tears, he later sent her a gently chastening letter, informing her:
“Nehrus don’t cry in public. They keep a stiff upper lip.”
Meanwhile,
her relatives and friends in Hungary were scattering. Her father was saved by his
German housekeeper; her brother, an officer in the Hungarian Army, swam across
the Danube to Czechoslovakia ; her best friend drove across the border
with her son hidden in the trunk of her car.
She
was busy with her own crises in India . As partition approached, Delhi was flooded with refugees: Hindus who had
been pushed out of Pakistan , Muslims who were boarding trains for Pakistan , mobs pumped with murderous rage on both
sides. She learned, after she had helped families crowd onto one such train,
that everyone aboard had been dragged off and killed while crossing Punjab .
“Can
you imagine the horror?” she told Mr. Gilbert. “For several days we sent no
train.”
For
the newly arrived refugees, she began an employment campaign, opening a shop to
sell the handicrafts of refugee women that grew into a vast network, the
Central Cottage Industries Emporium.
She
would not return to Hungary until 1949, along with three sons who had
never seen her in anything but a sari.
“She
used to go out every day, to meet her friends,” her son Ashok, who accompanied
her on that trip, recalled. “Many of them had disappeared. Many had been raped
by the Russians or killed by the Germans. They were harrowing tales. I remember
her coming back crying.”
B.
K. Nehru died in 2001. In addition to her son Ashok, Mrs. Nehru is survived by
two other sons, Aditya and Anil; four grandchildren; and three
great-grandchildren.
As
the wife of a high-level dignitary, Mrs. Nehru moved from Washington , to the northeastern state of Assam , to London , but thoughts of Hungary ’s Jews never entirely left her. She told Mr.
Gilbert that at official receptions, she could not bring herself to shake hands
with the German ambassador.
“I
have a feeling of guilt,” she said. “I wasn’t there. I was safe. The guilt
feeling is still with me. Why should I not have suffered?”