Nehru (6 page)

Jawaharlal's daughter, Indira Priyadarshini, was born on November 19, 1917, but was receiving little attention from her increasingly politically active father. (Her admirably simple first name, though, was something Jawaharlal may well have insisted upon. He had never liked his own polysyllabic and traditional appellation, once writing to a friend: “for heaven's sake don't call your son Jawaharlal. Jawahar [
jewel
] by itself might pass, but the addition of ‘lal' [
precious
] makes it odious.”) Childbirth at eighteen left Kamala weak and ill, and her husband's neglect could not have improved matters for her. On one occasion Jawaharlal failed to decipher a prescription the Nehru family homeopath had written for his wife, and Motilal snapped: “There is nothing very complicated about Dr. Ray's letter if you will only read it carefully after divesting your mind of Khilafat and Satyagraha.” Jawaharlal was, typically, blissfully unconscious of the financial burdens his own father had to bear, cheerfully donating to the Congress cause the war bonds Motilal had put aside for his inheritance. Motilal finally closed the
Independent
in 1921, unable to sustain its continuing losses. Too proud to draw a salary for his political work, Motilal decided to resume his legal practice so that his family would be provided for. Jawaharlal, enthralled by Gandhian self-denial, cared little about such matters, provoking his father to declare bluntly: “You cannot have it both ways: Insist on my having no money and yet expect me to pay you money.”

But Jawaharlal was not merely feckless. He immersed himself with compassion in the cause of the landless peasantry of U.P., taking on the vice presidency of the Kisan Sabha (Farmers' Council) and lending his advocacy and his pen to their grievances. He began, too, to show some of the emotional identification with them that would forever characterize his relationship with the Indian masses. “I have had the privilege of working for them,” he wrote in 1921, “of mixing with them, of living in their mud huts and partaking in all reverence of their lowly fare. . . . I have come to believe that Nonviolence is ingrained in them and is part of their very nature.” Such feelings marked the beginning of the Harrovian and Cantabrigian Nehru's rediscovery of India, and of his own Indianness — a process (as the reference to Nonviolence underlined) that was intertwined with his admiration of Mahatma Gandhi. He “found the whole countryside afire with enthusiasm and full of a strange excitement. Enormous gatherings would take place at the briefest notice by word of mouth.” Roads would be built for him overnight to allow his car to pass; when his wheels got stuck in the soft mud, villagers would bodily lift his vehicle onto drier ground. “Looking at them and their misery and overflowing gratitude, I was filled with shame and sorrow, shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life and our petty politics of the city which ignored this vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty of India.”

Though the emotional intensity was genuine, the political opportunity was there to be seized. Jawaharlal sought to harness the peasants to the Congress's nationalist cause and helped organize Kisan Sabhas, or farmers' associations (though the U.P. Kisan Sabha itself split in early 1921 over the issue of noncooperation). His old shyness was now completely overcome; in its place arose the mounting oratorical confidence of an increasingly  surefooted politician. After one episode where a number of farmers were killed by unprovoked police firing, Jawaharlal calmed matters by persuading angry farmers to disperse rather than to resort to violence in their turn. The episode pointed both to his increasing capacity for leadership and discipline as well as his instinct for moderation; Jawaharlal the Congress organizer was not quite the firebrand that Jawaharlal the Congress polemicist had suggested he might be.

The peasantry of U.P., whose backbreaking work under wretched conditions was exploited both by Indian landlords (zamindars) and the British administration, were in many ways ripe for revolt, but Jawaharlal was no Bolshevik (the one threat some of the British expected and feared). He preached unity between kisans and zamindars, rejected calls by peasant agitators for nonpayment of rents, and constantly extolled Mahatma Gandhi's message of nonviolence and self-reliance. He romanticized the Indian farmer as a sort of local equivalent of the sturdy and honest English yeoman; but he saw India's peasant masses as a base of support for nationalist politics, not as fodder for agrarian revolution. Time after time he urged angry crowds to calm down, to call off protests, to acquiesce in an arrest rather than to resist it. Like Gandhi, he was mobilizing the masses for responsible ends. “Greatness,” Jawaharlal wrote to his father at the time of the Mussoorie Afghan episode, “is being thrust upon me.” The words may have been slightly ironic at the time, but they were to prove prophetic.

 

1
The Press Act of 1910 was a key instrument of British control of Indian public opinion. Under its provisions an established press or newspaper had to provide a security deposit of up to five thousand rupees (a considerable sum in those days); a new publication would have to pay up to two thousand. If the newspaper printed something of which the government disapproved, the money could be forfeit, the press closed down, and its proprietors and editors prosecuted. Annie Besant had refused to pay a security on a paper she published advocating home rule, and was arrested for failing to do so and thereby violating the Act.

2
The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, named for the secretary of state for India and the viceroy, constituted the Government of India Act passed after the First World War to “reward” India for its support of the British in that conflict. Whereas Indians had expected Dominion status analogous to the arrangements prevailing in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa — or at the very least significant progress toward self-government — they received instead a system of “dyarchy” which associated Indians with some institutions of government but left power solidly in the viceroy's hands.

3
The Rowlatt Act, perhaps the most oppressive piece of legislation passed by the British government in India, established summary procedures for dealing with political agitation, including punishments by whipping, imprisonment, fines, forfeiture of property, and death. It also sharply limited the rights of defendants in sedition trials, thus antagonizing British-trained lawyers as well as fervent Indian nationalists.

4
The acronym “U.P.” so entered the Indian consciousness that after independence the government renamed the state Uttar Pradesh (Northern Province) in order to retain the initials.

3

“To Suffer for the Dear Country”:
1921–1928

I
n 1920, Gandhi declared that India would have
swaraj
(self-government) within a year, a promise Jawaharlal Nehru described as “delightfully vague.” Less vague was the slogan that drove Gandhi's followers in the civil disobedience movement of 1921: “Go to the villages!” Jawaharlal found himself traveling to impassioned meetings in rural areas (by car, train, and horse-drawn carriage, and once on an improvised trolley sent wheeling down the railway track after he had missed his train), calling for freedom for India, the restoration of the Khilafat in Turkey, and economic self-reliance (to be achieved through boycotting foreign goods, spinning khadi at home and consigning English suits to the bonfire). Nonviolence, Hindu-Muslim unity, harmony between tenants and landlords, and the abolition of untouchability were the pillars of the movement on which Gandhi had launched the nation. “Noncooperation” with the British was the slogan, but like so many other Indian political negatives, from nonviolence to nonalignment, it was imbued with a positive content transcending that which it sought to negate.

Jawaharlal Nehru, no longer the diffident political neophyte, plunged himself into the campaign with great zeal. He revealed, or at any rate developed, a talent for both oratory and organization: when on one occasion a government order was served on him prohibiting him from addressing a meeting, he marched four and a half miles with the entire assemblage to the next district and resumed his speech there. He formed and drilled volunteer squads, inspiring them to paralyze life in various U.P. towns through “hartals,” or work stoppages, in the name of noncooperation with the colonial authorities. The mounting momentum behind these efforts caused alarm among British officialdom, already tense about the impending visit to India of the Prince of Wales. On December 6, 1921, both Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru were arrested, each for the first time in his life.

Jawaharlal had spent part of the morning at the district court attending the trial of fellow Congressman K. D. Malaviya. “The poor judge [was] in a bad way,” he wrote in his diary. “He appeared to be the convict and the prisoners the judges.” When father and son were taken away by the police, Motilal issued a message to his compatriots: “Having served you to the best of my ability, it is now my high privilege to serve the motherland by going to jail with my only son.” Jawaharlal was taken to Lucknow for detention and trial, principally for his leadership of the volunteers, whose organization had been declared illegal. He was sentenced (under the wrong section of the penal code, as it later turned out) to six months in prison and a fine of a hundred rupees or a further month of imprisonment. Motilal, after a farcical trial in which an illiterate witness “verified” his signature on a seditious document while holding it upside down, was sentenced to six months' imprisonment and a fivehundred-rupee fine. (His refusal to pay the fine resulted in the seizure of property from his home worth several times that amount.) Both father and son, in their separate jail cells, declined the special privileges offered to them in view of their social standing. Jawaharlal relished his status as a prisoner of the Raj. A fellow Congress worker noted that “the smiling and happy countenance of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru stood out in relief amongst the persons in the lock-up.”

It was not to last. The increasing violence of the noncooperation movement, and in particular the murder of two dozen policemen by a nationalist mob in the small U.P. town of Chauri Chaura on February 5, 1922, led Mahatma Gandhi to call off the agitation, fearing that his followers were not yet ready for the nonviolent attainment of freedom. Thanks to a technical error in his sentencing, Jawaharlal was released in March 1922, with only half his sentence served. He was bitterly disappointed with Gandhi's decision and its effect on his volunteers, who had made such headway in destabilizing British rule in U.P. But his faith in the Mahatma remained, and he wrote to his colleague Syed Mahmud: “You will be glad to learn that work is flourishing. We are laying sure foundations this time. … [T]here will be no relaxation, no lessening in our activities and above all there will be no false compromise with Government. We stand,” he added in a Gandhian touch, “for the truth.”

It is said that Motilal enjoyed such close relations with the British governor of U.P., Sir Harcourt Butler, that during his first imprisonment he received a daily half-bottle of champagne brought personally to the prison by the governor's aide-de-camp. With his father still in jail, Jawaharlal continued his efforts to promote disaffection with British rule, and for his pains he was arrested again on May 12, 1922. Refusing to defend himself, he issued an emotional and colorful statement: “India will be free; of that there is no doubt. … Jail has indeed become a heaven for us, a holy place of pilgrimage since our saintly and beloved leader was sentenced. … I marvel at my good fortune. To serve India in the battle of freedom is honor enough. To serve her under a leader like Mahatma Gandhi is doubly fortunate. But to suffer for the dear country! What greater good fortune could befall an Indian, unless it be death for the cause or the full realization of our glorious dream?”

The British may have dismissed such words as romanticized bombast, but they struck a chord among the public beyond the courtroom, giving the thirty-three-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru national celebrity as the hero of Indian youth. The trial court was his platform, but his real audience was young Indians everywhere. By the summer of 1922, Motilal, now released and traveling across the country, found his son's fame widespread, and his already considerable pride in Jawaharlal grew even further. “On reading your statement,” he wrote to his son, “I felt I was the proudest father in the world.” This time the younger Nehru drew a sentence of eighteen months' rigorous imprisonment, a fine of a hundred rupees, and a further three months in jail if he did not pay the fine. There were no judicial irregularities to mitigate his punishment.

Despite poor health, which required homeopathic medication in jail, and food that was “quite amazingly bad,” Jawaharlal welcomed his imprisonment. He seemed to see it as confirmation of his sacrifices for the nation, while writing to his father that no sympathy was needed for “we who laze and eat and sleep” while others “work and labor outside.” He used his time to read widely — the Koran, the Bible, and the Bhagavad Gita, a history of the Holy Roman Empire, Havell's
Aryan Rule in India
with its paeans to India's glorious past, and the memoirs of the Mughal emperor Babar and the French traveler Bernier. These works fed a romanticized sense of the Indian nationalist struggle as a version of the Italian Risorgimento; in one letter he even quoted Meredith's poem on the heroes of the latter, substituting the word “India” for “Italia.” This, as Gopal has observed, “was adolescent exaltation, yet to be channeled by hard thinking.” Jawaharlal was suffused with “the glow of virginal suffering, … in love with sacrifice and hardship. … He had made a cradle of emotional nationalism and rocked himself in it.” A British interviewer in late 1923 noted that Nehru had no “clear idea of how he proposed to win Swaraj or what he proposed to do with it when he had won it.”