Nehru: The Invention of India

1. “With Little to Commend Me”: 1889–1912

In January 1889, or so the story goes, Motilal Nehru, a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer from the north Indian city of Allahabad, traveled to Rishikesh, a town holy to Hindus, up in the foothills of the Himalayas on the banks of the sacred river Ganga (Ganges). Motilal was weighed down by personal tragedy. Married as a teenager, in keeping with custom, he had soon been widowed, losing both his wife and his firstborn son in childbirth. In due course he had married again, an exquisitely beautiful woman named Swarup Rani Kaul. She soon blessed him with another son — but the boy died in infancy. Motilal’s own brother Nandlal Nehru then died at the age of forty-two, leaving to Motilal the care of his widow and seven children. The burden was one he was prepared to bear, but he desperately sought the compensatory joy of a son of his own. This, it seemed, was not to be.

Motilal and his two companions, young Brahmins of his acquaintance, visited a famous yogi renowned for the austerities he practiced while living in a tree. In the bitter cold of winter, the yogi undertook various penances, which, it was said, gave him great powers. One of the travelers, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, informed the yogi that Motilal’s greatest desire in life was to have a son. The yogi asked Motilal to step forward, looked at him long and hard, and shook his head sadly: “You,” he declared, “will not have a son. It is not in your destiny.”

As a despairing Motilal stood crestfallen before him, the other man, the learned Pandit Din Dayal Shastri, argued respectfully with the yogi. The ancient Hindu shastras, he said, made it clear that there was nothing irreversible about such a fate; a great karmayogi like him could simply grant the unfortunate man a boon. Thus challenged, the yogi looked at the young men before him, and finally sighed. He reached into his brass pitcher and sprinkled water from it three times upon the wouldbe father. Motilal began to express his gratitude, but the yogi cut him short. “By doing this,” the yogi breathed, “I have sacrificed all the benefits of all the austerities I have conducted over many generations.”

The next day, as legend has it, the yogi passed away.

Ten months later, at 11:30 P.M. on November 14, 1889, Motilal Nehru’s wife, Swarup Rani, gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He was named Jawaharlal (“precious jewel”), and he would grow up to be one of the most remarkable men of the twentieth century.

Jawaharlal Nehru himself always disavowed the story as apocryphal, though it was attributed by many to two of the protagonists themselves — Motilal and Malaviya. Since neither left a firsthand account of the episode, the veracity of the tale can never be satisfactorily determined. Great men are often ascribed remarkable beginnings, and at the peak of Jawaharlal Nehru’s career there were many willing to promote a supernatural explanation for his greatness. His father, certainly, saw him from a very early age as a child of destiny, one made for extraordinary success; but as a rationalist himself, Motilal is unlikely to have based his faith in his son on a yogi’s blessing.

The child himself was slow to reveal any signs of potential greatness. He was the kind of student usually referred to as “indifferent.” He also luxuriated in the pampering of parents whose affluence grew with the mounting success of Motilal Nehru’s legal career. In a pattern well-known in traditional Indian life, where wives received very little companionship from their husbands and transferred their emotional attentions to their sons instead, Jawaharlal was smothered with affection by his mother, in whom he saw “Dresden china perfection.” Years later he would begin his autobiography with the confession: “An only son of prosperous parents is apt to be spoilt, especially so in India. And when that son happens to have been an only child for the first eleven years of his existence, there is little hope for him to escape this spoiling.”

The young Jawaharlal Nehru’s mind was shaped by two sets of parental influences that he never saw as contradictory — the traditional Hinduism of his mother and the other womenfolk of the Nehru household, and the modernist, secular cosmopolitanism of his father. The women (especially Swarup’s widowed sister Rajvati) told him tales from Hindu mythology, took him regularly to temples, and immersed him for baths in the holy river Ganga. Motilal, on the other hand, though he never disavowed the Hindu faith into which he was born, refused to undergo a “purification ceremony” in order to atone formally for having “crossed the black water” by traveling abroad, and in 1899 was formally excommunicated by the high-caste Hindu elders of Allahabad for his intransigence. The taint lingered, and Motilal’s family was socially boycotted by some of the purists, but the Nehrus typically rose above the ostracism through their own worldly success.

The Nehrus were Kashmiri Pandits, scions of a community of Brahmins from the northernmost reaches of the subcontinent who had made new lives for themselves across northern and central India since at least the eighteenth century. Kashmir itself had been largely converted to Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but Kashmiri Muslims followed a syncretic version of the faith imbued with the gentle mysticism of Sufi preachers, and coexisted in harmony with their Hindu neighbors. Though the Pandits left Kashmir in significant numbers, they did so not as refugees fleeing Muslim depredation, but as educated and professionally skilled migrants in quest of better opportunities. Though the Kashmiri Pandits were as clannish a community as any in India — conscious that their origins, their modest numbers, their high social standing, and their pale, fine-featured looks all made them special — they were proud of their pan-Indian outlook. They had, after all, left their original homes behind in the place they still called their “motherland,” Kashmir; they had thrived in a state where Muslims outnumbered them thirteen to one; they had no history of casteist quarrels, since the non-Brahmin castes of Kashmir, and several of the Brahmins, had converted to Islam; they were comfortable with Muslim culture, with the Persian language, and even with the eating of meat (which most Indian Brahmins other than Kashmiris and Bengalis abjured). Secure in themselves and at ease with others, Kashmiri Pandits inclined instinctively toward the cosmopolitan. It was no accident, for instance, that Motilal’s chief household retainer was a Muslim, Munshi Mubarak Ali. Jawaharlal learned a great deal from him: “With his fine grey beard he seemed to my young eyes very ancient and full of old-time lore, and I used to snuggle up to him and listen, wide-eyed, by the hour to his innumerable stories.”

The family’s original name was Kaul. Jawaharlal Nehru’s ancestor Raj Kaul settled in Mughal Delhi in the eighteenth century and, perhaps because there were other Kauls of prominence in the city, assumed the hyphenated name of Kaul-Nehru, the suffix indicating the family’s residence on the edge of a canal, or nehar in Urdu. (It is also possible the name came from the village of Naru in the Badgam district of Kashmir, but this has never been conclusively established.) The Kaul-Nehrus moved to Agra in the mid-nineteenth century, where the compound form soon disappeared. It was simply as a Nehru that Motilal made his name at the Allahabad bar.

Along with the name and the money that came with his success as a lawyer, Motilal acquired the trappings of a Victorian gentleman of means — an elegant house (named Anand Bhavan, or “Abode of Bliss”) in a desirable residential area, with mostly British neighbors; a fancy carriage; a stable of Arabian steeds; and a wardrobe full of English suits, many tailored in Savile Row. Jawaharlal grew up surrounded by every imaginable creature comfort. Not only did he have electricity and running water in the house (both unheard-of luxuries for most of his compatriots), but the family home was equipped with such unusual perquisites as a private swimming pool and a tennis court, and his father ordered the latest toys for him from England, including the newly invented tricycle and bicycle. (Motilal himself owned Allahabad’s first car, imported in 1904.) Jawaharlal enjoyed lavish birthday parties, holidays in Kashmir, a plenitude of clothes — a classic Little Lord Fauntleroy upbringing.

The allusion is not too far-fetched. There is a studio photograph of Jawaharlal aged five in 1894, attired in a navy blue sailor suit, his hair neatly combed under a high stiff collar, his little hands firmly grasped between his knees, while the paterfamilias looms above, left arm cocked at his side, gold watch-chain at his waist, surveying the world with gimlet eyes above his handlebar moustache. Swarup Rani Nehru, seated to the side in an elaborate sari, seems almost marginal to this striking tableau of bourgeois Victorian male authority. (There is another photograph of mother and son: this time, Jawaharlal is in Indian clothes, and Motilal is absent.)

It was at about this time that an episode occurred that Jawaharlal would recall for decades afterward. His father had two fine pens in an inkstand atop his mahogany desk, which caught the young boy’s eye. Thinking that Motilal “could not require both at the same time,” Jawaharlal took one for his lessons. When Motilal found it missing, a furious search ensued. The frightened boy first hid the pen and then himself, but he was soon discovered by servants and turned in to his enraged father. What ensued was, in Jawaharlal’s recollection, “a tremendous thrashing. Almost blind with pain and mortification at my disgrace, I rushed to my mother, and for several days various creams and ointments were applied to my aching and quivering little body.” He learned much from this experience: not to cross his father, not to lay claim to what was not his, not to conceal evidence of his own wrongdoing, if ever he were to do wrong — and never to assume he could simply “get away with it.” It was a lesson which had much to do with the sense of responsibility that became a defining Nehru characteristic.

Motilal and Jawaharlal remained the only male Nehrus in the immediate family. A sister, Sarup Kumari (who would one day be known to the world as the glamorous Vijayalakshmi Pandit, the first woman president of the United Nations General Assembly), was born on August 18, 1900. On Jawaharlal’s sixteenth birthday, another ill-fated boy was born; he died within a month, the third of Motilal’s four sons to fail to outlive his infancy. Two years later, on November 2, 1907, the last of Jawaharlal Nehru’s siblings, another sister, Krishna, emerged. The older of the two girls was nicknamed “Nanhi,” or “little one” in Hindi, the younger “Beti,” or “daughter.” Their English governesses quickly transmuted these diminutives to “Nan” and “Betty” respectively, and it was the Anglicized versions of the nicknames that stuck, not the Hindi ones.

Indeed, Jawaharlal Nehru’s sailor suit in that early photograph was not just for posing. It embodied the Westernization of his early upbringing; he had two British governesses at home, and from 1901 to 1904 a private tutor, the Irish-French Ferdinand T. Brooks, who taught him English poetry and the rudiments of science from a lab he rigged up at home, and instilled in him a lifelong love of reading (the young Jawaharlal devoured Scott and Dickens, Conan Doyle and Twain). Motilal also engaged an eminent Sanskrit tutor, who reportedly had little success with his Anglophone charge. But Brooks, a follower of theosophy — a conflation of Hindu doctrines and Christian ethics that reached its peak of popularity in the last decades of the nineteenth century — obliged Jawaharlal to read the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita in English translation, and the young Nehru even briefly went through a formal conversion to theosophy at age thirteen (though this was soon forgotten by all concerned, including the convert himself). The woman who initiated Jawaharlal into theosophy, Annie Besant, a silver-tongued Englishwoman who had joined the struggle for Indian “home rule,” would remain a powerful influence in the years to come.

Meanwhile, the boy was doted on by his increasingly unwell mother, who superstitiously went to inordinate lengths to protect him from the “evil eye” — that malefic gaze, born of envy or even excessive admiration, which many Hindus believe brings disaster in its wake. She would admonish anyone who commented on his looks, his growth, his talents, or even his appetite (it is said she would give him a private snack before dinner so that he would not eat too hungrily before others and invite comment). Jawaharlal was frequently subjected to ritual attempts to ward off possible afflictions, including the placing of a black dot on the forehead to repel the evil eye, which of course was rubbed off before the lad posed for the studio photographs of the family with Motilal.

Motilal had little time for such distractions as religion or custom; the hereafter concerned him less than the here and now. A freethinking rationalist, he saw in Western science and English reasoning, rather than in Hindu religion or ritual, the real hope of progress for India. He sometimes took this conviction too far: at one point in the 1890s he decreed that no language other than English would be spoken at his home, having forgotten that none of the female Nehrus had been taught any English. Inevitably, when Jawaharlal was just fifteen, his father enrolled him at the prestigious British public school, Harrow.

By an intriguing coincidence, some fifteen years earlier the school had educated (and sent on to Sandhurst) a young man called Winston Spencer Churchill, who after stints in the colonies was already embarking upon a prodigious career in British public life. The two Harrovians would come to have diametrically opposed views of India — dismissive on Churchill’s part, proudly nationalist on Nehru’s. “India,” Churchill once barked, “is not a country or a nation. … It is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.” A more liberal-minded Harrovian of the previous century, Sir William Jones, had founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, translated many Sanskrit classics, and greatly advanced Western appreciation of Indian culture and philosophy. But ironically, it was Churchill’s view of India that would one day make Jawaharlal Nehru’s “invention of India” necessary. “Such unity of sentiment as exists in India,” Churchill wrote, “arises entirely through the centralized British Government of India as expressed in the only common language of India — English.” Jawaharlal Nehru, as the product of the same elite British school as Churchill, would use that education and the English language to complete what he called “the discovery of India” and assert its right to be free of Churchill’s government.

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.

Motilal also generously funded his spendthrift son, rewarding him handsomely for every educational attainment, however modest. Every time he bridled at his son’s profligacy, Jawaharlal managed to win him round. (On one such occasion Motilal wrote: “You know as well as anyone else does that, whatever my shortcomings may be, and I know there are many, I cannot be guilty of either love of money or want of love for you.”) It was one of Motilal’s lavish gifts — a graduation present of a hundred pounds — that nearly ended Jawaharlal Nehru’s career. Urged by Motilal to spend the money visiting France and learning the language, Jawaharlal chose instead to go trekking in the Norwegian mountains with an unnamed English friend. Dipping into a stream, the young Nehru, numbed by the icy water, was swept away by a current toward a steep waterfall and would have drowned but for the pluck and enterprise of his traveling companion, who ran along the riverbank and caught him just in time, grasping a flailing leg and pulling him out of the water a few yards ahead of a four-hundred-foot drop.

This episode led a recent biographer, the American historian Stanley Wolpert, to suggest that Jawaharlal Nehru had had a homosexual relationship with his savior. Wolpert’s conclusions are based, however, on so elaborate a drawing out of the circumstances, and such extensive speculation (on grounds as flimsy as Jawaharlal’s tutor Brooks having been a disciple of a notorious pederast), that they are difficult to take seriously. Certainly there is no corroborating evidence, either in letters or the accounts of contemporaries, to substantiate Wolpert’s claim of homosexuality. It was quite common in those days for young men to travel in pairs on the Continent, and difficult to imagine that friends, family, and acquaintances would have made no reference to homosexual tendencies if Jawaharlal had indeed been inclined that way. Nor did any chroniclers of the adult Nehru, including enemies who would have used such a charge to wound him, ever allude to any rumors of adolescent homosexuality.

By the time he embarked for India in August 1912 after nearly seven years in England, Jawaharlal Nehru had little to show for the experience: he was, in his own words, “a bit of a prig with little to commend me.” Had he been better at taking exams, he might well have followed his father’s initial wishes and joined the Indian Civil Service, but his modest level of academic achievement made it clear he stood no chance of succeeding in the demanding ICS examinations. Had he joined the ICS, a career in the upper reaches of the civil service might have followed, rather than in the political fray. Officials did not become statesmen; it is one of the ironies of history that had Jawaharlal Nehru been a higher achiever in his youth, he might never have attained the political heights he did in adulthood.

But there had certainly been an intangible change in the young man, for all the modesty of his scholarly accomplishment. In a moving letter upon leaving his son at Harrow, Motilal had described his pain in being separated from “the dearest treasure we have in this world … for your own good”:

It is not a question of providing for you, as I can do that perhaps in one single year’s income. It is a question of making a real man of you. … It would be extremely selfish … to keep you with us and leave you a fortune in gold with little or no education.

Seven years later, the son confirmed that he had understood and fulfilled his father’s intent. “To my mind,” Jawaharlal wrote to his father four months before leaving England, in April 1912, “education does not consist of passing examinations or knowing English or mathematics. It is a mental state.” In his case this was the mental state of an educated Englishman of culture and means, a product of two of the finest institutions of learning in the Empire (the same two, he would later note with pride, that had produced Lord Byron), with the attitudes that such institutions instill in their alumnae. Jawaharlal Nehru may only have had a second-class degree, but in this sense he had had a first-class English education.

The foundations had been laid, however unwittingly, for the future nationalist leader. It would hardly be surprising that Jawaharlal Nehru, having imbibed a sense of the rights of Englishmen, would one day be outraged by the realization that these rights could not be his because he was not English enough to enjoy them under British rule in India.