Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

Nehru’s close friend Syed Mahmud was immediately struck, upon first meeting Jawaharlal, by his manners, which were those of “an upper-class English gentleman”; but his level of courtesy and consideration was extravagantly Indian. When Mahmud explained his reliance on a traveling servant by saying how much he hated folding and spreading his bedding on the bunk of the train, Jawaharlal took on the chore himself, and continued to make and unmake Mahmud’s bed whenever the two traveled together over a period of decades. The Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah told the story of how, on a winter visit to India, he was about to leave by train for the cold north when

Nehru unexpectedly arrived at the station looking rather extraordinary in an oversized overcoat. … “I know it is too big for me, but I think it should be just right for you. … Try it on.” I tried it on and it was, as he had said, just right. I put my hands proudly in the pockets and discovered fresh surprises. In one there was a warm wool scarf and in the other a pair of warm gloves.

This courtesy was not only for VIPs: discovering on a visit to Kashmir that his stenographer’s suitcase had been mislaid and that the poor man was shivering in a thin cotton shirt, the prime minister personally ensured that a sweater and jacket were provided to him. Jawaharlal never forgot a sibling’s birthday, even when in prison. He was also so good with children (who knew him as “Chacha,” or Uncle Nehru) that his birthday began to be celebrated across India, even while he was alive, as Children’s Day.

Yet the same Jawaharlal could also be imperious and short-tempered. He would often lash out publicly at some unfortunate official who was in no position to defend himself. The Ceylonese leader Solomon Bandaranaike described him as “a delicately nurtured aristocrat with high-strung nerves. … He often uses up his nervous energy and that makes him sometimes short-tempered and irritable.” Bandaranaike recounted with wry amusement lunching with Nehru as an admiring crowd gathered and Jawaharlal erupted, “I just cannot eat in public.” The crowd was dispersed and Bandaranaike mused, “There speaks the sensitive aristocrat.” Nehru was also capable of behaving in a manner so remote and brooding that he seemed to be thinking of anyone but his interlocutor, and (particularly in his later years) retreating into lengthy and impenetrable silences even when receiving visitors. He was not just moody; many felt a barrier existed between him and even those closest to him. He was often described as the loneliest man in India.

Despite (or perhaps because of) these paradoxical qualities, Jawaharlal enjoyed the attentions of several distinguished women, many of whom, at least if Stanley Wolpert’s speculations are to be believed, may have become his lovers. Through much of the 1950s Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal exchanged annual visits; the French author Catherine Clément has spun an elaborate romance out of these twice-yearly encounters (Edwina staying with him at Teen Murti, Jawaharlal with her at the Mountbatten estate in England, Broadlands). Others suggest that though the opportunity certainly existed, and the two exchanged intimate letters testifying to the intensity of their friendship, there is no proof the relationship was ever consummated. In 1960 Edwina died in Borneo with letters from Jawaharlal scattered about her bed. He was an ardent and prolific correspondent to a number of women: his letters to Padmaja Naidu, Sarojini’s daughter and herself a frequent overnight guest at his house, are perhaps among the most exquisite love letters ever written by an Indian public figure. But the speculation is largely irrelevant: Jawaharlal’s major aphrodisiac, as Talbot put it, was clearly politics.

Perhaps the most interesting description of Nehru at this time (when he had, so to speak, just crested the peak of his success but not yet begun to sense his own decline) comes from the account of another who combined the burdens of governmental office with the acuity of the writer-philosopher, the Frenchman André Malraux, who called on Jawaharlal in 1958. Nehru had “a Roman face with a slight heaviness about the lower lip which gave his apparently ‘posed’ smile the seductiveness which a suggestion of innocence imparts to a great man,” wrote Malraux. Nehru’s voice and bearing revealed “beneath the patrician intellectual the English gentleman’s ease and self-possession which he had doubtless learned to emulate in his youth. … His hand gestures, once so expansive, were now turned inward toward his body, the fingers almost closed. And … these chilly gestures … gave his authority a charm such as I have never since encountered.” Malraux noted delightfully that Nehru “meant what he said, like the few great statesmen I have met, and like most of the painters.”

Critics have painted an unedifying picture of a Jawaharlal increasingly out of touch with reality in his last years in office, prone to public expressions of self-doubt, drifting into decisions delayed by his own tendency to see both sides of every question, an intellectual dreamer who gave expression to ideas but not to their implementation. Though much of that is true, it paints a simplistic picture. There were both triumphs and setbacks in his life and work, many challenges successfully surmounted and one crushing defeat.

Domestic issues continued to press in upon him — a Naga tribal insurgency in the northeast, Master Tara Singh’s demands for a Sikh-majority state in the Punjab, anti-Hindi agitation in Madras (where the avowedly secessionist Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Party was gaining ground in its attacks on north Indian domination). Nehru dealt with these through a combination of shrewdness (postponing the proposed adoption of Hindi as the official national language until 1965), democracy (insisting that the Sikhs could flourish in free India without needing a Sikh-majority state, while backing a tough Sikh Congressman, Pratap Singh Kairon, as chief minister of Punjab), and repression (turning the army on the Nagas). All three came into play over Kashmir, where he explored every hope of a settlement, only to be thwarted each time. Just before his death he released Sheikh Abdullah from jail and sent him to Pakistan to negotiate a new accommodation. (It was at a press conference in Muzaffarabad that the Sheikh learned the news of Jawaharlal’s passing; he wept openly at the loss of his former comrade-in-arms, who had sadly become his jailer.)

Jawaharlal — the man who had in his younger days been known to leap off the stage and physically attack hecklers in his audience — became an Olympian presence at public meetings around the country. Nehru made magnificent speeches, usually without notes, but he was not a great orator. The British statesman Lord Pethick-Lawrence described Jawaharlal’s style as prime minister:

Unlike a European or American orator he does not commence on a bold or emphatic note or end with a carefully prepared rhetorical peroration. His voice begins quietly; almost imperceptibly, like a piece of Indian music, it rises to a height of passionate pleading and fades away at the end into silence. And his listeners are greatly moved alike by his sincerity and his restraint.

Sometimes they were not; even an admirer, the industrialist S. P. Jain, conceded that “occasionally his speeches are rambling, sometimes trite, sometimes reflective and unrelated to the immediate subject of the debate.” But “it is the personality of the man rather than his oratory that holds attention.” And through the strength of his personality Jawaharlal held the country together and nurtured its democracy. But his sense of mass public opinion became increasingly suspect: as one historian put it, “Nehru addressed the Indian masses as a democrat, but the Indian masses revered him as a demigod. … In his last years he had no means of feeling the pulse of the people he wanted to serve. The masses were either mute or would throw him their acclaim at crowded meetings.”