Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

On January 26 Jawaharlal was released by the British to go to his father’s deathbed. Early on February 6, after a restless and tormented night, the end came. In the son’s words: “his face grew calm and the sense of struggle vanished from it.” Motilal’s last words on earth were to Mahatma Gandhi, in praise of the Garhwalis, the Hindu troops who had refused to fire on the Muslim Khudai Khidmatgar protestors in Peshawar the previous year. It was entirely appropriate that his last living thought should have been for Hindu-Muslim unity in India. The old Khilafat campaigner Muhammad Ali had once declared that the only Hindus trusted by all Muslims were Gandhi and the two Nehrus. Now there was only one Nehru left; Jawaharlal would have to shoulder Motilal’s share of the anticommunal burden.

Motilal’s influence on his son, and by extension on the fortunes of India, cannot be underestimated. (Motilal’s love of India, Mahatma Gandhi once said, was derived from his love of Jawaharlal, and not the other way around.) It was Motilal’s liberal and rationalist temperament that gave Jawaharlal his scientific inclinations and his agnosticism; the Motilal who defied Hindu orthodoxy by traveling abroad was the progenitor of the Jawaharlal who had little time for the priesthood or the self-appointed guardians of any faith. Motilal’s abhorrence of bigotry, his contempt for the Hindu communalists who mirrored the Muslim League with their sectarian Hindu Mahasabha, found echoes in his son. Jawaharlal was ideologically the more radical — Motilal would never have called himself a socialist — but he imbibed from his father’s sturdy moderation a capacity for compromise that enabled him repeatedly to find common ground with his party’s old guard. Above all it was Motilal’s unshakable faith in his son’s greatness that gave Jawaharlal the aura of self-confidence that marks so many of the major figures of history. His father saw a man of destiny in Jawaharlal well before anyone else could spot any but the most modest qualities in his son. Motilal’s formidable will, and his hands-on mentoring, had helped bring Jawaharlal to this point. Now he was on his own.

In turn Jawaharlal sought to instill in his only child something comparable to what Motilal had done for his only son. He had written sporadically to the young Indira since she was five, but during his imprisonment in 1930 he consciously sought to make up for his absence as a father by educating her through his letters. Jawaharlal’s wide and eclectic reading, his notes, and his own remarkable mind had to compensate for the lack of a shelf of reference books, as he embarked on a series of letters intended to outline for Indira his vision of the history of humankind. Raleigh and Condorcet had written comparable works during their incarcerations, but there was no Indian precedent for this extraordinary endeavor. Starting with the roots of ancient Indian civilization in Mohenjodaro, taking in ancient Greece and Rome, and traveling through China and the Arab world before coming to the triumph of European imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the letters are a remarkable testament to Jawaharlal Nehru’s intellect and his sense of humanity. Written over three years in jail without research assistance of any kind and published in one volume under the title Glimpses of World History, the letters transcended their stated purpose to stand for something rarely seen in the political world — the revelation of the insights into human history that inspired the worldview of an uncommon statesman.

The letters were too much for the poorly educated Indira; she read them sporadically if at all, and it soon became clear that they were meant for a larger audience than the daughter to whom they were addressed. On New Year’s Day 1931 her mother was arrested for leading a women’s demonstration; typically the news of Kamala’s arrest (and especially of her defiant statement as she was carted off to jail, saying, “I am happy beyond measure and proud to follow in the footsteps of my husband”) delighted Jawaharlal, who completely overlooked the fact that it would leave a thirteen-year-old at home without either parent at a time when the larger family was consumed with the condition of her dying grandfather. Motilal’s letters to his son were full of practical advice, paternal love and pride, friendly reassurance (and some political observations); Jawaharlal’s cerebral ones to his daughter were completely removed from the quotidian concerns of her lonely life. If Motilal left his stamp on Jawaharlal by being a fully engaged and even overdirective father, Jawaharlal’s influence on Indira would be marked by his disengagement from her needs.

While Motilal lay dying, however, the British sought compromise. They had convened a Round Table Conference while the Congress leaders were in jail and realized it was an exercise in futility; for a second round to succeed in bringing peace to the country, they had to treat with Gandhi and his followers. The Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald released the prisoners (as it happened, on January 26) and suggested the terms of a compromise leading to fundamental constitutional reforms. Jawaharlal was deeply suspicious about the offer (“the British Government are past masters in the art of political chicanery and fraud, and we are babes at their game”) and urged its rejection. He did not accept the notion that Labourites were more sympathetic to India: “Almost every Englishman, however advanced he may be politically, is a bit of an imperialist in matters relating to India.” But, shell-shocked by his father’s painful descent into death, he proved unable to rally the other party leaders or to persuade the Mahatma to see it his way. Negotiations with the viceroy were entrusted to Gandhi (who, on being told that Lord Irwin always prayed to God before making any major decision, once remarked, “what a pity God gives him such bad advice”). In London, the bombastic imperialist Winston Churchill growled his dismay at the “nauseating” sight of “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer … striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace … to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.” (Churchill rather undermined his impact by describing the Mahatma in the same statement as a “fakir of a type well known in the East.” On Indian subjects his racism usually got the better of his judgment: a fakir is a religious Muslim mendicant and the Gandhian “type” was hardly well known except for the Mahatma himself.)

But this time the reactionaries in London would not be allowed by the British government to scuttle compromise in New Delhi. In talks that riveted the national and world press, Gandhi met with the viceroy between February 17 and March 4 and, after eight sessions adding up to over twenty-four hours of intense give-and-take, signed an agreement that would become known to history as the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. Under the pact, to Jawaharlal’s dismay, the Mahatma agreed to take part in a second Round Table Conference in London in exchange for the release of political prisoners and for permission to picket and protest nonviolently. Jawaharlal thought these terms were humiliating and — still mourning the loss of his father — hurtfully told Gandhi that had Motilal been alive he would have negotiated a better deal. But the die was cast. The Mahatma threatened to retire from politics if his agreement was repudiated by the Congress.

As so often happened, Jawaharlal gave in and actually proposed the resolution at the Karachi Congress in March 1931 ratifying Gandhi’s terms. He made no secret of his objections but, unlike in 1929, did not even offer to resign, urging all Congressmen to put aside their differences and follow the directions of the party’s Working Committee. The British had feared he might split the party and lead a radical group into continued civil disobedience, but (as when they thought he was a Communist) they had failed to understand Motilal Nehru’s son. “We cannot afford to get excited in politics,” Jawaharlal advised a young party worker in 1931. “We must preserve our balance and not rush into any action without proper consideration…. [We must not] lose the benefit of collective action and of [a united] organization.”