Tharoor Shashi - Nehru - The Invention of India

When Dr. Rafiq Zakaria began a biographical essay on Nehru for his compilation A Study of Nehru, published to mark the prime minister’s seventieth birthday, he noted the “extravagance” of the Indian people’s love of Jawaharlal:

They have idolized him; they have worshipped him. Even in the inaccessible tribal areas, his name is a household word; to the illiterate villagers he has become almost a god. To most Indians he has symbolized everything that is good and noble and beautiful in life. Even his faults are admirable; his weaknesses, lovable. In a land of hero-worship he has become the hero of heroes. To criticize him is wrong; to condemn him is blasphemous…. They may be dissatisfied with his party; they may be unhappy under his Government, but such is their devotion to the man that he is not blamed for anything.

Yet by his speeches, his exhortations, and above all by his own personal example, Jawaharlal imparted to the institutions and processes of democracy a dignity that placed it above challenge from would-be tyrants. He instituted a public audience at his home every morning where ordinary people could come to petition or talk with their prime minister. His speeches were an extended conversation with the people of India. “Sometimes,” wrote the journalist A. M. Rosenthal, “he talked angrily to his India and sometimes he shrieked at it and denounced it and said it was just impossible, impossible. Sometimes he courted his India, laughed with it, and was merry and delicate and understanding. But it was always as if Jawaharlal Nehru was looking into the eyes of India and India was just one soul.”

And yet Jawaharlal was often described by his critics as the last Englishman left in India; the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge called him the last viceroy. By Nehru’s own admission as a young man, “I had imbibed most of the prejudices of Harrow and Cambridge and in my likes and dislikes I was perhaps more an Englishman than an Indian…. And so I returned to India as much prejudiced in favor of England and the English as it was possible for an Indian to be.” The writer Nirad Chaudhuri declared that Nehru was “completely out of touch with the Indian life even of his time, except with the life of the self-segregating Anglicized set of upper India.” Chaudhuri described Jawaharlal as a snob, contemptuous of those who spoke English with an Indian accent, with no understanding of contemporary Hinduism. Such criticisms are not entirely illegitimate (though at least one admirer, the Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg, declared that for Nehru “Shakespeare did not overshadow Kalidasa, and he conversed with a Punjabi peasant as naturally as with a Cambridge professor”). But they were often sparked by animus. Those who resented Jawaharlal’s near-total identification with his country challenged the authenticity of his claims to embody India. N. B. Khare, the president of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1950, described Jawaharlal Nehru as “English by education, Muslim by culture and Hindu by accident.” He meant it as an insult, but in fact it was a tribute — to the eclecticism that had made Jawaharlal the finest product of the syncretic traditions to which a twentieth-century Indian was heir. Eh-renburg called Nehru “a man of great and universal culture. His interests have lain in Marxism and in the origins of religions, in Freudianism and in ethics, in the sculpture of Ellora and Elephanta, in the poetry of the English Romantics. He has discussed human discontent with Romain Rolland, revolutionary romanticism with Ernest Toller, and the destinies of Buddhism with André Malraux.”

From these varied sources of inspiration emerged Nehru’s most important contribution to Indian democracy — the very notion of Indianness. It is worth remembering that, amid the popular ferment that made an Italian nation out of a mosaic of principalities and statelets, the Italian nationalist Massimo Taparelli d’Azeglio had memorably written, “We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians.” Nehru never succumbed to the temptation to express a similar thought, because he believed in the existence of India and Indians for millennia before he gave words to their longings. He would never have spoken of “creating” India or Indians, merely of being the agent for the reassertion of what had always existed but had been long suppressed. Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time, that divided Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time, that asked the Keralite peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri pandit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time. Nehru would not have written of the challenge of “creating” Indians, but creating Indians was what, in fact, the nationalist movement did. And Nehru it was, above all else, who welded that India into a plausible nation — the man who, through his writings, his speeches, his life, and his leadership, can be credited with the invention of the India we know today.

Jawaharlal always saw India as more than the sum of its contradictions. It is a country held together, he wrote in The Discovery of India, “by strong but invisible threads…. She is a myth and an idea” (he always feminized India), “a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive.” Who better than Nehru to incarnate this India, this idea, this present reality? Nehru articulated a vision of India as pluralism vindicated by history:

India … was like an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously…. Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, every-where there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages…. [India] was a world in itself, a culture and a civilization which gave shape to all things. Foreign influences poured in … and were absorbed. Disruptive tendencies gave rise immediately to an attempt to find a synthesis. Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization. That unity was not conceived as something imposed from outside, a standardization of externals or even of beliefs. It was something deeper and, within its fold, the widest tolerance of belief and custom was practiced and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged.

This was a vision of India that resolved the national argument about identity by simply bypassing it. Nehru argued that the unity of India was apparent from the outside: every Indian, whatever his differences from other Indians, was seen by foreigners as an Indian first, rather than as a Christian or Muslim, even though he might share his religion with those foreigners. For Nehru, the “Indian people” had a timeless quality, emerging from history and stretching on into the future. Not surprisingly, it was Nehru who insisted that the name India be retained in the Constitution, in the face of attempts by Prasad and others to rename the country Bharat, a piece of Hindu atavism that Jawaharlal accommodated by allowing both versions to be used. For he was above all a unifying figure for the newly independent country. In a 1953 article Nirad Chaudhuri considered Nehru “the indispensable link between the governing middle-classes and the sovereign people” of India, as well as “the bond between India and the world” … “India’s representative to the great Western democracies, and I must add, their representative to India…. [W]hen Nehru takes an anti-Western or neutral line[,] they feel they are being let down by one of themselves.”

The “link,” the “bridge,” the embodiment of India, the man forever trying to accommodate and reconcile the country’s various and disparate tendencies, even the notion of him as a turncoat to the West — these very terms point to the contradictions between conviction and compromise that marked Jawaharlal Nehru’s life. His books reveal a Western intellect articulating an Indian heritage in the voice of the Enlightenment. (In this regard he made possible India’s ability to compete in the globalized world of the twenty-first century, by infusing “Westernization” into Indianness institutionally, temperamentally, and philosophically.) Nehru defined Indian nationhood through the power of his ideas, in many ways like Thomas Jefferson in the United States, a figure to whom he bears considerable resemblance — a man of great intellect and sweeping vision, a wielder of words without parallel, high-minded and eloquent, yet in many ways blind to his own faults and those of others around him.