INTERVIEW BY SAMUEL ABRAHAM
Writers' World
The Week, February 15, 2004

Much has been written about Jawaharlal Nehru, the English-educated aristocrat forever ready to be doomed with the millions rather than be saved alone, the architect of modern India who made industries its temples and the ultimate democrat and secularist. His dreams may now be shattered, but not his legacy. Three biographies were published last year. Shashi Tharoor, a senior official of the United Nations and celebrated author, sketches this legacy in his biography, Nehru: The Invention of India. Excerpts from an interview:

How far have you 'discovered India' after writing the book?

Each of my books has involved a self-interrogation about some aspect of India, of the forces and ideas that have made India and nearly unmade it. I guess it is fair to say that in this book too, I am still scratching at that same itch.

What is Nehru's single biggest influence on you?

Jawaharlal Nehru's impact on India is too great not to be re-examined periodically. His legacy is ours, whether we agree with everything he stood for or not. What Indians are today, both for good and for ill, we owe in great measure to one man. That is why his story is not simply history.

Equally, Nehru's idea of India is fundamental to me as an Indian, and as a writer. It is that embodied in our Constitution and in decades of political practice - that of a pluralist society. Nehru defined Indian nationhood through the power of his ideas, in many ways like Thomas Jefferson in the United States, a figure to whom he bears considerable resemblance - a man of great intellect and sweeping vision, a wielder of words without parallel, high-minded and eloquent, yet in many ways blind to his own faults and those of others around him.

What is the relevance of Nehru when Nehruvian socialism has given way to liberalisation and free trade, and his secular dreams lie in shambles?

Nehru, who led the country for its first 17 years of Independence, was the man who ensured, protected and preserved India's democracy. He could easily, like so many other post-colonial nationalists, have turned into a dictator, arguing that the great challenges of development required an authoritarian hand. Instead, he went out of his way to nurture democracy. Nehru was so unquestionably India's leader that all he needed to do if anyone opposed him was to threaten to resign: he usually got his way. And yet Nehru was a convinced democrat, a man so wary of the risks of autocracy that, at the crest of his rise, he authored an anonymous article warning Indians of the dangers of giving dictatorial temptations to Nehru.

How much of a Nehruvian is Vajpayee?

More than is commonly supposed by many of Nehru's detractors in the BJP. Upon Nehru's death, Vajpayee delivered a magnificent elegy in Parliament that "a dream has remained half-fulfilled, a song has become silent, and a flame has vanished into the Unknown. The dream was of a world free of fear and hunger; the song a great epic resonant with the spirit of the Gita and as fragrant as a rose; the flame a candle which burnt all night long, showing us the way."

When he took over as Minister of External Affairs in India's first non-Congress Government in 1977, Vajpayee noticed that a portrait of Nehru was missing from its usual spot in the ministerial chamber, removed in an excess of zeal by functionaries anxious to please the new rulers. The lifelong critic of the Congress demanded its return. As he had said in his elegy, "the sun has set, yet by the shadow of the stars we must find our way."

What is India's challenge today in terms of Nehruvian vision?

British historian E.P. Thompson has argued that India is the most important country for the future of the world, because all the major questions facing the world are being answered in India. Dictatorship versus democracy; centralisation versus federalism; socialism versus free enterprise; protectionism versus globalisation; pluralism versus fundamentalism; terrorism versus peaceful change (the bullet against the ballot) - all of these issues are central to India's political life today.

And the answers India finds will resonate across the globe, because Indians are one-sixth of humanity. Our challenge is to develop an India open to the contention of ideas and interests within it, unafraid of the prowess or the products of the outside world, wedded to the pluralism that is India's greatest strength, and determined to liberate and fulfil the creative energies of its people. Such an India can make the 21st century its own.

Was Nehru more English than Indian?

Nonsense. I have no patience with this 'last Englishman in India' stuff. Nehru was a product of the influence of an English education on an Indian mind, but his sensibility, his values, his sense of historical connection, his civilisational consciousness were all Indian. If you have any doubt, ask the English whether they thought he was one of them!

How do you assess him as one of the first Indo-Anglian writers?

Greatness is an overused word, but he really was an astonishingly good writer. Many of his prison writings are amongst the finest political literature produced in the English language in the 20th century (and I don't mean just in India). His "tryst with destiny" speech and his funeral oration for Gandhi rank with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address as amongst the greatest political speeches ever written in English. He's right up there at the top of the canon of Indian writing.

You have mentioned that Nehru pointed to the Anglo-Saxon bloc dominating the world. Your comments in view of the invasion of Iraq.

It was remarkably perceptive of him to have predicted this in 1927.

What are you working on now?

I have started a new novel, continuing my pattern of alternating fiction and non-fiction. Obviously, fiction affords you much more freedom, but you need not just time to write, but a space inside your head, to create an alternative universe and to inhabit it, so that the characters and concerns of that world are as real to you as your own. As one who has struggled to find the time and the "space" to write, I have found non-fiction easier, because I can allow my daily work to interrupt it and still find it possible to pick up the threads with less effort than fiction demands. So it might be a while before the novel comes out. Meanwhile, Penguin wants to put together a collection of my literary essays, tentatively titled 'Bookless in Baghdad', for publication early next year.