Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

There are a couple of photographs of Jawaharlal Nehru at Harrow, aged about seventeen, one of him sulky in the khaki uniform of the Harrow School Cadet Corps, his cheek bisected by the chinstrap of a faintly absurd helmet, the other in more conventional pose (dark suit, left hand in pocket, boater in right, a somewhat abstracted gaze just avoiding the camera’s lens). Neither photo reveals the moustache he sometimes maintained out of deference to his hirsute father (who told his son bluntly that his clean-shaven face made him “look like a fool”). But they suggest a well-adjusted Harrovian, comfortable enough in himself, and to that extent the photographs do not mislead. Jawaharlal did well at school, impressing his teachers with his “industry and ability,” his willingness to prepare for his classes, and the quality of his “English subjects” (though his French and Latin were never quite up to the mark). Harrow confirmed what would become a lifelong faith in physical fitness; “Joe” Nehru played football and cricket (though neither particularly well), ran fairly seriously (he competed in the school’s half-mile and mile racing events and the cross-country steeplechase, which testifies to a level of fitness and stamina that his slight build does not suggest), and was often found ice-skating or performing calisthenics in the gymnasium. He also took an avid interest in the Officers’ Training Corps.

Harrow was an experience Nehru always cherished, though contemporaries interviewed by his preeminent biographer, Sarvepalli Gopal, largely remembered him as “average” and “undistinguished.” Nehru himself described his Harrovian experience as a happy one, which he had wept at having to leave behind. Not enough credit is given — not even by Gopal — to young Jawaharlal’s remarkable ability, after a cloistered upbringing in Allahabad, to adjust to a new country, a new climate, and the rigors of a new school, and to do well enough there so that, in prison three decades later, he would find solace in inserting pictures of Harrow into his diaries.

It was during Jawaharlal’s years at Harrow that Indian nationalist politics, hitherto a largely genteel affair, took a dramatic turn with the mass agitation against the British decision in 1905 to partition the province of Bengal. The Indian National Congress, which had been founded in 1885, four years before Jawaharlal’s birth, by a liberal Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume, was coming of age. The first Congress was attended by seventy-two Indian delegates. Three years later, Motilal had been one of fourteen hundred delegates at the Allahabad Congress of 1888, but had not remained directly active in the cause. Jawaharlal, though, took a keen interest in news of Indian political developments. Letters from his father, and clippings from Indian newspapers Motilal sent him, kept the adolescent apprised of the Swadeshi movement (which urged Indians to reject British goods and use only items of Indian manufacture), the division within the Indian National Congress between the “Extremists” and the “Moderates” (broadly, the agitationists, led by the lecturer, journalist, and historian Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and the constitutionalists, led by the teacher and social reformer Gopal Krishna Gokhale), and the eventual British capitulation on the issue of Bengal’s partition (which was, under popular pressure, duly reversed). Jawaharlal expressed admiration for the nationalism of Tilak and the Extremists, criticizing his father for being “immoderately moderate.” Years later he recognized that his father’s objections to the Extremists were based less on a dislike of their methods than on the Hindu nationalism they expressed, at odds with Motilal’s own secular cosmopolitanism.

The radical streak in Jawaharlal Nehru began to show from the moment of his arrival in England, when news of the Japanese naval triumph over Russia at Tsushima in 1905 thrilled him with the realization that a great European power could be defeated by an Asian nation. A later visit to Ireland also revealed to Jawaharlal the force of nationalist agitation, with the Sinn Fein movement and Irish calls for a boycott of British goods reinforcing his Extremist sympathies. He also read widely, developing a great admiration for the works of George Bernard Shaw, and finding in the books of some British writers of the period, notably William Morris and Meredith Townsend, persuasive arguments against both capitalism and imperialism that seemed to predict the inevitable decline of the British Raj in India. A school prize was Trevelyan’s biography of Garibaldi, which inspired in the young Nehru “visions of similar deeds in India.”

In October 1907 Jawaharlal Nehru entered Trinity College, Cambridge, having passed the entrance examinations somewhat earlier than either his father or his headmaster thought he should have attempted them. By all accounts his does not appear to have been a particularly active or distinguished undergraduate life. He studied chemistry, geology, and physics (later swapping physics for botany) and graduated with a mediocre second-class degree. Though in later years he was to be identified with the Fabian Socialism that had already begun to flourish in Cambridge intellectual circles, there is no evidence of his having had anything to do with the Fabian Society at the university. He joined various debating societies but almost never spoke; nor was he an exceptionally prominent member of the Indian Majlis, the Indian students’ group, which held its own public meetings and debates. To some degree this was a reflection of a shyness in public that he would have to work hard to overcome in later life. To an extent, though, it was also testimony to his upper-class distaste for the vulgar posturing of those Indian politicians, like the Extremist Bipin Pal, whom he did hear speak at Cambridge. Whatever the reasons, Jawaharlal Nehru, far from being a prominent Indian student figure, “showed at this time,” in the words of his sympathetic biographer Gopal, “no real signs of any sort of fire or distinction, and did not stand out among his generation.”

He was, however, untypically for Indians of his class, an active sportsman, playing tennis, riding proficiently, and coxing a boat at races on the Cam. There is no record of his being the man-about-town he liked to pretend he was, though he is said once to have danced with a waitress just to find out what she would talk to him about. While still at Cambridge Jawaharlal joined the Inner Temple to prepare for admission to the bar, more in fulfillment of Motilal’s aspirations for him than out of any great passion for the law. This entailed a move to London and studies at the London School of Economics, where it is assumed he imbibed something of the socialism that came to define his view of the world. Again, there is less evidence of an intellectual engagement with Fabianism than of his spending much of his time on more leisurely pursuits, in particular attending a number of classical music concerts. “My general attitude to life at the time,” he later wrote, “was a vague kind of Cyrenaicism. … It is easy and gratifying to give a long Greek name to the desire for a soft life and pleasant experiences.” Jawaharlal ran up a few debts along the way, once pawning his gold watch and chain, and had to seek supplementary funds from Motilal. (He could be quite manipulative in his demands, at one stage threatening to return home without finishing his studies if funds were not wired to him.) His lack of enthusiasm for his father’s profession was manifest in his barely passing the bar examinations, but pass them he did, qualifying to practice law in 1912.

About to return home for good at twenty-two, Jawaharlal Nehru had completed an unremarkable first phase of his life, the only period which would not be marked by any accomplishment worthy of the name. And yet it is striking how the correspondence between father and son reveals Motilal’s faith in his son’s destiny. Motilal, a man of monumental self-assurance and incandescent temper, known for erupting in rage and thrashing his servants, comes across as gentle, loving, almost sentimental in his tenderness for his son — and throughout the correspondence he makes no secret of his ambitions for, and expectations of, Jawaharlal. An early postcard bearing the pictures of Congress leaders bears, just below the portrait of Romesh Chunder Dutt, Congress president in 1899 and an extraordinary figure of the age (one of the first Indians to qualify for the British-run civil service, Dutt had been a successful administrator, lawyer, historian, litterateur, and translator), the notation by Motilal: “Future Jawaharlal Nehru.” If the father set the ultimate bar very high, he also urged his son to seek smaller successes, from becoming Senior Wrangler at school to taking the Indian Civil Service (ICS) examinations (which Jawaharlal in fact never did). Motilal’s letters were full of advice on everything from the importance of riding and shooting to the need to avoid soccer injuries. They also dispensed opinion and insight on Indian political developments, challenging Jawaharlal to contestation and argument. Across thousands of miles, father and son maintained a dialogue fuller and more direct than that which they might have been able to sustain had they lived under the same roof in India.