Do we need this book? A collection of historical documents, in the absence of the easy accessibility of the archives that contain them, and for purposes of teaching, can be an important means of access to the subtleties of historical scholarship that remain unavailable to those confined to reading secondary sources. A collection of documents with a well-thought-out conceptual framework can be a valuable research tool. Given that much of this collection has already seen print, either in the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru or the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, and that the rationale for this volume is the admiration both editors had for their respective “individual heroes” (p. xl), it is difficult to see what wider significance the book might have. South Asian history has an unfortunate tendency to descend to the level of the polishing of haloes of national heroes, and this book dutifully proceeds in that direction. It claims to contain “every extant letter” between the two men (p. xlii), though admitting that the destruction of letters, losses due to colonial censorship, or the ravages of termites might have affected the collection's integrity (pp. xl–xli).

The introduction perfects the art of redundancy, repeating well-worn clichés to tired audiences who learned to recite many of the quotations at school, bowing to the diktats of authoritarian history teachers. We are told, yet again, that Gandhi and Nehru mutually admired and respected one another, though they had many political differences, and that the older man placed his trust in the younger man as a kind of political successor despite these differences. Five hundred-odd pages and nearly a hundred dollars might be too high a price to pay to know this, if we did not know it already.

Of more immediate value to a reader who is not well-versed in the history of the period under consideration are the annotations to the letters, painstakingly placed in the footnotes so as to provide a context for understanding the stray references that appear in correspondence between two men who knew each other well and wrote within a mutually intelligible framework often opaque to outsiders. Here too, however, the editors simply place a set of observations in footnotes without reference to any other text, document, or secondary source, implicitly insisting that readers trust their judgments and knowledge. This is unscholarly in the extreme, and is in any case restricted to standard biographical and chronological details; in several places where context is indeed required, the editors appear not to have enough background knowledge to provide it. A random example might be provided: Gandhi writes to Nehru on July 3, 1928, “Let the Song Celestial be your guidebook” (p. 70), which mysterious reference is only intelligible to those who know from his Story of My Experiments with Truth that Gandhi first read his favorite religious text, the Bhagavad Gita, in its English translation, The Song Celestial, by Sir Edwin Arnold, the Theosophist. A reference to “the Kharagpur horror” in the same letter is not glossed at all, and remains unintelligible. An inattentive reader might have missed the relevant footnote earlier on in the book, and must turn the pages backward in the hope that the relevant gloss may be found. The index proves in this respect to be completely unhelpful.

Given that the two men were major participants in major world events for a longish period of time, it seems to make little sense to cut and paste their letters into a chronological framework without some sort of principle of arrangement. Many of the letters make for interesting reading to anyone already familiar with the grainy details of the history and historiography of India in the first half of the twentieth century. However, there are probably only a handful of such readers, who will already be familiar with these materials from other sources. For anyone else, this book is likely to remain largely unintelligible.