Mum’s the word: Advani at the release of his book; anb (below right) (Top to bottom) Russi Mody, Jaswant Singh and Vyjayanthimala

All right, Vyjayanthimala Bali did not have an affair with Raj Kapoor. There was, or maybe there wasn’t, a mole in the Prime Minister’s Office. Russi Mody was as straight as a ramrod. And Lal Krishna Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee were the best of friends.

Suddenly, it’s raining autobiographies and biographies. Yet the more you read, the hungrier you are for details. For unlike the West where memoirs and biographies are often an excuse to kiss and tell, Indians are still hemming and hawing about what they want to say. And often, what’s left unsaid is a story in itself.

Former deputy Prime Minister Advani’s book My Country, My Life — launched last week — is a candid account, surprisingly so since he is not a retired politician, as political memoir writers usually are, but the main Opposition party’s prime ministerial candidate for the next election. Yet even Advani’s memoirs leave several questions unanswered.

Did he, for instance, know that former foreign minister Jaswant Singh was to escort freed terrorists to Kandahar in 1999? Did he threaten to resign? Who wanted him to step down as president after his 2005 Pakistan trip when he hailed M.A. Jinnah as secular? And despite years of camaraderie, why is it that rumours of rifts between Vajpayee and Advani still abound?

It is, of course, the prerogative of the author of an autobiography to write what he or she wishes. Advani admits that some things are always better left unsaid. “To an extent, yes, that’s true. But that’s natural, for I am in public life and have to work with everybody,” he says. “But I have also been self-critical and self-analytical.”

Publishers agree that Indians are wary of writing without reservations. “We don’t have a culture of revealing with complete honesty,” says Penguin India executive editor Ravi Singh. So we have a 2008 Russi Mody biography, The Man Who Also Made Steel, which whets your appetite about the colourful man but doesn’t sate it.

“There is a great sense of privacy in India. And politicians, I suppose, are more careful than others,” points out Random House India editor-in-chief Chiki Sarkar. That would explain why Jaswant Singh claimed there was a spy in P.V. Narasimha Rao’s PMO in his 2007 book, but refused to name him.

That politicians are more careful than others — and often without cause — was never more evident than in Abul Kalam Azad’s India Wins Freedom. Azad withheld 30 pages from his book, arguing that the country wasn’t ready for them. The section, sealed for 30 years, was published in 1988. But the Maulana said nothing that India didn’t already know. He called Nehru vain, and was critical of Sardar Patel.

But it’s not just the politician. The story so far from non-politicos has not been particularly frank either, though actor Dev Anand’s recent book Romancing With Life did talk about his many affairs and his wife’s alcoholism. But often, the aftermath of a book throws up more information than its pages.

Actress Vyjayanthimala, for instance, kicked up a furore last September when she wrote in Bollywood: A History that the talk of an affair with actor Raj Kapoor was a publicity stunt. Kapoor’s son, Rishi, went public with details of the relationship, and how it had affected his mother.

Actress Hema Malini was reluctant to talk about her bigamous marriage with actor Dharmendra for her 2007 authorised biography. “She had to be persuaded to talk about it but didn’t elaborate on her relationship with Dharmendra’s first wife or their children,” says a publishing insider.

A senior actor, whose affair with an actress almost drove his wife to suicide, was once asked by a leading publisher to write his memoirs. He refused, saying that if he couldn’t write what he wanted to — since it would affect people close to him — it would be better if he didn’t write at all. Retired boxwallah Amar Mishra, who had close links with musicians as the founder of the Calcutta ITC Sangeet Research Academy, has delightful anecdotes to relate about a leading vocalist’s fondness for drink and the ensuing problems. But his 2004 book Some Musical Memories left out much of the juicier bits.

“As a biographer, one has to be extremely sensitive in representing facts. No one who’s being written about wants dark facts regarding their lives exposed in the public domain,” reasons Kishwar Desai, author of Darlingji, a 2007 book on Nargis and Sunil Dutt. “Yes, biographers do constantly apply some kind of censorship while writing, either to protect a family or an individual or simply out of their own discretion.”

But honest memoirs are not completely unknown in India either. Commentator Ramachandra Guha lists among them the works of M.K. Gandhi, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Jawaharlal Nehru, S. Gopal and Dom Moraes. “But autobiographies are very rarely truly frank,” says Guha. “Autobiographies are generally an exercise in justification and self-gratification.”

Among the exceptions is writer Nayantara Sehgal, who published letters to and from her lover in Relationships. Bijoya Ray, Satyajit Ray’s wife, mentioned her husband’s relationship with an actress and how it pushed Bijoya to a nursing home in her autobiography, serialised in Desh magazine.

A former historian says Gandhi’s book My Experiments with Truth has often been seen as a rare example of confessional candidness. Gandhi wrote about his quest for celibacy, which has also been recorded by Arthur Koestler in The Lotus and the Robot and Nirmal Bose, Gandhi’s secretary and interpreter in the mid-forties, in My Days With Gandhi.

But Gandhi was suitably coy about his relationship with Rabindranath Tagore’s niece Sarala Devi — an affair that his grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, writes about in his 2007 book Mohandas. The relationship prompted C. Rajagopalachari to sternly tick Gandhi off in a letter. “Pray disengage yourself at once completely,” he wrote.

Delhi-based psychiatrist Sameer Parikh believes that despite changes in India — satellite television, for instance, thrives on celebrity lives — privacy is as important as ever. “Traditionally, we have been a shame-oriented society, where people have hated revealing personal details about themselves or disliked the image of their idols tarnished in the public domain,” he says.

Bringing down heroes is not something that the West baulks at — which explains why biographies and memoirs there are often brutally honest. Patrick French’s recent book on V.S. Naipaul described how Naipaul drove his wife to death, while his former friend, Paul Theroux, hinted that he was a woman-hating miser in Sir Vidia’s Shadow in 1998.

Indians are wary of criticising openly — and of libel. Author Khushwant Singh bore the brunt of his words in his 1995 autobiography Truth, Love and a Little Malice. Maneka Gandhi, who thought a chapter portrayed her family in poor light, obtained a legal stay, which delayed its publication by six years.

Khushwant Singh, who says he “paid the price for his candour”, has, however, been open about his own relationships, and about his wife’s extra-marital affair. “An autobiography must be truthful and unforgiving of people’s feelings, including those of the author himself,” he says.

Till then, let’s stick to fiction.

What Advani didn’t say

Who asked him to step down as the president of the BJP in 2005?

How deep was the RSS intervention in governance?

What was the role played by his former protégés in the post-Jinnah oust-Advani campaign?

Did he know that Jaswant Singh was going to Kandahar to release jailed terrorists in 1999?

Did the RSS want to sideline Atal Behari Vajpayee from active politics when it asked him to move to Rashtrapati Bhawan?

How true were speculations about two camps in the BJP, one supporting Vajpayee, and the other backing Advani?

What did Advani feel about Pramod Mahajan abandoning him?