Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Nonetheless, Jawaharlal remained an outspoken advocate of the Allied cause, even threatening guerrilla warfare against the Japanese if they were to invade — an issue on which he earned a sharp rebuke from the Mahatma. His attempts to enlist American sympathy for the Indian case in the negotiations with the British, however, did not succeed; Roosevelt, who might have been able to temper the racist imperialism of Churchill, declined to intervene. Gandhi, increasingly exasperated by the British, argued that Jawaharlal’s proAllied position had won India no concessions. His public message to the Government was to “leave India to God or anarchy.” Jawaharlal, ever the Harrovian Anglophile, quoted Cromwell (in a conscious echo of the Harrovian Amery, who had used the same words just two years earlier in Parliament in calling for Neville Chamberlain’s resignation as prime minister): “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” On August 7, 1942 in Bombay, the All-India Congress Committee, at the Mahatma’s urging, adopted a resolution moved by Nehru, and seconded by Patel, calling upon Britain to — in a journalistic paraphrase that became more famous than the actual words of the resolution — “Quit India.” (Gandhi’s own preferred phrase was “Do or Die.”) Within thirty-six hours the Congress leaders were under arrest. Mahatma Gandhi was incarcerated in the Aga Khan’s palace in Poona; Jawaharlal Nehru and the rest in Ahmadnagar Fort.

Jawaharlal was always a curious combination of the idealist intellectual and the man of action. On the way to jail, an incident occurred that brought out the latter quality. At the station in Poona, when the train made an unscheduled stop, a crowd of people recognized Jawaharlal and ran toward his compartment. The police tried to prevent them approaching him by resorting to a lathi charge. Outraged at seeing unarmed civilians being beaten by police staves, Jawaharlal leapt out onto the platform through the narrow window of the train to remonstrate with the police. Though he was fifty-three, it took four policemen to restrain him and force him back onto the train — and the officer in charge apologized personally for the incident.

Some of that fury communicated itself to the populace at large. For all of the Mahatma’s devotion to nonviolence, his jailing, together with the rest of the Congress leadership, left the Quit India movement in the hands of the young and the hotheaded. An underground movement was born, which actively resorted to acts of sabotage. Ordinary people took improbable risks to hoist the national flag on government buildings. Young newsboys added sotto voce subversion to their sales cries: “ Times of India . Quit India. Times of India . Quit India.” In the weeks after the arrests, no day passed without reports of clashes between demonstrators and police. The British responded with ruthless repression, firing upon unarmed protestors, killing dozens every week, flogging offenders, and censoring (and closing down) nationalist newspapers. “Quit India” became the drumbeat of a national awakening, but all it did was to prolong the nation’s continued subjugation.

In this climate, there was to be no respite for Jawaharlal; this became his longest spell in prison, a total of 1,040 days, or more than 34 months, from August 9, 1942 to June 15, 1945. Initially cut off from all communication (even newspapers), the Congress leaders were gradually allowed a few limited privileges, but Jawaharlal rejected many of the humiliating conditions imposed upon him. “I do not fancy being treated like a wild beast in a cage with occasional rope allowed so that I can move a few feet if I behave myself,” he wrote to his sister Nan, imprisoned elsewhere. “… Where force prevents me from acting as I wish, I have to accept it, but I prefer to retain such freedom of mind and action as I possess.” His freedom was not much: Jawaharlal’s prison diary abounds in trivia, featuring the acquisition of new canvas shoes and the death of a cat inadvertently hit on the head by a cook. He read Proust, and learned Urdu poetry from Maulana Azad, for whom his friendship and respect deepened.

Nonetheless the prison experience was not without significance. Tempers frayed among the Congressmen; the strain of prolonged incarceration proved unbearable for many, and Jawaharlal’s close friend for thirty-five years, Syed Mahmud, obtained his release in 1944 by disowning the Congress resolution. Gandhi nearly died after a fast in 1943. And Jawaharlal finished The Discovery of India, which he had begun during his earlier stint in jail. Instead of the Marxian obsession with social and economic forces that characterized Glimpses of World History, Jawaharlal revealed an abiding fascination with the making of the Indian nation, its cultural and historical antecedents, and the continuity of the Indian heritage from the days of the Indus Valley Civilization to the privations of British rule. For all the weaknesses of the book — born from the circumstances of its composition, the lack of source material, and the absence of a skilled editor — it is a striking articulation of a view of Indian nationhood that transcended the petty pride of most nationalisms. To Nehru, India was a palimpsest on which many had written their contributions and none were to be disowned; the greatness of India lay in her diversity, the richness of her varied civilization, her willingness to absorb and accommodate disparate religions and ethnicities. It is a stirring evocation of the past as an instrument to explain the present and give hope for the future, and as such it is the primordial text in what was, ultimately, Jawaharlal Nehru’s invention of India.

But before “Quit India” and prison consumed him, a major development had occurred on the personal front. In March 1942, his daughter, Indira, now twenty-four, married the man who had been courting her for nearly seven years, her mother’s faithful admirer Feroze Gandhi.

If Kamala’s impact on Jawaharlal’s thought or action is difficult to discern, she was indirectly responsible for the turn her daughter’s life had taken. During her brief stint, between bouts of ill-health, as a Congress volunteer, Kamala went to address a college in Lucknow and fainted from the heat and exhaustion. The young student who rushed to her succor became a lifelong fan and soon followed her into active work for the Congress Party. His name was Feroze Gandhi.

Nehru’s sister Betty described Feroze as enamored of Kamala “in a romantic, Dante-and-Beatrice way, content if he could just be near her.” He dropped out of college to be at her side, and was in Lausanne at Kamala’s deathbed. His fidelity to her mother was certainly a crucial factor in Indira’s own attraction to the fair-skinned, stocky Parsi (a member of India’s tiny Zoroastrian minority, descended from Persian refugees who had fled Muslim persecution in the seventh century, and no relation of the Mahatma). In India the development of such a relationship would have had severe obstacles to overcome, but Feroze and Indira both decided to study in England and became intimate there, Indira finally accepting Feroze’s proposal of marriage on the steps of the SacréCoeur in Paris. When they returned to India they found the Nehru family, particularly Jawaharlal’s sisters, implacably opposed to their marriage plans (an impecunious Parsi without a college degree for the only heir of the future leader of free India? The prospect, Nan averred, was out of the question). But Jawaharlal could not bring himself to stand in the way of the happiness of his only child. Though he tried to delay her decision, and though hate mail arriving at his residence left him in no doubt of the views of the self-appointed guardians of Hindu purity, Jawaharlal acquiesced in her wishes. He issued a statement to the press in February 1942. Marriage, he declared, was a personal affair; “on whomsoever my daughter’s choice would have fallen, I would have accepted it or been false to the principles I have held.” But he was careful enough to cite the Mahatma’s blessing of the match, and to conduct the wedding according to Vedic Hindu rites.