Nehru: The Invention of India

3. “To Suffer for the Dear Country”: 1921–1928

In 1920, Gandhi declared that India would have swaraj (self-government) within a year, a promise Jawaharlal Nehru described as “delightfully vague.” Less vague was the slogan that drove Gandhi’s followers in the civil disobedience movement of 1921: “Go to the villages!” Jawaharlal found himself traveling to impassioned meetings in rural areas (by car, train, and horse-drawn carriage, and once on an improvised trolley sent wheeling down the railway track after he had missed his train), calling for freedom for India, the restoration of the Khilafat in Turkey, and economic self-reliance (to be achieved through boycotting foreign goods, spinning khadi at home and consigning English suits to the bonfire). Nonviolence, Hindu-Muslim unity, harmony between tenants and landlords, and the abolition of untouchability were the pillars of the movement on which Gandhi had launched the nation. “Noncooperation” with the British was the slogan, but like so many other Indian political negatives, from nonviolence to nonalignment, it was imbued with a positive content transcending that which it sought to negate.

Jawaharlal Nehru, no longer the diffident political neophyte, plunged himself into the campaign with great zeal. He revealed, or at any rate developed, a talent for both oratory and organization: when on one occasion a government order was served on him prohibiting him from addressing a meeting, he marched four and a half miles with the entire assemblage to the next district and resumed his speech there. He formed and drilled volunteer squads, inspiring them to paralyze life in various U.P. towns through “hartals,” or work stoppages, in the name of noncooperation with the colonial authorities. The mounting momentum behind these efforts caused alarm among British officialdom, already tense about the impending visit to India of the Prince of Wales. On December 6, 1921, both Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru were arrested, each for the first time in his life.

Jawaharlal had spent part of the morning at the district court attending the trial of fellow Congressman K. D. Malaviya. “The poor judge [was] in a bad way,” he wrote in his diary. “He appeared to be the convict and the prisoners the judges.” When father and son were taken away by the police, Motilal issued a message to his compatriots: “Having served you to the best of my ability, it is now my high privilege to serve the motherland by going to jail with my only son.” Jawaharlal was taken to Lucknow for detention and trial, principally for his leadership of the volunteers, whose organization had been declared illegal. He was sentenced (under the wrong section of the penal code, as it later turned out) to six months in prison and a fine of a hundred rupees or a further month of imprisonment. Motilal, after a farcical trial in which an illiterate witness “verified” his signature on a seditious document while holding it upside down, was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and a fivehundred-rupee fine. (His refusal to pay the fine resulted in the seizure of property from his home worth several times that amount.) Both father and son, in their separate jail cells, declined the special privileges offered to them in view of their social standing. Jawaharlal relished his status as a prisoner of the Raj. A fellow Congress worker noted that “the smiling and happy countenance of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru stood out in relief amongst the persons in the lock-up.”

It was not to last. The increasing violence of the noncooperation movement, and in particular the murder of two dozen policemen by a nationalist mob in the small U.P. town of Chauri Chaura on February 5, 1922, led Mahatma Gandhi to call off the agitation, fearing that his followers were not yet ready for the nonviolent attainment of freedom. Thanks to a technical error in his sentencing, Jawaharlal was released in March 1922, with only half his sentence served. He was bitterly disappointed with Gandhi’s decision and its effect on his volunteers, who had made such headway in destabilizing British rule in U.P. But his faith in the Mahatma remained, and he wrote to his colleague Syed Mahmud: “You will be glad to learn that work is flourishing. We are laying sure foundations this time. … [T]here will be no relaxation, no lessening in our activities and above all there will be no false compromise with Government. We stand,” he added in a Gandhian touch, “for the truth.”

It is said that Motilal enjoyed such close relations with the British governor of U.P., Sir Harcourt Butler, that during his first imprisonment he received a daily half-bottle of champagne brought personally to the prison by the governor’s aide-de-camp. With his father still in jail, Jawaharlal continued his efforts to promote disaffection with British rule, and for his pains he was arrested again on May 12, 1922. Refusing to defend himself, he issued an emotional and colorful statement: “India will be free; of that there is no doubt. … Jail has indeed become a heaven for us, a holy place of pilgrimage since our saintly and beloved leader was sentenced. … I marvel at my good fortune. To serve India in the battle of freedom is honor enough. To serve her under a leader like Mahatma Gandhi is doubly fortunate. But to suffer for the dear country! What greater good fortune could befall an Indian, unless it be death for the cause or the full realization of our glorious dream?”

The British may have dismissed such words as romanticized bombast, but they struck a chord among the public beyond the courtroom, giving the thirty-three-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru national celebrity as the hero of Indian youth. The trial court was his platform, but his real audience was young Indians everywhere. By the summer of 1922, Motilal, now released and traveling across the country, found his son’s fame widespread, and his already considerable pride in Jawaharlal grew even further. “On reading your statement,” he wrote to his son, “I felt I was the proudest father in the world.” This time the younger Nehru drew a sentence of eighteen months’ rigorous imprisonment, a fine of a hundred rupees, and a further three months in jail if he did not pay the fine. There were no judicial irregularities to mitigate his punishment.

Despite poor health, which required homeopathic medication in jail, and food that was “quite amazingly bad,” Jawaharlal welcomed his imprisonment. He seemed to see it as confirmation of his sacrifices for the nation, while writing to his father that no sympathy was needed for “we who laze and eat and sleep” while others “work and labor outside.” He used his time to read widely — the Koran, the Bible, and the Bhagavad Gita, a history of the Holy Roman Empire, Havell’s Aryan Rule in India with its paeans to India’s glorious past, and the memoirs of the Mughal emperor Babar and the French traveler Bernier. These works fed a romanticized sense of the Indian nationalist struggle as a version of the Italian Risorgimento; in one letter he even quoted Meredith’s poem on the heroes of the latter, substituting the word “India” for “Italia.” This, as Gopal has observed, “was adolescent exaltation, yet to be channeled by hard thinking.” Jawaharlal was suffused with “the glow of virginal suffering, … in love with sacrifice and hardship. … He had made a cradle of emotional nationalism and rocked himself in it.” A British interviewer in late 1923 noted that Nehru had no “clear idea of how he proposed to win Swaraj or what he proposed to do with it when he had won it.”

Once again Jawaharlal was released before he had served his full sentence, emerging from prison at the end of January 1923 following a provincial amnesty. But the premature release would be more than made up for in seven more terms of imprisonment over the next two decades, which gave him a grand total of 3,262 days in eight different jails. Nearly ten years of his life were to be wasted behind bars — though perhaps not entirely wasted, since they allowed him to produce several remarkable books of reflection, nationalist awakening, and autobiography. His first letter to his five-year-old daughter Indira (asking her whether she had “plied” her new spinning wheel yet) was written from Lucknow jail. This largely one-sided correspondence would later culminate in two monumental books painting a vivid portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru’s mind and of his vision of the world.

In the meantime, the early 1920s found Indian nationalism in the doldrums. Gandhi’s decision to call off the noncooperation movement was baffling to many Muslim leaders, who saw in his placing the principle of nonviolence above the exigencies of opposition to British rule a form of Hindu religious fervor that sat ill with them. This, and the fizzling out of the Khilafat movement, ended what had been the apogee of Hindu-Muslim unity in Indian politics, a period when the Muslim leader Maulana Muhammad Ali⁵ could tell the Amritsar Congress in 1919: “After the Prophet, on whom be peace, I consider it my duty to carry out the demands of Gandhiji.” The president of the Muslim League in 1920, Dr. M. A. Ansari, had abandoned the League for the Congress; the Congress’s own president in 1921, Hakim Ajmal Khan, had been a member of the original delegation of Muslim notables to the viceroy in 1906 which had first established the League. Yet by 1923 a growing estrangement between the two communities became apparent, with several Hindu-Muslim riots breaking out, notably the “Kohat killings” and the “Moplah rebellion” in opposite extremities of the country. In the twenty-two years after 1900 there had been only sixteen communal riots throughout India; in the three years thereafter, there were seventy-two. The Mahatma responded by undertaking fasts to shame his countrymen into better behavior.

During this time Jawaharlal found his leader unwilling to lead. Gandhi “refused to look into the future, or lay down any long-distance program. We were to carry on patiently ‘serving’ the people.” This, despite the ironic quotation marks around the word “serving,” Jawaharlal continued to do, focusing particularly on the boycott of foreign cloth and the promotion of homespun, a cause which bolstered Indian self-reliance while uniting peasants, weavers, and political workers under a common Congress banner. But he was too dispirited to do more than extol khadi; in particular, he took no specific steps to combat the growing communalization of politics. Devoid of religious passions himself, with many close Muslim friends whom he saw as friends first and Muslims after (if at all), he could not at this time take religious divisions seriously; he saw them as a waste of time, a distraction from the real issues at hand. “Senseless and criminal bigotry,” he wrote in a speech delivered for him when he was ill in October 1923, “struts about in the name of religion and instills hatred and violence into the people.” Three years later he wrote to a Muslim friend that “what is required in India most is a course of study of Bertrand Russell’s books.” The atheist rationalism of the British philosopher was to remain a profound influence; religion, Nehru wrote, was a “terrible burden” that India had to get rid of if it was to “breathe freely or do anything useful.”

The young idealist was also disillusioned by the cliquism and intrigues which were taking over the Congress itself. Some nationalists were accepting office under the Raj; Jawaharlal himself was sounded out about becoming the provincial education minister, a suggestion to which he gave short shrift. Instead he became general secretary of the All-India Congress Committee, in which capacity he made an abortive attempt to persuade partymen to dispense with the profusion of honorifics encumbering Indian names, starting with the “Mahatma” before “Gandhi.” (He was quickly slapped down by Muhammad Ali and, chastened, never repeated the attempt.)

But the party was split on a more important issue. A section of Congressmen, including Motilal Nehru and Bengal’s Chitta Ranjan Das, decided to contest elections to the legislative council, which offered limited self-government to Indians in a system of “dyarchy” under British rule. They called themselves the Swaraj Party; by cooperating with the British political machinery it seemed they had resurrected the old Moderate faction from under Gandhi’s suffocating embrace, though in fact they saw their role as a new form of noncooperation (since election would offer Indians the power to make legislative demands and obstruct British governance if these demands were not met). Gandhi and the majority of the Congress, however, opposed this approach, Jawaharlal among them. Motilal did not try to wean his son away from the Mahatma, but Das did, unsuccessfully. The elections of November 1923 saw the Swarajists winning convincingly, bringing the voice of Indian nationalism into the ruling councils of the Raj. But Gandhi did not approve of their participation in the colonial system, and Jawaharlal’s support for him exasperated his father. In September 1924 Gandhi wrote to Motilal to say that Jawaharlal “is one of the loneliest young men of my acquaintance in India. The idea of your mental desertion of him hurts me.… I don’t want to be the cause, direct or indirect, of the slightest breach in [your] wonderful affection.”

A third round of imprisonment had meanwhile punctuated the burgeoning Nehru curriculum vitae. A nonviolent agitation by the Sikh Akali movement in the Punjab, principally aimed at wresting control of Sikh shrines from British-appointed Hindu overseers, caught Jawaharlal’s attention, especially since the Sikhs’ discipline in peacefully courting arrest was the effective application of a Congress tactic. In September 1923, visiting the “princely state” of Nabha (a principality nominally ruled by an Indian rajah but in fact under the control of a British Resident, or administrator) to observe the Akalis in action, Jawaharlal found himself arrested on dubious legal grounds and incarcerated in a vile cell in abominable conditions. Motilal came to visit his son and was dismayed that his courageous intervention — which included cables to the viceroy, whose office overruled the Resident and allowed him to see his son without preconditions — had only irritated Jawaharlal, who was clearly relishing the role of the unjustly imprisoned martyr. Departing unhappily, Motilal sent his son a tart letter: “I was pained to find that instead of affording you any relief, my visit of yesterday only had the effect of disturbing the even tenor of your happy jail life. After much anxious thinking I have come to the conclusion that I can do no good either to you or to myself by repeating my visits.… [P]lease do not bother about me at all. I am as happy outside the jail as you are in it.” Jawaharlal was instantly contrite and apologetic, even agreeing to replace the defiant statement he had drafted for the court with a cooler piece of legal reasoning prepared by his father. Eventually he was sentenced to thirty months’ rigorous imprisonment, but Delhi ordered that the punishment be suspended, and Nehru and his companions were bundled out of the state. The British thought they had triumphed; Jawaharlal saw it differently, and his experience of cooperation with the Akalis led the Congress to assign him party responsibility for Punjab affairs.

At this time Jawaharlal was exercising another function, one which afforded him a great deal of satisfaction. Despite the split with the Swarajists over the Viceroy’s Council, the Congress did decide to contest local elections for municipal bodies, and in April 1923 Jawaharlal found himself elected chairman of the Allahabad Municipal Board. This was a position he did not seek but won because he was the Congressman most acceptable to the city’s Muslim councilors, who had rejected the party’s official nominee, the traditionalist Congress leader P. D. Tandon. Unprepared for office, Jawaharlal at first grumbled that it would distract him from the national cause, but he soon took to the job and performed creditably, earning a reputation for hard work, incorruptibility, a stubborn management style (with a low threshold of tolerance for inefficiency), and a refusal to play the patronage game. He cut through much of the self-serving cant that surrounded officialdom, refusing to declare a holiday on the anniversary of the Amritsar Massacre because he believed the staff was more interested in a holiday than in mourning the tragedy, and overruling a petty bureaucrat who had denied a prostitute permission to buy a house. (“Prostitutes,” he pointed out, “are only one party to the transaction”; if they were obliged to live only in a remote corner of the city, “I would think it equally reasonable to reserve another part of Allahabad for the men who exploit women and because of whom prostitution flourishes.”)

But his de facto mayoralty was not only about good civil administration; he unabashedly promoted his nationalist agenda, making Muhammad Iqbal’s song “Sare Jahan se Achha Hindustan hamara” (“Better than all the world is our India”) a part of the school curriculum, declaring Tilak’s death anniversary and the date of Gandhi’s sentencing to be public holidays (in lieu of “Empire Day”), and refusing to meet the visiting viceroy, Lord Reading. He even introduced spinning and weaving into the school system. At the same time he had no patience for sectarian causes; he opposed a Hindu member’s proposal to ban cow-slaughter, and won the Board’s unanimous support. Though Jawaharlal gave up the chairmanship of the municipality after two years in order to devote his energies to national affairs, he missed the job and sought it again in 1928, only to lose that election by a single vote to the pro-Raj “loyalist” candidate.

Political pressures during this period were augmented by personal stress. In November 1924, Kamala gave birth prematurely; her infant son did not survive. Shortly thereafter, her increasingly fragile health took a turn for the worse, and doctors began to suspect tuberculosis. Jawaharlal, repeatedly bedridden with fever, himself underwent a surgical operation in March 1925 for an undisclosed minor ailment. It became clear that he would soon have to take Kamala to Europe for treatment, but he had no money for such an expensive undertaking. Once again Motilal came to the rescue, arranging a legal brief for him with the princely retainer of ten thousand rupees (a sum that Jawaharlal’s modest professional experience could not possibly have justified, but which ensured that Motilal himself would keep an eye on the case). It was time, in any case, for a break from the practice of politics; the national movement was not going anywhere, and “as for our politics and public life,” Jawaharlal wrote to a friend in November 1925, “I am sick and weary of them.” On March 1, 1926, Jawaharlal, Kamala, and the eight-yearold Indira sailed for Europe.

The next twenty months were a hiatus in Nehru’s political career but not in the development of his political thought. He boarded his ship in Bombay a committed Gandhian, his worldview shaped almost wholly by the inspirational teachings of the Mahatma. When he returned in December 1927, having spent the interim discovering the intellectual currents of Europe and rethinking his own assumptions, he briefly refused to meet his old mentor. The rebellion was short-lived and did not derive from any fundamental differences over the national question, but it was revealing nonetheless. Jawaharlal left India as Motilal Nehru’s son and Mahatma Gandhi’s acolyte, but he returned his own man.

It was suggested to him that, in order to facilitate the issuance of a passport for his journey, he provide an assurance that he was not traveling to Europe for political purposes. Even though his primary motive was Kamala’s health, which necessitated treatment in Switzerland, Jawaharlal refused to provide any such assurance. The passport was issued anyway; the British had never lost their regard for the Nehrus. His letters to various friends in early 1926 reveal considerable reluctance about his departure, even guilt at being absent from the national political arena; he was anxious about leaving and did not expect to be happy in Europe. Yet by October he was telling his father: “I must confess to a feeling of satisfaction at not being in India just at present. Indeed the whole future outlook is so gloomy that, from the political viewpoint, a return to India is far from agreeable.”

Settling initially in inexpensive lodgings in Geneva, Jawaharlal busied himself walking Indira to and from school, nursing Kamala, studying French, managing a prolific correspondence, reading as eclectically as ever, and attending lectures, conferences, and symposia. (“The older I grow the more I feel that there is so much to be learnt and studied and so little time to do it in.”) Since Kamala showed little improvement from her treatment, Jawaharlal moved her to a sanatorium in the mountains, at Montana-Vermala in the canton of Valais, near Indira’s school at Bex. There he learned skiing and practiced the ice-skating he had learned at Harrow, but he also became restive at his physical and intellectual isolation. It was not long before the Nehrus embarked upon forays into the Continent. Their travels took in Berlin and Heidelberg as well as London and Paris; they visited museums and factories, and Jawaharlal took Indira to Le Bourget to watch, hoisted upon his shoulders, the pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh land after his historic solo crossing of the Atlantic.

There were, inevitably, dozens of meetings, conversations, and encounters with Indian exiles, students, and revolutionaries, as well as with European political figures. Jawaharlal kept up his writing, publishing a letter in the Journal de Genève and numerous articles in the Indian press, one of which, advocating the creation of an “extremist” pressure group in the Congress Party to push for full independence, was interpreted as an attack on the Swarajists and caused Motilal considerable irritation.

But the high point of his political development in Europe came when he was invited to represent the Congress Party at the Brussels International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism in February 1927. A gathering largely of Soviet sympathizers and “fellowtravelers” (the principal organizer, Willi Muenzenberg, was the man who had coined the phrase), with Communists, pacifists, trade unionists, and nationalists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as Europe, the meeting was clearly aimed at rallying international opposition to imperialism, especially of the British variety.

Though the conference was riddled with spies and provocateurs of all stripes (including several secret agents busy double-and triple-crossing each other), Jawaharlal was an active and visible participant, presiding over one of the sessions and drafting many of the resolutions. The Brussels Congress confirmed his conversion to socialism.

The participants’ list was a veritable who’s who of Europe’s leading socialists and Marxists, including Englishmen like the Labourite Fenner Brockway and the leader of the British Communist Party, Harry Pollitt. Nehru was receptive to their ideas. His public statements and speeches explicated his understanding of the forces that sustained imperialism, which drew more deeply from Marxist critiques than previously, including the link between imperialism and capitalism. His resolution on India called not only for independence but for “the full emancipation of the peasants and workers of India, without which there can be no real freedom.” He made common cause with the Chinese delegation, drafting a joint Indian-Chinese declaration that hailed three thousand years of cultural links between the two peoples and pledged to work together to thwart British imperialist designs in both countries. (His admiration for China was deeply rooted in a sense of civilizational commonality, and would last through the Communist Revolution, foundering finally on the Himalayan wastes captured by the People’s Liberation Army in their war with India in 1962.)

Nehru was the star of the show, his role being crowned by appointment as honorary president of the new body set up by the meeting, the League against Imperialism and for National Independence. Its executive committee included such luminaries as Albert Einstein, the French philosopher and writer Romain Rolland, Madame Sun Yat-sen, the former Labour minister George Lansbury — and Jawaharlal Nehru. Motilal’s son had arrived on the international stage.

Father joined son in Europe soon after and was distinctly unenthusiastic about Jawaharlal’s keenness to accept an invitation to visit the Soviet Union on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. In the end Motilal gave in, though he was unamused by the charmlessness of socialist hospitality and the privations the family had to endure in spartan Moscow. Jawaharlal was considerably more impressed with the achievements of the Russian Revolution in “this strange Eurasian country of the hammer and sickle, where workers and peasants sit on the thrones of the mighty and upset the best-laid schemes of mice and men.” His four-day visit, supplemented by extensive reading about Russia in English, prompted a series of articles on the USSR in the Indian papers, which were compiled in one volume in December 1928 under the unimaginative title Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions. The USSR’s progress in such diverse areas as agriculture and literacy, its eradication of class and gender discrimination, its treatment of minorities, and the combination of professionalism and zeal that marked the Leninist revolutionaries, all made a deeply positive impression on the Indian nationalist. Jawaharlal Nehru’s first book was, therefore, a paean in praise of the Soviet Union.

Within a year of his return to India he told an audience of students that “though personally I do not agree with many of the methods of [the] communists, and I am by no means sure to what extent communism can suit present conditions in India, I do believe in communism as an ideal of society. For essentially it is socialism, and socialism, I think, is the only way if the world is to escape disaster.” In his 1941 book Towards Freedom, he wrote that “the theory and philosophy of Marxism lightened up many a dark corner of my mind.… I was filled with a new excitement.” Such statements would later lead some to see Nehru as a fellow-traveler himself, but the critics overlooked his independence of mind, always his most attractive feature. In a secret report on the International Congress to his own party back in India, Jawaharlal suggested that “the Russians will try to utilize the League to further their own ends,” adding: “Personally I have the strongest objection to being led by the nose by the Russians or anybody else.”

This capacity for independent thought was confirmed during his European sojourn. The British Labourites who met and patronized him expected his gratitude or at the very least his socialist solidarity, but Nehru saw them as fundamentally in the imperialist camp; he described them in 1928 as “the sanctimonious and canting humbugs who lead the Labour Party.” His insights into world affairs revealed both intelligence and acuity. He wrote in 1927 (!) that “England, in order to save herself from extinction, will become a satellite of the United States and incite the imperialism and capitalism of America to fight by her side.” He suggested that a Communist victory in China would not necessarily mean that the country would be ruled by the principles of Marx; the role of the “small peasant” would ensure a departure from “pure communism.” At the same time he found it difficult to escape the prism of the anticolonial freedom fighter; while taking a benign view of Russian and Chinese communism, he thought that “the great problem of the near future will be American imperialism, even more than British imperialism. Or it may be … that the two will join together to create a powerful Anglo-Saxon bloc to dominate the world.”

Internationalism was Jawaharlal’s forte among Indian nationalist politicians. “I welcome all legitimate methods of getting into touch with other countries and peoples so that we may be able to understand their viewpoint and world politics generally,” he wrote to Mahatma Gandhi from Europe in April 1927. “I do not think it is desirable … for India to plough a lonely furrow now or in the future. It is solely with a view to selfeducation and self-improvement that I desire external contacts. I am afraid we are terribly narrow in our outlook and the sooner we get out of this narrowness the better.” His broad-mindedness, foreign travels and contacts, and astute judgment of the world situation meant that Jawaharlal had no serious rivals within the Congress Party on international questions. Gandhi, whose own concerns were primarily domestic, was content to leave the field of foreign affairs entirely to his protégé.

It was a physically and intellectually rejuvenated Jawaharlal Nehru who stepped off a ship in Madras in December 1927, just in time to attend the annual session of the Congress which was being held in the southern port city. Motilal had suggested to Gandhi that his son be offered the presidency of the party at the session, but Jawaharlal had turned down an exploratory inquiry from the Mahatma while he was in Switzerland, and Gandhi was reluctant to make the offer anyway: “He is too highsouled to stand the anarchy and hooliganism that seem to be growing in the Congress.” Jawaharlal himself took another view in a letter to his close friend Syed Mahmud: “The real objection to me is not youth or jealousy but fear of my radical ideas. I do not propose to tone down my ideas for the presidentship.”

But the formerly uncritical Gandhian had returned a self-consciously radical anti-imperialist, impatient with the cautiousness of his elders and convinced that the British connection had to be completely severed. No sooner had the Congress session begun than Jawaharlal was embroiled in a controversy over a draft resolution he submitted calling, in explicit detail, for complete independence for India. The party leaders, including Gandhi himself, thought this was going too far; freedom within the Empire, or Dominion status, was the most they felt they could stake a claim for, and it was already more than the British had shown any inclination to grant. (The British refusal to reciprocate the cooperation extended them by the Indian-elected members of the Viceroy’s Council had already disillusioned both Jinnah and Motilal.) The party elders could not persuade Jawaharlal to back down, however, and a compromise was eventually struck on a demand for “complete national independence,” the details left carefully undefined. Most of the radical language in Jawaharlal’s draft (calling, for instance, for the immediate withdrawal of Britain’s “army of occupation”) was excised.

Mahatma Gandhi had not been present in Madras when the resolution was carried, but he wrote in his magazine Young India that the resolution was “hastily conceived and thoughtlessly passed” by a Congress descending to the level of a “schoolboys’ debating society.” Gandhi rebuked Nehru for his zeal, pointing out that “the Congress stultified itself” by passing such resolutions “when it knows that it is not capable of carrying them into effect. By passing such resolutions we make an exhibition of our impotence.” These were harsh words; Jawaharlal was furious, and dashed off an excoriating letter to his mentor which so hurt the older man that he destroyed it. A second letter, still angry but more measured, has survived. In it Nehru reiterates his long-held admiration for the Mahatma and expresses his disappointment: “I have asked you many times what you expected to do in the future and your answers have been far from satisfying.” That blunt sentence was followed by a long list of objections to the Mahatma’s views on matters ranging from religion to contraception. Jawaharlal seemed conscious that his words would cause deep offense. “I have already exceeded all reasonable limits,” he wrote in conclusion, acknowledging how far he had strayed from his previously undiluted fealty to the Mahatma. “My only excuse is my mental agitation.”

Gandhi’s reply saw this as “an open warfare against me and my views.… The differences between you and me appear to me to be so vast and radical that there seems to be no meeting ground between us.” He made it clear he was prepared to break publicly with his former acolyte, offering to make this correspondence public. Jawaharlal immediately realized he had gone too far. Matters had not been helped by distorted (and sometimes deliberately false) reports in the newspapers suggesting he had been even far more critical in public of Gandhi (one report alleged that he had described the Mahatma as “effete and fossilized”). He wrote an abject letter of apology to “my dear Bapuji” (a term he had begun using for Gandhi, connoting filial devotion): “Am I not your child in politics, though perhaps a truant and errant child?” The Mahatma was disarmed, and immediately forgiving. The crisis between mentor and protégé was defused.

In reality the only difference between their approaches related to timing. Gandhi did not disagree about the ultimate goal, but he believed his countrymen had to be prepared for it through a mass mobilization that had not yet occurred. Jawaharlal’s resolution was the work of a few English-educated elitists; it was carried by the party but had not yet aroused the consciousness of the nation. In March 1928 he wrote a letter to the press calling on people who were in favor of independence, against religion in political life, and sought to end class inequalities to get in touch with each other and with him. Nehru himself started two policy study groups within the party to press his agenda — the Republican Congress and the Independence for India League, the latter adding socialism to its republican ideals. But these were again the forums of the privileged. Gandhi wanted to take the issue of freedom beyond the party conclaves, to the people at large. And in doing so he wanted Jawaharlal Nehru by his side.

5 Not to be confused with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Maulana Muhammad Ali (1878–1931) was a leader of the Khilafat agitation and president of the Congress in 1923.