Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Though writing (and eclectic reading, this time without restrictions) warded off some of the tedium of jail, Jawaharlal spent a great deal of his solitude mourning his father. On one occasion he was reading a newspaper article about the unveiling of a bust of Motilal when he suddenly found his eyes full of tears. He had always known how much he was reliant on that strong, protective, and overindulgent paternal force in his life, and he was now suffused with the extent of his loss. The Mahatma was, of course, the closest substitute. When Gandhi undertook a fast-unto-death in September 1932 in protest against a British decision to treat the “Untouchables” as a separate community outside the Hindu fold, Jawaharlal feared he would lose a second father figure. (Gandhi, who had been seeking to reform the discriminatory practices within Hinduism in order to ensure the Untouchables — whom he called Harijans, or “Children of God” — full acceptance within Hindu society, saw the British decision as a further scheme to divide Indians against each other.) That crisis passed, but in 1933 Gandhi undertook another potentially fatal fast and an anxious Jawaharlal cabled him: “I feel lost in a strange country where you are [the] only familiar land-mark and I try to gropeexile in London and made him “permanent my way in [the] dark but I stumble.” Yet politically the two diverged more and more; Jawaharlal’s prison diaries reveal his increasing conviction that Gandhi was too willing to compromise with reactionary social, political, and religious forces which were anathema to the radical Nehru. The Mahatma derived his ethic from God; the author of Glimpses of World History derived his from Man, or at least from his study of mankind. He found Gandhi’s “frequent references to God … most irritating.”

On August 12, 1933, with his mother seriously ill and his sentence having less than two weeks to run, the British released Jawaharlal. Perhaps they expected him to break decisively with Gandhi and split the Congress Party. Indeed, Jawaharlal traveled to Poona to meet the Mahatma in a somewhat rebellious mood. But once again the two men found common ground; his great need for the paternal figure of Gandhi, his admiration for the Mahatma’s common touch with ordinary Indians (which he, as an aristocratic intellectual, felt he could never match), and his conviction that party unity was indispensable for an effective freedom struggle, prompted Jawaharlal to articulate his views in terms that the Mahatma could live with. Gandhi declared the differences between them to be merely those of temperament; he told an interviewer that Jawaharlal’s “communist views … need not frighten anyone.” Some of Nehru’s radical followers in the Congress were disappointed at this seeming gulf between analysis and action, but it was wholly characteristic of Jawaharlal. Rather than attacking the Congress leadership, he turned his anger against the forces of Hindu bigotry which had begun to organize themselves under the Hindu Mahasabha. (In an approach that would lead to him being forever accused of double standards, he was less harsh on Muslim communalism, seeing this as to some degree excusable in a minority afraid for its future.)

Nonetheless his new pact with Gandhi made him a dangerous figure in British eyes. The authorities feared the pair would shortly revive the dormant civil disobedience movement, this time with a communistic tinge. The government sent secret instructions around the country that Jawaharlal was to be closely watched, and arrested at the slightest provocation. Various speeches were examined as suitable candidates for prosecution, before a stinging denunciation of imperialism in Calcutta in January 1934 gave the Bengal government the excuse to arrest and try him. In February he was sentenced to another two years in His Majesty’s prisons.

After three months with no books other than a German grammar, no companion other than a clerk jailed for embezzlement, and severe restrictions on his writing, Jawaharlal was transferred from Calcutta to a prison in the U.P. hills, in Dehra Dun. In April a disillusioned Mahatma Gandhi suspended civil disobedience altogether, to Jawaharlal’s great disappointment. Yet again, Jawaharlal confided to his diary that the time had come for a parting of the ways with his mentor. “I felt with a stab of pain that the cords of allegiance that had bound me to him for many years had snapped.” He said as much in an emotional letter to Gandhi, which the Mahatma chose to regard merely as the letting off of steam rather than the sign of a definitive break. Gandhi was wise: Jawaharlal had no taste for patricide. Briefly released from prison on compassionate grounds — Kamala’s health was worsening by the day — he disassociated himself from public criticism of the Congress leaders, to the dismay of his leftist followers, who had constituted themselves into a Congress Socialist Party and were looking to him for leadership. Jawaharlal kept his disagreements with Gandhi to himself; in any case the British authorities, fearing what he might do if he were left at large, put him back into prison the moment Kamala’s health showed a slight improvement. He had been free for just eleven days.

In June 1934, as much to take his mind off his wife’s deteriorating condition as anything, Jawaharlal Nehru began to write his autobiography, an elegant and fascinating portrait of his life and of his own mind. The 976-page manuscript was completed in nine months. When it was published in 1936, it bore the simple dedication “To Kamala, who is no more.” The brave and long-suffering Mrs. Jawaharlal Nehru, barely older than the century, had succumbed to tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Lausanne on February 28, 1936. Despite (or perhaps because of) the long periods of neglect of the relationship, Jawaharlal was devastated. He had sent her to Europe the previous May in the hope that she would improve, but in September her doctors had cabled him that she was in critical condition, and the British suspended his sentence to enable him to be at her side. He joined her at a clinic in Badenweiler in Nazi Germany (where he made it a point to make his purchases from Jewish shopkeepers), then moved her to Lausanne, but it was all in vain.

Kamala’s had been a deeply unhappy life, marked by a sense of social and intellectual inadequacy, afflicted by severe illness (her tuberculosis had been first diagnosed three years into her marriage, in 1919), punctuated by personal tragedy (the death of her infant son two days after his birth in 1925, a miscarriage in 1928), and undermined by her husband’s overwhelming preoccupation with nationalist politics, which left him little time or inclination to be an attentive husband. Jawaharlal’s prison diaries and correspondence in the 1920s hardly mention her, and even after they grew closer in the last few years of her life, it is clear their mental outlooks and personal values had little in common. But she was a loyal supporter of her husband’s politics, and believed passionately in such issues as the education of girls and the ending of Hindu-Muslim conflict. The marriage was its best in the last half-dozen years of her life. Jawaharlal and Kamala rediscovered their intimacy on holiday in Ceylon in 1931, and their affection grew to such an extent that, toward the end of her life, even British Intelligence concluded that Jawaharlal was a “devoted husband.” Jawaharlal ironically recalled seeing pictures of Kamala and himself being sold on the Indian sidewalks with the caption “Adarsh Jodi” (“Ideal Couple”). After her death Jawaharlal kept a photo of Kamala and a small urn of her ashes with him at all times, even in prison, and in his will he requested that her ashes be mingled with his own.

The book he dedicated to her, his Autobiography, was an astounding success in Britain and the West, and established Jawaharlal Nehru firmly in the world’s imagination as the leader of modern India. Mahatma Gandhi, with his baffling fasts and prayers and penchant for enemas, stood for the spirit of an older tradition that imperialism could not suppress, but Jawaharlal’s book spoke for the free India of the future. Though it was written entirely in a British prison, there is no rancor against the British, only against imperialism and exploitation. His rationality, his breadth of learning, his secular outlook, his moral indignation at the subjugation of his people, and the lucid fluency of his writing, attested to his own, and his country’s, place in the world of the twentieth century that was still taking shape.