Important political leaders are not supposed to have private lives. Or even if they have, it is not a subject that biographers should pry into and write about. One of Napoleon Buonaparte's female admirers once remarked, referring to her idol, that genius has no sex. That luminous, if absurd, epigram just about sums up attitudes some Indians have towards their political icons. The reported response of the Congress party and of Ms Sonia Gandhi to the recent biography of Indira Gandhi by Ms Katherine Frank is a reminder that such attitudes endure. Reports suggest that Ms Gandhi has taken 'strong exception' to the book and is even contemplating legal action. She is upset because she feels that the biography besmirches the memory of her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi. The objections are difficult to comprehend. It is not by any reckoning the duty of a biographer to uphold the memory of his subject. His job is to recreate the personality of his subject and through that to illuminate the work and times of the man or woman about whom he is writing. There is space for sympathy in a biography, but none for hagiography, a different genre altogether. In India, the two genres of biography and hagiography are always mixed up. It is significant that the sections which have hurt Ms Gandhi all relate to her mother-in-law's or her father-in-law's personal life. The biography does not hide the fact that Feroze Gandhi was a rampant womanizer. And this hurt Indira Gandhi and embarrassed Jawaharlal Nehru. It looks at the rumour about Feroze Gandhi having an affair with Kamala Nehru before he married Indira. But the author dismisses the rumours because she feels such an affair 'was inconceivable given Kamala's poor health, her values and the complete lack of privacy in Anand Bhawan'. But she takes away the strength of the last point by admitting that the two of them often travelled together. The matter remains ambiguous. She follows in some detail the story of Indira Gandhi's liaison with M.O. Mathai, Nehru's secretary. Persons close to Indira Gandhi, like Mr B.K. Nehru and Mr S. Gopal, confirmed that Mathai's version of the relationship contained more fact than fiction. What is surprising is that other kinds of allegation, like Indira Gandhi's knowledge that Sanjay Gandhi had amassed a fortune during the Emergency or her involvement in the assassination of L.N. Mishra, do not disturb Ms Gandhi and her party. Only extramarital sex, it seems, is objectionable and capable of besmirching someone's memory. Such a reaction is by no means unique to the Nehru-Gandhi family and its retainers. Many Bengalis have the same kind of attitude towards local icons, Rabindranath Tagore and Subhas Chandra Bose. When Ananda Bazar Patrika printed translations of Bose's love letters to his wife, Bose's supporters burnt copies of the paper. Any mention of Tagore's relationship with Victoria Ocampo brings forth looks of disapproval in polite Bengali circles. The same strain of hero worship is visible in the way Indians look at biographies. Biographies should be worshipful and they should gloss over scandals, affairs and such like. This is completely contrary to the way the art of biography has developed in the West. Biographers have had no hesitation in writing about John Maynard Keynes's homosexuality, about Karl Marx's illegitimate son by his housekeeper, about Bertrand Russell's love affair with Ottoline Morell and so on. In India, such frankness has been rare. Nirmal Bose, in his memoirs, wrote about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's experiments with sex and Mr Gopal, with breathtaking honesty, described how his father S. Radhakrishnan was a philanderer. These are the exceptions that come readily to mind. Biographies in India tend to suppress what is private and considered salacious. This is a sign of immaturity. India, as a nation, clings to and protects its heroes when in fact they need no such protection. History will not judge Indira Gandhi by her sex life. She will be remembered, perhaps not very fondly, for what she did to the country. By being unnecessarily touchy, Ms Gandhi may be infringing on more than a biographer's freedom.