TV REVIEW : A Timely Look at India’s Rulers

Robert and Anne Drew could not have known what a prescient title they had chosen for their 90-minute documentary for PBS on India’s family of rulers since independence in 1947.

“Life and Death of a Dynasty” (Sunday at 10 p.m., Channel 28) tracks the legacy of the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, on to his daughter, Indira Gandhi, and finally to her son, Rajiv Gandhi. The Drews’ original meaning of “death” is summed up in a remark by historian Susanne Rudolph, who says of Rajiv, “While he is the dynasty, the future is no longer dynastic.”

Now, with the bloody assassination Tuesday of Rajiv, campaigning for a return to power with his Congress-I party, Rudolph’s assessment assumes a new, darker meaning. (KCET had planned to run the program June 6 but moved it up to Sunday after this week’s events. The broadcast will include a voice-over epilogue, not on the review tape, bringing it up to date.)

With a tragic recurrence that Americans can respond to, Indian leaders--Mahatma Gandhi, Indira (not related to Mahatma) and Rajiv--have often met with violent ends, in a country riven with violent clashes between Hindus and Moslems, between ethnicities, between castes. India’s problems seem insoluble, a sense made only worse by the country’s size (bigger than Europe) and population (second only to China).

Can they be captured in 90 minutes? The Drews try, having first filmed Nehru in 1962 (with master filmmaker Richard Leacock) and then Indira in 1981--with an intimate candor, we’re told via Cliff Robertson’s cogent narration, not allowed any other reporters. Perhaps looking at the Indian story with the family dynasty as the plot’s spine can make India comprehensible.

India, though, has paid the price for dynastic government, and the film, too, pays a price for focusing so intently on the Nehru/Gandhi clan. For viewers unschooled in recent Indian history, it becomes a near act of faith to reconcile the on-camera personalities--Nehru’s calming rationalism, Indira’s political astuteness, Rajiv’s almost bashful humility--with the Gargantuan events they tried to manage. The Drews bring us so close to Indira and Rajiv’s family circle, that when she is felled by her two Sikh bodyguards, there’s a palpable sadness.

But even with the helpful overview of historian Rudolph and her husband (and fellow India expert) Lloyd Rudolph, the Drews can’t get a handle on the cause of the Sikh separatist movement that led to Indira’s death. Many observers, not heard here, think that India’s ultra-centralized bureaucratic madhouse called a government, rife with corruption and aloof to the many diverse regions, has sown the seeds of conditions now close to civil war. By looking only at the center, “Life and Death of a Dynasty,” eloquent as it is, loses sight of the whole.