Nehru (25 page)

And yet Jawaharlal was often described by his critics as the last Englishman left in India; the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge called him the last viceroy. By Nehru's own admission as a young man, “I had imbibed most of the prejudices of Harrow and Cambridge and in my likes and dislikes I was perhaps more an Englishman than an Indian… . And so I returned to India as much prejudiced in favor of England and the English as it was possible for an Indian to be.” The writer Nirad Chaudhuri declared that Nehru was “completely out of touch with the Indian life even of his time, except with the life of the self-segregating Anglicized set of upper India.” Chaudhuri described Jawaharlal as a snob, contemptuous of those who spoke English with an Indian accent, with no understanding of contemporary Hinduism. Such criticisms are not entirely illegitimate (though at least one admirer, the Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg, declared that for Nehru “Shakespeare did not overshadow Kalidasa, and he conversed with a Punjabi peasant as naturally as with a Cambridge professor”). But they were often sparked by animus. Those who resented Jawaharlal's near-total identification with his country challenged the authenticity of his claims to embody India. N. B. Khare, the president of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1950, described Jawaharlal Nehru as “English by education, Muslim by culture and Hindu by accident.” He meant it as an insult, but in fact it was a tribute — to the eclecticism that had made Jawaharlal the finest product of the syncretic traditions to which a twentieth-century Indian was heir. Eh-renburg called Nehru “a man of great and universal culture. His interests have lain in Marxism and in the origins of religions, in Freudianism and in ethics, in the sculpture of Ellora and Elephanta, in the poetry of the English Romantics. He has discussed human discontent with Romain Rolland, revolutionary romanticism with Ernest Toller, and the destinies of Buddhism with André Malraux.”

From these varied sources of inspiration emerged Nehru's most important contribution to Indian democracy — the very notion of Indianness. It is worth remembering that, amid the popular ferment that made an Italian nation out of a mosaic of principalities and statelets, the Italian nationalist Massimo Taparelli d'Azeglio had memorably written, “We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians.” Nehru never succumbed to the temptation to express a similar thought, because he believed in the existence of India and Indians for millennia before he gave words to their longings. He would never have spoken of “creating” India or Indians, merely of being the agent for the reassertion of what had always existed but had been long suppressed. Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time, that divided Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time, that asked the Keralite peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri pandit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time. Nehru would not have written of the challenge of “creating” Indians, but creating Indians was what, in fact, the nationalist movement did. And Nehru it was, above all else, who welded that India into a plausible nation — the man who, through his writings, his speeches, his life, and his leadership, can be credited with the invention of the India we know today.

Jawaharlal always saw India as more than the sum of its contradictions. It is a country held together, he wrote in
The Discovery of India,
“by strong but invisible threads… . She is a myth and an idea” (he always feminized India), “a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive.” Who better than Nehru to incarnate this India, this idea, this present reality? Nehru articulated a vision of India as pluralism vindicated by history:

India … was like an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously… . Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, every-where there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages…. [India] was a world in itself, a culture and a civilization which gave shape to all things. Foreign influences poured in … and were absorbed. Disruptive tendencies gave rise immediately to an attempt to find a synthesis. Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization. That unity was not conceived as something imposed from outside, a standardization of externals or even of beliefs. It was something deeper and, within its fold, the widest tolerance of belief and custom was practiced and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged.

This was a vision of India that resolved the national argument about identity by simply bypassing it. Nehru argued that the unity of India was apparent from the outside: every Indian, whatever his differences from other Indians, was seen by foreigners as an Indian first, rather than as a Christian or Muslim, even though he might share his religion with those foreigners. For Nehru, the “Indian people” had a timeless quality, emerging from history and stretching on into the future. Not surprisingly, it was Nehru who insisted that the name India be retained in the Constitution, in the face of attempts by Prasad and others to rename the country Bharat, a piece of Hindu atavism that Jawaharlal accommodated by allowing both versions to be used. For he was above all a unifying figure for the newly independent country. In a 1953 article Nirad Chaudhuri considered Nehru “the indispensable link between the governing middle-classes and the sovereign people” of India, as well as “the bond between India and the world” … “India's representative to the great Western democracies, and I must add, their representative to India… . [W]hen Nehru takes an anti-Western or neutral line[,] they feel they are being let down by one of themselves.”

The “link,” the “bridge,” the embodiment of India, the man forever trying to accommodate and reconcile the country's various and disparate tendencies, even the notion of him as a turncoat to the West — these very terms point to the contradictions between conviction and compromise that marked Jawaharlal Nehru's life. His books reveal a Western intellect articulating an Indian heritage in the voice of the Enlightenment. (In this regard he made possible India's ability to compete in the globalized world of the twenty-first century, by infusing “Westernization” into Indianness institutionally, temperamentally, and philosophically.) Nehru defined Indian nationhood through the power of his ideas, in many ways like Thomas Jefferson in the United States, a figure to whom he bears considerable resemblance — a man of great intellect and sweeping vision, a wielder of words without parallel, high-minded and eloquent, yet in many ways blind to his own faults and those of others around him.

Syed Mahmud, who had known Jawaharlal since 1912, wrote in 1959 that Nehru “is essentially a man of the future. In his anxiety to build the future of his country in the shortest possible time, he sometimes lamentably ignores the present.” Three decades later, in my own
The Great Indian Novel,
I portrayed Jawaharlal Nehru as the blind visionary Dhritarashtra, unable to see the realities around him while he fixed his gaze on distant ideals. Such a conceit was the privilege of a satirist, but as with all satire there was a kernel of truth in the portrait. And yet that faith in the future that animated Nehru's vision of India seems so much more valuable than the atavistic assertion of pride in the past that stirs pettier nationalists.

Until late into adulthood Jawaharlal felt keenly the need for, and depended upon, a strong father figure: first Motilal, then the Mahatma, both strong-willed individuals in relation to whom he shaped his own beliefs, and whose self-confident judgment guided, confirmed, or altered his own. (Even Patel briefly played this role between 1947 and 1950.) The gap between rhetoric and action, between conviction and execution, was particularly apparent in his relations with Mahatma Gandhi, with whom he frequently expressed disagreement but could never bring himself to make a definitive break. The profound certitude that there was always someone older and stronger to set him right if he strayed might help explain his lifelong tendency to affirm principles disconnected from practical consequences. During the freedom struggle, this was manifest in his frequent courting of arrest and enduring prison terms without any concrete effect on the British, his advocacy of the disastrous resignation of the Congress ministries in 1939, his leadership of the futile (and in the end counterproductive) Quit India movement in 1942; as prime minister, it lay in much that he said, on issues ranging from socialism to world peace, which had little relation to the real experience of the Indians in whose name he spoke. Indeed, the gap between the ideals he articulated and their achievement became one of the tragedies of Nehru's life, because the more people took him at his word, the more disillusioned they became — as with the Socialists, who broke with him precisely because they shared what he declared to be his beliefs but rejected what they saw were his actions.

But it would be wrong to see this talent for compromise in purely negative terms. Jawaharlal saw the task of nation-building as requiring inclusiveness and consensus; the hotheaded radicalism of his youth, when he was critical of Gokhale and later of Gandhi, gave way over time to a profound respect for consensus over conflict, idealism over ideology, and democracy over dictatorship. He told André Malraux that his greatest challenge was “creating a just state by just means.” The equation of means and ends was fundamentally Gandhian, even if in other respects Nehru might have disavowed the label. His critics on both the left and the right saw his moderation as temporizing; the left attacked him for selling out to capitalism, the right for appeasing Indian Muslims and Pakistan. Ambedkar accused him of reducing the Congress Party to a dharamsala, or rest home, devoid of principle or policy, “open to all, fools and knaves, friends and foes, communists and secularists, reformers and orthodox and capitalists and anti-capitalists.”

But this was what Jawaharlal believed Indian democracy required. “India,” he told Malraux, “must struggle against herself.” The statesman who epitomized the marriage of British political education, Muslim aesthetic refinement, and Hindu civilizational tolerance helped establish and affirm a democracy that has proved both freewheeling and enduring. Yet it now appears that one of the early strengths of Nehruvian India — the survival of the nationalist movement as a political party, the Congress Party serving as an all-embracing, all-inclusive agglomeration of all the major political tendencies in the country — turned out, with hindsight, to have under-mined the evolution of a genuine multiparty system. Had the nationalist movement given birth to, say, three major parties — one right of center, one social democrat, one communist — a culture of principle might have evolved in India's political contention. Instead the survival of the eclectic Congress for decades as India's dominant party (a survival ensured by Nehru's talent for accommodation) stifled this process, and opposition to it (with a few honorable exceptions, like the pro-free-enterprise Swatantra Party between 1959 and 1974) emerged largely in the form of the assertion of identities to which the Congress was deemed not to have given full expression. Nehru sought to promote a politics based on the management of secular relationships, but not long after his death, politicians began to organize themselves, and even to create parties, around primordial identities, including the very elements Nehru abhorred, particularly caste, ethnicity, and religion.

The result is that instead of parties distinguished by political principle, Indian politics too often offers the spectacle of a choice between different group identities. And democratic politics is not always able to contain the country's undemocratic passions. Early in the twenty-first century India witnessed, in the state of Gujarat, a politicized form of sectarian bloodletting that took over a thousand (mainly Muslim) lives in scenes reminiscent of the partition killings. This occurred with a democratically elected government in office. This was not the freedom Nehru had fought for. Jawaharlal had written, in
The Discovery of India,
that India offered “the terrifying glimpses of dark corridors which seem to lead back to primeval night,” though he had added, with typical optimism, “but also there is the fullness and warmth of the day about her.” Nehru built India's political institutions with conviction and principle, but many of India's politicians increasingly reflect the qualities required to acquire power by the assertion of communal difference rather than the skills to wield it for the common good. Across the country, the democratic process has attracted figures who can win elections but who have barely a nodding acquaintance with ethics or principles, and are untroubled by the need for either.

So there is no denying the disillusionment with aspects of Indian democracy that afflicts middle-class India; many who ought to know better lapse disturbingly into a wistful longing for benign authoritarianism. Jawaharlal's daughter, Indira, suspended the country's democratic freedoms during a twenty-two-month “state of emergency” from 1975 to 1977, imprisoning her opponents, suspending civil rights, and censoring the press. It is a measure of the values she imbibed at her father's knee that she then called a free and fair election and lost it comprehensively.

The disconnect between father and daughter during Indira's formative years had a lasting impact. Indira spent the last fourteen years of her father's life by his side, in his home, serving as his official hostess and political colleague; but she failed to become his true political heir. She had none of his intellectual gifts and few of his ideals. From his years of suffering and resistance, and even from the inspiring correspondence he addressed to her, she learned little, except for a heightened sense of her family's sacrifices, intensified by the insecurities that haunted her lonely childhood. Instead, Indira's education would always be empirical. Her proximity to Jawaharlal came when he was in office, the unquestioned leader of India and of the Third World. From this experience she imbibed a taste for power and its acquisition, with little of the sense of the larger good for which it could be used. Jawaharlal, ever the democrat, did little to prepare his daughter for high office; when this was thrust upon her, two years after his death, by Congress Party bosses hoping to capitalize on her name and pedigree, she seized the mantle of Nehruvianism but never understood its spirit. That the Jawaharlal who had warned of the temptations of dictatorship should produce a daughter who would, albeit briefly and unsuccessfully, suspend India's democracy, remains one of the great ironies of his legacy.