Nehru, the man and statesman

After Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru probably is the most written about Indian leader of the twentieth century. One would naturally expect that, considering that Nehru was the first Prime Minister of independent India and remained as one for seventeen continuous years which is something of a record. Apart from S. Gopal's comprehensive three-volume official biography, there have been, as Stanley Wolpert, another biographer put it "hundreds of books" on Nehru, many of them quoting original sources.

So do we need one more?

This, newest addition, written by Shashi Tharoor, currently an Under-Secretary General at the United Nations, makes no claim to originality. Neither does Tharoor claim great scholarship. It is, claims the author, merely "a reinterpretation" of an "extraordinary life and career", no doubt meant for a new generation, though it is dedicated to Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary-General "who as a young man in Ghana, admired Nehru": Fair enough. This is a slim volume, drawing information from previous writers, all of whom are duly acknowledged.

What distinguishes this new work is its title: "Nehru, The Invention of India". Stanley Wolpert titled his work as "As Tryst With Destiny". M. J. Akbar's volume was entitled "The making of India". These titles tell us more of what and how the authors viewed their subject than what the subject himself was.

Tharoor's contention is that for seventeen early years Nehru was in India. No doubt he was. Certainly Nehru did try to raise an India of his dreams. To an extent, one supposes, he succeeded. To an extent he did change the thinking of one whole generation of Indians, He sought to establish a secular, scientific-minded generation with high ideals.

He was clean, incorruptible, above petty thoughts though not above being wily where he felt it necessary to assert himself. States Tharoor: "His legacy is ours, whether agree with everything he stood for or not. What we are today, both for good and for ill, we owe in great measure to one man". May be that is slightly exaggerated. Great as the man was, he had his faults and his shortcomings. Tharoor does not hide them. Great as his ambitions were, there were obvious limitations to them. Tharoor has no hesitation in pointing them out. Thus, though he laid the foundation for great technical and scientific institutions like the IITs, gifted researchers like Hargovind Khurana and S. Chandrashekar had to go abroad to win Nobel Prizes for the U.S. and not India and disturbing as it may seem, post-independence India has not yet produced scientists like C. V Raman, Satyen Bose or Meghand Saha.

Tharoor does note that the fault may lie in over-bureaucratisation and or under-funding of scientific institutes, not in the conceptualisadon of the institutes itself. In his time, socialist economics was considered the final answer to the removal of poverty, Tragically it turned out to be, in Tharoor's own words, "disastrous, condemning the Indian people to poverty and stagnation and engendering inefficiency, red-tapism and corruption on a scale almost unrivalled elsewhere". That is telling the truth.

Tharoor is an admitted admirer of Nehru, but not a wide-eyed one, blind to the man's fault. He points out, thus, that Non-alignment, considered a Nehruvian invention, preserved India's self-respect and enhanced its international standing "without bringing any concrete benefits to the Indian people". All said and done Nehru's most outstanding gift to India lies probably in the democratic institution-building in which he undoubtedly excelled and to which succeeding generations have to be grateful.

Very correctly Tharoor observes: "India's progress has been mixed. India's challenge today is both to depart from his legacy and to build on it... If we succeed, we must acknowledge that he laid the foundation for such a success; if we fail, we will find in Nehru many of the seeds of our failure". Jawaharlal's story makes us often wonder whether there would have been a Jawaharlal, if his father, Motilal" first three male heirs had not died an early death. Had they lived, who then would have made his mark? One can only speculate. If Jawaharlal had listed to the sage advice of Sardar Patel not to take the Kashmir "dispute" to the United Nations, would two succeeding generations not have been spared unending fights with Pakistan?

Tharoor should have gone deeper into the role played by Lord Mountbatten, and, perhaps, by Edwina Mountbatten as well. British foreign affairs papers surely would have been available to him. Tharoor merely says: "recent scholarship has confiriped that British diplomacy at the time played a particularly active role in recasting the issue internationally to India's disadvantage".

Tharoor would have done some real service had he gone deeper into the issue. All that he does is to end up saying: "Nehru should hardly have been surprised to see other countries acting in pursuance of their own interests: the wonder was that a man of such sharp intelligence and insight should have failed to more clearly define and act upon India's":

In this sense this is rather superficial work, a mere putting together of information culled from other peoples' writings, with nothing added by way of Tharoor's own research. Even when he says that many distinguished women (Quoting Wolpert's speculations) "May have become his lovers" the author makes no effort either to prove or disprove the assumption. All that he can say is that" (his) letters to Padmaja Naidu,- Sarojini's daughter and herself a frequent overnight guest at his house, are perhaps amongst the most exquisite love-letters ever written by an Indian public figure". Guesswork not proved beyond any challenge.

The only commendable part of this book is that it is an easy read and makes a good introduction to people who do not either have the time or the desire to go deeper into the life and times of an extraordinary man. To many Jawaharlal came through as a stern, unbending and aristocratic idealist but Tharoor throws new light on another aspect of the man who could "be utterly charming to total strangers, witty, engaging andeven (in the right mood) frivolous". Jawaharlal was primarily a man of his times, even as Sardar Patel was or Subhas Chandra Bose.

The tides of time sweep leaders away and it is necessary for new writers to produce fresh biographies if only to remind contemporary generations that such a man as Jawaharlal once lived and for a time captured the hearts of his fellow Indians. Sparkling, anecdotal and not necessarily controversial, "Nehru, The Invention of India" is inventive in its own delightful way, low-keyed, unpretentious but highly readable. Old hat to old readers but surely a notable introduction to the first six decades of the twentieth century to younger ones.

NEHRU: THE INVENTION OF INDIA, by Shashi Tharoor, 216pp, Dehli: Penguin Viking. Rs 295