Nehru: The Invention of India

Preface

For the first seventeen years of India’s independence, the paradox-ridden Jawaharlal Nehru — a moody, idealist intellectual who felt an almost mystical empathy with the toiling peasant masses; an aristocrat, accustomed to privilege, who had passionate socialist convictions; an Anglicized product of Harrow and Cambridge who spent almost ten years in British jails; an agnostic radical who became an unlikely protégé of the saintly Mahatma Gandhi — was India. Upon the Mahatma’s assassination, Nehru became the keeper of the national flame, the most visible embodiment of India’s struggle for freedom. Incorruptible, visionary, ecumenical, a politician above politics, Nehru’s stature was so great that the country he led seemed inconceivable without him. A year before his death a leading American journalist published a book entitled After Nehru, Who? The unspoken question around the world was: “after Nehru, what?”

Today, nearly four decades after his death, we have something of an answer to the latter question. As an India still seemingly clad in the trappings of Nehruvianism steps out into the twenty-first century, little of Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy appears intact. India has moved away from much of it, and so (in different ways) has the rest of the developing world for which Nehruvianism once spoke. As India nears the completion of the sixth decade of its independence from the British Raj, a transformation — still incomplete — has taken place that, in its essentials, has changed the basic Nehruvian assumptions of postcolonial nationhood.

In this short biography, I have sought to examine this great figure of twentieth-century nationalism from the vantage point of the beginning of the twenty-first. Jawaharlal Nehru’s life is a fascinating story in its own right, and I have tried to tell it whole, because the privileged child, the unremarkable youth, the posturing young nationalist, and the heroic fighter for independence are all inextricable from the unchallengeable prime minister and revered global statesman. A concluding chapter critically analyzes the principal pillars of Nehru’s legacy to India — democratic institution-building, staunch pan- Indian secularism, socialist economics at home, and a foreign policy of nonalignment — all of which were integral to a vision of Indianness that is fundamentally contested today.

Nehru: The Invention of India is not a scholarly work; it is based on no new research into previously undiscovered archives; it is not footnoted, though a Note on Sources and a Select Bibliography will guide the curious toward further reading. It is, instead, a reinterpretation — both of an extraordinary life and career and of the inheritance it left behind for every Indian. The very term “Indian” was imbued with such meaning by Nehru that it is impossible to use it without acknowledging a debt: our passports incarnate his ideals. Where those ideals came from, whether they were brought to fulfillment by their own progenitor, and to what degree they remain viable today are among the themes of this book. I started it as divided between admiration and criticism as I finished it; but the more I delved into Nehru’s life, it was the admiration which deepened.

Jawaharlal Nehru’s impact on India is too great not to be reexamined periodically. As an Indian writer, I am conscious that his legacy is ours, whether we agree with everything he stood for or not. What India is today, both for good and for ill, we owe in great measure to one man. This is his story.