The Indian Express
Sunday, 16 November 2003 

A Discovery of Nehru

Modern India first came to life in his mind, says Sagarika Ghose

Today, Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy to India is under question as never before. An alternative version of Indian nationalism challenges the secular socialist non-aligned vision that dominated India for over 40 years. Nehru, aristocratic prince of hearts, Cambridge-educated intellectual, handsome, charming, manly, world statesman and adored by all Indians, is now cast as the creator of a malign bureaucrat-dominated leviathan state which squashed the enterprise of his people. Worse, Nehru is accused of promulgating a romantic ‘‘secularism’’, he was an Englishman cut off from the life blood of the Hindu faith, fatally elitist and distant from the very ‘‘masses’’ he so romanticised.

From Nehru was born the Nehruvian elite — characterised by the Nehruvian dilemma — a thin wavering line of some of the best educated, most cosmopolitan people in the world, trying to understand, govern and identify with the world’s poorest and most illiterate.

Shashi Tharoor is Nehru’s legatee. Like the subject of his book, he too is a western-educated lover of the genius of his own country; his writings strain to throw off colonial perceptions and strike out towards the future, where the Indian is not only someone steeped in the Bhagavad Gita but also in Proust (and sometimes P.G. Wodehouse). Indeed Nehru’s ‘‘discovery of India’’ has become almost a rite of passage for India’s educated class which learns to read Kalidasa in a western university.

He continues his quest in this deeply felt portrait. In the process, he delineates that generation of Indians who invented India even as they fought for her freedom, who created a new beloved country in passionate works of poetry, literature, song, who were mutually divided but united in their constant love affair with the entity known as India. India was Gandhi’s child, Sardar Patel’s motherland, Maulana Azad’s ideal and Nehru’s aphrodisiac.

Nehru is part of a Penguin Lives series and doesn’t claim to chart pathbreaking new ground. Much of the material is drawn from secondary sources and a great deal of it, such as Motilal’s devotion to his son, Jawaharlal’s neglect of Kamala and Indira, sharp differences with Gandhi and Bose, the Robert Frost poem discovered on his study table, have passed into folklore.

Tharoor’s portrait is seductive not for its information but for its insight into the freedom struggle’s most glamorous figure and for the deft warp and weft between unfolding events and the progress of a human life. The effect of Jallianwala Bagh on Nehru’s political development, the toll of long imprisonment and the electrifying influence of international meetings such as the Brussels Congress against Colonial Oppression are woven into the evolution of the mercurial, hot-headed, refined, short-tempered, courteous man, who succumbed in the end to an economic structure that was far too theoretical and far too driven by emotional nationalism — the benevolent patriarch whose ‘‘imperial travels’’ among the Indian masses led him, as it turned out, towards a faulty grand design. ‘‘The people’’ became an inert thing which had to be moulded and enhanced by Nehru’s own act of will because of a subliminal suspicion of the illiterate. Tharoor’s Jawaharlal is irresistible, but he is also a monumental egoist, he is a passionate politician, yet unable to build a new generation of leaders.

One relationship Tharoor might have dealt with superbly had he turned greater attention to it was Nehru’s relationship with Gandhi. What peculiar attraction lay at the centre of that ever-changing relationship? Was Nehru’s own insecurity about India at the heart of his reverence for his “Bapuji”? Tharoor’s questioning, subtle narrative opens the door to deeper questions about the man in whose mind modern India first came to life. Nehru emerges as flawed and lonely but, as the author suggests, let us never forget that the foundations of democracy that were laid half a century ago have proved deep and irreversible.