Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

Sleep had come to Nehru at the age of seventy-four. The nation was plunged into mourning; tributes poured in from around the world. An earthquake rocked the capital on the day of his death, a portentous omen to some. Cynics waited for the survivors to fight over the spoils; many predicted India’s inevitable disintegration. But Jawaharlal had prepared his people well, instilling in them the habits of democracy, a respect for parliamentary procedure, and faith in the constitutional system. There were no succession squabbles. Lal Bahadur Shastri, a modest figure of unimpeachable integrity and considerable political and administrative acumen, was elected India’s second prime minister. The country wept, and moved on.

Years earlier Jawaharlal had repeated a question posed to him by an American interviewer: “My legacy to India? Hopefully, it is 400 million people capable of governing themselves.” The numbers had grown, but in the peaceful transfer of power that followed his death, Jawaharlal Nehru had left his most important legacy.

His last will and testament, written in 1954 when he was not yet sixty-five, was released to the nation upon his death. In it he spoke of his gratitude for the love and affection of the Indian people and his hope that he would not prove unworthy of them. He asked that his body be cremated and the ashes transported to Allahabad, his birthplace, where a “small handful” was to be “thrown in the Ganga.” This last request would not have been surprising from a devout man, but from India’s most famous agnostic, a man who openly despised temples and was never known to have worshipped at any Hindu shrine in his long life, it came as a surprise. Nehru’s reasons, spelled out in his will, had little to do with religion:

The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India’s age-long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the snow-covered peaks and the deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below, where my life and work have been cast. Smiling and dancing in the morning sunlight, and dark and gloomy and full of mystery as the evening shadows fall, a narrow, slow and graceful stream in winter and a vast, roaring thing during the monsoon, broad-bosomed almost as the sea, and with something of the sea’s power to destroy, the Ganga has been to me a symbol and a memory of the past of India, running into the present, and flowing on to the great ocean of the future. And though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain her and divide her people, … I do not wish to cut myself off from the past completely. I am proud of that great inheritance that has been, and is, ours, and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India.

This was Jawaharlal at his finest: lyrical, sentimental, passionately combining a reverence for the past with his aspirations for the future, making the most sacred river of Hinduism into a force for cultural unity, a torrent that unites history with hope. There is nothing in Nehru’s use of the Ganga as symbol that could alienate an Indian Muslim or Christian. Here was the magic of Indian nationalism as no one else could express it, capped by a concluding request:

The major portion of my ashes should … be carried high up into the air in an airplane and scattered from that height over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust and soil … and become an indistinguishable part of India.

During his years as prime minister, many at home and abroad could not distinguish Jawaharlal Nehru from the country he so unchallengeably led. That task would now become literally impossible. In death, as in life, Jawaharlal would become India.***

“My presents,” Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to his daughter Indira from prison on her thirteenth birthday in November 1930, “cannot be very material or solid. They can only be of the air and of the mind and of the spirit, such as a good fairy might have bestowed on you — things that even the high walls of prison cannot stop.” These gifts he bestowed in plenty, and when he died in 1964, Nehru’s legacy to the nation and the world seemed secure. A towering figure in national politics and on the international stage, the reflective, mercurial Nehru had — in innumerable books and speeches, but also in his conduct as a prime minister — developed and articulated a worldview that embodied the aspirations of his generation, of his country, and (many believed) of the developing postcolonial world as a whole. “We are all Nehruvians,” a senior Indian official told me years later, with conviction and pride, of his colleagues in the Indian ruling establishment.

Two and a half decades after that remark, there are fewer Nehruvians in office. Indeed, Nehruvianism seems to have lost both power and allure. Nehru is criticized, even derided, by votaries of an alternative version of Indian nationalism, one that claims to be more deeply rooted in the land (and therefore in its religious traditions and customary prejudices). His mistakes are magnified, his achievements belittled. How are we, today, to parse his legacy? Nehru’s impact on India rested on four major pillars — democratic institution-building, staunch pan-Indian secularism, socialist economics at home, and a foreign policy of nonalignment. All four remain as official tenets of Indian governance, but all have been challenged, and strained to the breaking point, by the developments of recent years.

“The world’s largest democracy” remains the sobriquet of which all Indians are proud. India became that under the tutelage of a man so unquestionably its leader — so unchallengeably the personification of its very freedom — that all he needed to do if anyone opposed him was to threaten to resign. Nehru usually got his way. And yet he was a convinced democrat, a man so wary of the risks of autocracy that, at the crest of his rise, he authored an anonymous article warning Indians of the dangers of giving dictatorial temptations to Jawaharlal Nehru. As prime minister he carefully nurtured democratic institutions, paying careful deference to the country’s ceremonial presidency, regularly writing letters to the chief ministers of India’s states explaining his policies, subjecting himself to cross-examination in Parliament by a fractious opposition, taking care not to interfere with the judiciary (on the one occasion where he publicly criticized a judge, he apologized the next day to the individual and to the chief justice of India).

Though he was, in the celebrated Indian metaphor, the immense banyan tree in whose shade no other plant could grow, he made sure that every possible flora flourished in the forest.

In his 1937 Modern Review article in which he had anonymously portrayed himself as a potential dictator “sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-moving democracy,” Jawaharlal had added the revealing aside: “He is far too much of an aristocrat for the crudity and vulgarity of fascism.” As an aristocrat he disdained autocracy, and this paradox illuminated his nurturing of Indian democracy. If there was something tutelary about it — the idol of the masses dispensing democracy like so much prasad 9to the worshipping throngs — that was a necessary phase in the process of educating a largely illiterate, overwhelmingly poor people in the rights and prerogatives that came with freedom. There is no doubt that Nehru romanticized his connection to the Indian masses. As he wrote to Edwina in 1951: “Wherever I have been, vast multitudes gather at my meetings and I love to compare them, their faces, their dresses, their reactions to me and what I say…. I try to probe into the minds and hearts of these multitudes…. The effort to explain in simple language our problems and our difficulties, and to reach the minds of these simple folk is both exhausting and exhilarating.”