Jawaharlal Nehru, a voracious reader and impeccable writer with a philosophical bent of mind
Biswanath Bhattacharya
January 27, 2024, 07:19:05
It was 27th May 1964. I heard on the Radio that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had expired. It was one of the saddest moments in my life. I admired Nehru like a God next only to Netaji. By this time, I had read his Autobiography, Letters from a Father to His Daughter ( From the moment they are born, little girls can have their fathers wrapped around their pinkie fingers. As their children’s protectors, dads guide sons and daughters along the path of life. Leading by example, offering advice when needed and sometimes even when it’s not needed! Sharing dad jokes, being a safe place to land, and fostering their kids’ confidence are just a few of a man’s jobs as a dad. But when it comes to fathers and daughters, a special bond that a little girl shares with her daddy is perfectly summed up in that book) and his Glimpses of World History. In fact, one excerpt from his autobiography was included in our English syllabus for Class -IX.
The following day, the Ananda Bazar Patrika picturised Nehru looking at the setting sun and a published literary supplement on Nehru. It was so captivating, so fascinating, and so touching.
On that day the will of Nehru was read on All India Radio in 1964: I literally wept. It was highly philosophical and captured his love and affection towards Mother India! It was the Poetics of a Nation.
Nehru cannot be seen merely as an object of history or as a policy fragment. He was a dream, a hope, a claim to innocence, an aesthetic figure that gave modernity a touch of elegance. That is why Gandhi opted for him. The practical Gandhi realised that one needed the impractical Nehru to survive the first decade of Independence. Development and planning are dull words borrowed from a dismal social science. Nehru gave them a touch of poetry; only the poetics of the first decade allowed us to retain hope and dream differently.
Perhaps his extraordinary writing achievement was the most underestimated quality of Jawaharlal Nehru—whose life has seen more than its fair share of hagiology and denigration. An India that remains divided over his political legacy can unite to appreciate his remarkable contribution to the world of Indian letters.
It is all the more astonishing that much of his writing occurred amid the privations of imprisonment, the only periods of his life that afforded him the sustained quiet needed to produce memorable prose. In eight terms of imprisonment between 1922 and 1945, Nehru spent a grand total of 3,262 days in eight different jails. Nearly ten years of his life were to be wasted behind bars—though not entirely wasted, since they allowed him to produce several remarkable books of reflection, nationalist awakening, and autobiography.
He used his time in jail to read widely—his first stint in prison featured the Quran, the Bible, and the Bhagavad Gita, a history of the Holy Roman Empire, Ernest Binfield Havel’s The History of Aryan Rule in India from the Earliest Times to the Death of Akbar with its tributes to India’s glorious past, and the memoirs of the Mughal emperor Babur, and the French traveller François Bernier. In 1926, he wrote that a course of study of Bertrand Russell’s books is required in India most. During another stint in jail in 1930, he devoured Russell, Nikolai Bukharin, and Oswald Spengler, read André Maurois and Romain Rolland in French, and even threw in Lloyd George’s speeches and Shakespeare’s sonnets. He was allowed to take notes, though he rarely needed to consult them; once he had finished a book, it found a place in his mental reference library.
Nehru produced his work from this well-furnished intellect, emerging from a mind that remained intensely curious and ready to engage with the new. After a decade at the feet of his father, Motilal, and the awe-inspiring Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru spent most of 1926–27 in Europe. These twenty months were a hiatus in Nehru’s political career but not in developing his political thought. Jawaharlal kept up his writing, publishing a letter in the Journal de Genève and numerous articles in the Indian press. 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 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, it was revealing, nonetheless. Jawaharlal left India as Motilal Nehru’s son and Mahatma Gandhi’s acolyte, but he returned his own man.
His four-day visit to the USSR in 1927, supplemented by extensive reading about Russia in English, prompted a series of articles on the USSR in the Indian papers 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 nationalists. Jawaharlal Nehru’s first book was a paean to the Soviet Union. Yet those critics who saw him as ‘pro-Soviet’ overlooked his independence of mind, always his most attractive feature.
His insights into world affairs revealed both intelligence and acuity. He wrote as early as 1927! that ‘England, 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 principles of Marx would rule the country; 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 anti-colonial freedom fighter, while taking a benign view of Russian and Chinese communism. He thought that ‘the significant 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.
Specific segments in our society are engaged in a futile and odious comparison between the tall leaders of our freedom struggle; some others are out to diminish Jawaharlal Nehru’s stature and repudiate his legacy. Without being swayed by the rhetoric of the publicists or the ill-informed media, we need to bolster Nehru’s position as the second-best leader after the Mahatma. “Swachh Bharat” will not be sufficient. Whosoever is in power, Nehru’s memory must be kept alive in the interest of our democratic and secular values. Students of Indian history, on the other hand, will benefit from his writings, which embrace the creative thrust and splendour of the Continental and Indian civilisation.
Nehru was a voracious reader: he read 55 books from May 21, 1922, till January 29, 1923 alone. He delved into philosophy and turned the pages of history to illuminate his understanding of the ideas and movements that stood apart as catalysts for meaningful changes. He looked through other people’s writings to understand how simple, ordinary men and women became heroes and how their strivings made history stirring and epoch-making. The prison had made a man of him, he told the Socialist leader, Acharya Narendra Dev, while they were in jail for the last time in 1942.
Why did he write? Who did he write for? He had no archives to consult, so he relied on his recollections and on bits of information that he could conceal. He disliked being called a writer, and yet, armed with varied experience, writing became a pleasant occupation. Sometimes, he didn’t write for weeks; now and again, he wrote daily. His letters from jail represented his moods and thoughts at the time of each event; they were also his escapes from jail.
He wrote to regenerate his generation, to render them capable of following Gandhiji’s non-violent satyagraha, and to put before them the tangled web of current affairs in Russia, Germany, England, America, Japan, China, France, Spain, Italy and Central Europe. It was a tangled web, no doubt, difficult to unravel and see as a whole. Yet, he presented the many-coloured life of other ages and countries, analysed the ebb and flow of the old civilisations, and took up ideas in their full flow. The superimposed loneliness empowered him to turn to himself for fellowship and guidance, arrange his thoughts, and evolve his political creed undisturbed by external influences. This exercise affected the whole gamut of his emotions.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s writings transmit the enthusiasm and animation he felt for the discipline of history. There is something uncanny about how a self-taught and amateur historian like him explored the unbounded universe in complete variety. His vision was far from settled, but it was being etched out in conjunction and in contention with other voices.
He lived in the enchantment of India's ancient and medieval histories and sought to understand it in terms of the present and the future. Why should there be so much misery in the world? This question troubled him. Why do people argue and quarrel as a sect or a religious group? Why are they blind to the vision of freedom? His comments on political affairs, many of which tend to corroborate or supplement, to a fair degree, with the information that is available to us from some other sources.
Nehru asked what he was heir to and answered that he was heir to all that humanity had achieved over tens of thousands of years, to all that it had thought and felt and suffered and taken joy in, to its cries of triumph and its bitter agonies of defeat, to that astonishing adventure, which had begun so long ago and yet continued and beckoned to man. Besides commenting on the wisdom of India’s great, inexhaustible spiritual heritage, he talked of the vital necessity to apply it intelligently and reasonably to the present and the future.
His vision was hardly ever trapped in the exclusivist, culturological mode; far from it; it was supremely inclusive and driven by a belief in the existence, even the necessity of cultures constantly interacting with each other, of cultures working on and transforming the other and their own through a live contact. He talked of people becoming full of faith for a great cause and brought their treasures of knowledge, learning, heroism and devotion to the fore. He looked at the entire world with a fresh eye and gave a balanced view of man’s life on many continents. His was a global view — not an Asian one more than a European one.
With this eclectic approach, he called for breaking down national histories and constructing a more relevant world history to understand the global exchange of ideas in the past and the necessity of exchange for a better future. He wanted books for specialists and the general, interested lay reader in a popular and accessible mode. He liked books on the daily lives of ordinary men and women who lived in the past (family budgets from hundreds of years ago, he suggests, could show us how life was organised in that age!). He wanted Asia’s history to be read as widely as possible so that the readers should think of all the countries and all the peoples, not just one little country. Glimpses of World History is not a standard textbook, but it still makes an impression of sustained intellectual power. Received with a chorus of admiration, it has become traditional reading in India, Africa, Europe, and the United States. Fenner Brockwa, a friend of India and Secretary of the Independent Labour Party for many years, mentioned that his daughter learnt more from Glimpses than any other history book she had studied at school.
Written almost entirely in prison in the 1930s, it bears the mark of a passionate but humane nationalism free from jingoism of any kind.. Others have also put pen to paper on their lives and times, but Nehru’s biography glows with patriotic feelings. There is no cover-up and no concealment of facts. As for the “self,” the influences are too subtle or diffused to be easily identified or measured. The author loved India tenderly, and, in the words of Monod, to him that loved, much may be forgiven.
Autobiographical confessions cannot be regarded as accurate descriptions of a consistent life. Yet, Jawaharlal Nehru’s narrative is out of the ordinary precisely for its tropes and figures of thought, without which he would not have turned the real events of life into a narrative and transformed them from a chronicle into a story.
The Discovery of India is a hymn to the glories of India. He mapped the metaphysical and philosophical approach to life, idealised ancient India as a world apart, independent of and superior to the rest of the civilisations, toning down the barbarism of the caste system and throwing the warm colours of fancy around his narrative. At the same time, with his eyes set on India’s infinite charm, variety and oneness, he worked ceaselessly for a synthesis, drawing on the best and breaking with the worst. He consciously followed Gandhi and Tagore in the direction of the universal. Consequently, India appears in The Discovery as a space of ceaseless cultural mixing and, in the past, as a celebration of the soiling effects of cultural miscegenation and accretion.
The Nehruvian legacy- while the romantics in Nehru drew on old and new interpretations to buttress an ecumenical and universalistic point of view, some of the other Indian writers did so from a rather narrow perspective. He conducts the reader through the labyrinth of a colonial era, narrates the most complex events, and recreates portraits of outstanding fellow countrymen. His writings make public the spirit and substance of his many-sidedness, the deep-seated urge for freedom, and the negative response to the concomitants and consequences of colonial rule.
What is the Nehruvian legacy? Those living in a vibrant parliamentary democracy and amid creative institutions should not ask this question unless they wish to be identified with the Nehru-debunkers. They must remember that Nehru kept the country together, established secular ideals, propelled it forward with the thrust of science and modernity, healed some of the wounds of Partition, and stood before the world at the head of the non-aligned camp. “Men may break,” Gandhi was to say on the eve of the Quit India Movement, “but they should not bend beyond brute force.” His political heir did just that through his public life. He shared with tens and thousands of prisoners the changing moods of exaltations and depressions, of intense activity and enforced leisure. He bolstered the idea that man is not just a simple individual but a multitude of thoughts and ideas.
What raised Nehru in public estimation was his concern for the poor and the underprivileged. The life of the people, which flows in a dark current beneath political events, attracted his attention — the circumstances, sorrows and joys of millions of humble men and women. Even if his misfortunes had a melodramatic tinge, there was always a constant element of moral austerity to serve as a counterweight.
And my write-up would surely be incomplete if I didn’t mention his “ Tryst with Destiny” Speech.
"Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance...”.
This excerpt is sufficient to understand enough what Jawaharlal Nehru was made of. It is a sheer piece of poetry.
The power of that magical moment when India became free, which Mildred Talbot recorded, must never be forgotten. However, my mind turned to another extraordinary moment 76 years ago — the moment of India’s celebrated “freedom at midnight”. I am privileged to have seen a remarkable document, a letter written on August 27, 1947, by a young American woman, Mildred Talbot, who had the rare privilege of being present at the Independence ceremonies of both India and Pakistan.
Rejoinder: My write-up is completely apolitical
I have intentionally not brought the matter so that there are no political angularities; I have also not mentioned why Sardar Patel or Veer Savarkar ( who was sent to the notorious Cellular Jail in the Andamans in 1911 for his revolutionary activity, Savarkar first petitioned the British for early release within months of beginning his 50-year sentence. Then again in 1913 and several times till he was finally transferred to a mainland prison in 1921 before his final release in 1924. The burden of his petitions: let me go, and I will give up the fight for independence and be loyal to the colonial government. Savarkar’s defenders insist his promises were a tactical ploy. Still, his critics say they were not and that he stayed true to his promise after leaving the Andamans by staying away from the freedom struggle and helping the British with his divisive theory of ‘Hindutva’, which was another form of the Muslim League’s Two Nation theory ) are being lionised at the expense of Gandhi and Nehru.
I have also not mentioned that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru wrote 112 books in his lifetime. Books written by him are taught at 80 universities around the world.
President Biden has presented our PM with a book of poems by Robert Frost. Was he conveying some subtle message? These four lines from Frost's ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening’ had been copied out by Nehru and kept on his table: 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. Nehru's masterly biographer, S. Gopal, had drawn attention to this in 1984 in Vol 3 of his trilogy on Nehru. These lines had been translated into Hindi, too, by Harivansh Rai Bachchan.
(Tripurainfo)