Nehru

Benjamin Zachariah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134577392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Biografías históricas

This engaging new biography dispels many myths surrounding Nehru, and distinguishes between the icon he has become and the politician he actually was.

Benjamin Zachariah places Nehru in the context of the issues of his time, including the central theme of nationalism, the impact of Cold War pressures on India and the transition from colonial control to a precarious independence.

How did Jawaharlal Nehru come to lead the Indian nationalist movement, and how did he sustain his leadership as the first Prime Minister of independent India? Nehru's vision of India, its roots in Indian politics and society, as well as its viability have been central to historical and present-day views of India.

Connecting the domestic and international aspects of his political life and ideology, this study provides a fascinating insight into Nehru, his times and his legacy.

1

THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL

Jawaharlal Nehru was born in Allahabad on November 14, 1889, the son of the lawyer Motilal Nehru and his wife Swarup Rani. By birth a Kashmiri Brahmin, Jawaharlal was born into a family whose traditions had more of the North Indian Persianised elite of the late Mughal Empire than the Brahminical in it. The Nehru family had moved to Delhi from Kashmir in the service of the Emperor Farrukhsiyyar, the same emperor whose grant to the East India Company of the zamindari of Calcutta¹ and the right to duty-free trade in Bengal had paved the way for British power in India. The family had then lost its position and fortune in the aftermath of the great Revolt of 1857, which saw the destruction of the last vestiges of the Mughal Empire, and had had to flee Delhi for Agra.

Jawaharlal’s father, Motilal, was born in 1861 at a low point in the family’s history. He was his father Gangadhar Nehru’s third and posthumous son; the family had been supported by his two elder brothers, Bansidhar and Nandlal. Motilal was largely responsible for refounding the family fortune, rising to the highest ranks of the legal profession in Allahabad, where the family had moved in 1886, and where Nandlal also worked as a lawyer. Motilal’s not inconsiderable wealth, therefore, was not so much inherited as re-earned, in the practice of a profession that had acquired great importance in British India, and one that had contributed greatly to the emergence of a new Indian middle class.

Motilal owed his wealth largely to his work for the old landed aristocracy, the talukdars of Awadh, whose property disputes and litigation over succession kept his practice busy. To these large landlords the British had promised security of status and landholding after the Revolt to ensure that they did not side with future revolts. It was the Conservative prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli’s, idea that British rule should side with, and not against, the ‘natural leaders’ of Indian society, the landed aristocracy and the princes, to ensure stability of British rule in India. As far as his government was concerned, the causes of the great Revolt of 1857 lay in the British attempt to raise new classes to power at the expense of the old. Although these new classes had remained loyal to the British at a time when most of the country had risen in revolt, the new classes were a minority who by virtue of their newness could not provide the British with a necessary base of indigenous collaborators. The British link with ‘natural leaders’ was considered the key to the longevity, and assumed permanence, of British rule in India. This was a link that the Communist International, in one of its more felicitous phrases, was later to characterise as the ‘feudal–imperial alliance’ – where an old feudal aristocracy was kept alive by virtue of its support from the imperialists, instead of being destroyed by the new forces of capitalism unleashed on a colony by the metropolis.

Perhaps, however, the line between the old and the new India can be too sharply drawn as far as the ‘new middle classes’ are concerned. Motilal Nehru is an interesting, and perhaps not atypical, transitional figure among the professional classes in India. Both Motilal and his forefathers were service gentry: the latter had served the bureaucracy of the Mughal state, unfortunately in its time of decline; and Motilal served the legal system of the new British rulers. The clerical professions of the old regime sought employment in the clerical professions of the new. It was a logical shift for Motilal from a highly Persianised literary, bureaucratic and cultural world in which he grew up, and in which he continued to be comfortable, to the Anglicised world of the new political power. He wholeheartedly took to the task of mastering the conventions of the new milieu, wielding an elegant and acid pen in the English language, adopting European dress and European table manners. This was for him perfectly reasonable: adopting the cultural norms of the dominant political power was the means of upward social mobility and the marker of social status. But it was not that this was a purely instrumentalist choice. Having learnt Persian (but not Sanskrit, considered by the British to be the classical language of the ‘Hindus’) during his early schooling, he had then acquired English and proceeded to the British-run Muir Central College in Allahabad, where he was taught to admire English values, English culture and English institutions, embodying, he was told, the principles of liberty and progress. Introduced to this highly idealised picture of the rulers’ culture without the experiences to question it, Motilal took time to achieve disillusionment.

His son Jawaharlal, one generation further into British rule, was educated into European cultural norms, and was quite comfortable in them. He was consequently not quite as comfortable in the North Indian elite tradition, though he could read and write Urdu (the Persianised and more literary version of the North Indian lingua franca, Hindustani, written in the Arabic script) as well as Hindi (the more Sanskritised version, written in the Devanagari script). The best and most useful education, according to Motilal, was one that would empower his son to conduct his affairs efficiently in the language of power: English. Accordingly, a few Sanskrit lessons from a pandit² gave way to two English governesses in succession, to teach him English and basic arithmetic, and then an Irish-French private tutor to teach English literature and the sciences, whose Theosophical leanings – of which more shall be said – briefly influenced the young Jawaharlal before his sceptical sense reasserted itself.

Jawaharlal’s contact with the older cultural traditions of his family came mainly through its women, who were not expected to adopt the new values: the English-dominated world was the public domain of men. As a child, he heard mythological tales and stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata from his mother and aunts. But the women of the time were not particularly well-educated; therefore Jawaharlal’s literary and intellectual upbringing could not altogether draw upon elements that were undervalued by the old as well as the new society. Women were assigned definite roles in the old society and the new; folk tales and religious myths, for a self-consciously rationalist elite, were old wives’ tales, pleasant, but not to be taken too seriously: religion was ‘a women’s affair’.³ His other contact with the society that his generation would come to call ‘traditional’ came through the family’s old servant, Mubarak Ali. From him, Jawaharlal heard stories of the great Revolt of 1857, the events of which had significantly affected both his own and Mubarak Ali’s families. Later in his life, he was to return to these themes and to try to make sense of them.

The young Jawaharlal’s private tutor, Ferdinand Brooks, had been recommended to Motilal for the job by Annie Besant, Fabian socialist, Irish nationalist and now a member of the mystic-religious Theosophical Society as well as of the Indian National Congress. Mrs Besant had come to India in 1893 as a devotee of the new faith of Theosophy, propounded by Madame Blavatsky, a Russian noblewoman, and H.S. Olcott, an American lawyer and journalist. An Irish Home Ruler herself, she was sympathetic to Indian demands for a greater share in government, and was close to the social circles that frequented the annual Congress sessions. Motilal, as befitted a member of these social circles, had attended the first few sessions of the Congress. Founded in 1885 by liberal Englishmen and Indian notables and with a view to voicing Indian opinion as did ‘Her Majesty’s loyal opposition’ in Britain, it had a preponderance of members from the new Indian middle classes – doctors, lawyers, teachers and newspapermen. It was as yet far from the organised mass party of independence it was later to become; its annual sessions met for three days a year in the pleasant weather of the winter months, passed a few resolutions, and awaited the next session. Later, more radical nationalists would refer to its members as ‘mendicants’, begging favours from the British government and relying on the latter’s non-existent goodwill for political change. Yet these radicals did inherit the main achievement of the moderate years – a strong (and also academically respectable) economic nationalism that attributed to British rule the economic decline of India and the lack of industrialisation in India.

The influence of Mrs Besant and the almost-influence of Theosophy on the Nehru family are worth dwelling upon. Theosophy claimed to be a universal religion; it borrowed much from what it understood to be Hinduism and Buddhism, and believed that a noble Aryan-ness could be found at the root of these ancient world religions. Theosophy became a movement capable of generating multiple meanings. Some who engaged with its ideas later became connected with Aryan supremacist or fascist organisations in Europe and elsewhere. Others remained content to maintain a mystical connection with it.

The influence of Theosophy on many Indians was more significant. In a social environment in which the culture and civilisation of India had been denigrated, continuously undervalued or considered inferior by the dominant values imposed by the colonising power, the suggestion

that an Indian religion was actually considered noble by Europeans was an empowering one. Theosophy became the route for many Englisheducated Indians to return to ‘Hinduism’, playing a central role in the so-called Hindu revivalist movements that became endemic from the late nineteenth century, including the often explicitly anti-Muslim Arya Samaj, a social reform movement that stressed the noble purity (an approximate translation of the Sanskritic ‘Arya’) of an ‘original’ Hinduism that could allegedly be found in the Vedas. Indeed, even so apparently ‘indigenous’ a figure as Mahatma Gandhi had his faith in the validity of his own civilisation restored to him by reading the Bhagavad Gita in the Theosophist Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation: The Song Celestial.⁴ ‘Hindu’ thus came to mean, at least in part through Theosophy, a ‘religion’, a ‘nation’ or a ‘nationality’, and also a ‘race’. The exclusion of non-Hindus from a concept of Indian nationhood in such formulations can be clearly seen; but in many of these formulations this exclusion was neither clearly articulated nor necessarily deliberate or self-conscious.

The Nehrus were not among the victims of Theosophy. Motilal was not inclined to take Theosophy too seriously, although he greatly respected Mrs Besant. A sceptic in religious matters, he also did not observe caste practices. He had, after his first trip to England in 1899, refused to perform the rites of purification for travelling across the seas required of him by his caste. He did perform certain ceremonies at home on appropriate occasions, but more as social duty than out of a sense of religious belief (his wife, on the other hand, practised her religion more actively). Theosophy, accordingly, had not much of an impact upon him; he was for a short while a member of the Society, but soon dropped out. Jawaharlal was also briefly attracted by the brand of Theosophy that his tutor placed before him, and joined the Theosophical Society at the age of 13. ‘The Hindu religion especially went up in my estimation,’ he wrote later⁵ – reflecting the need of many Indians of his background in a European and Europeanising education to return to a positive understanding of ‘their’ tradition. However, this was a passing phase, and when Motilal dismissed Brooks in circumstances not altogether clear to his son (Brooks later committed suicide), the main influence that remained was Jawaharlal’s love for English poetry. Annie Besant herself remained for Motilal an important political ally, as well as the butt end of some gentle humour on his part for her attempts to find ‘proofs of a “super-physical existence”’.⁶

Politics was not always a central concern for Motilal Nehru. The young Jawaharlal’s childhood coincided with the years of success for Motilal’s practice, and with success, he upgraded his lifestyle. He moved first to a bungalow in the Civil Lines, which in the functional segregation of the colonial Indian town was a gesture of defiant confidence on the part of an upwardly-mobile Indian; then, in 1900, to a palatial residence near the confluence of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna, named Anand Bhavan – the Abode of Joy. In doing so, Motilal added to the North Indian elite culture many of the trappings of an English upper-class life – appearing as the Edwardian gentleman complete with motor car (Motilal was among the first in India to own one), entertaining European and Indian society in grand style. This Anglicised life did not, of course, include the Nehru family’s women, who as assumed upholders of ‘tradition’ remained outside the lifestyle adopted by the men. Male children, inhabiting the liminal zone between the women’s inner world and the public world of the men, were, for all their exposure to the latter, still subject to some surprises. It was in Anand Bhavan, at one of his father’s many dinner parties, that a very young Jawaharlal noticed with horror that the guests were drinking blood. It turned out this was merely an error of perception: he was used to the colour of whisky, but had never before encountered red wine.⁷

Motilal’s visits to England in 1899 and 1900 did nothing to diminish his admiration for things British and, in 1905, he took with him his pregnant wife, his son and his young daughter, Vijayalakshmi, with a view to placing Jawaharlal in a suitable public school. Having found him a place in Harrow, Motilal and family spent the summer travelling to the health resorts of Europe, leaving Jawaharlal to find his feet in England. In September 1905, having left Jawaharlal at Harrow, they returned to India. Harrow was necessary, Motilal explained to Jawaharlal, for ‘making a real man out of you’.⁸ But it was a big step for a privileged son of a rich man, educated at home and living in the bosom of the family. ‘Harrow agrees with me quite well,’ Jawaharlal wrote to his father in the first weeks of his new public school life, ‘and I would get on swimmingly with it, but for your not being here. This puts a jarring note into my every work and enjoyment.’⁹

On November 14, 1905, shortly after her return to India, Jawaharlal’s mother gave birth to a baby boy who shared his birthday. Informed of this by letter by his father, and requested to choose a name for the infant, Jawaharlal protested: ‘My vocabulary of Indian names is very limited and I can’t think of any appropriate one.’¹⁰ The need for his intervention passed with the death of the infant just over two weeks after its birth, the second child lost by his mother – a son had been born before Jawaharlal but had also not survived.

HARROW AND TRINITY, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF A POLITICAL ORIENTATION

Harrow did indeed agree with ‘Joe’, as he came to be called there. He was a dutiful and competent student; he did well in French and mathematics, reasonably well in Latin, and studied German, though not with quite as much success. At sports, participation was obligatory, and his father insisted he participate, wishing his son to attain the full range of skills required of a gentleman in the making – although he regretfully noted that his son was ‘backward in games’.¹¹ Joe had had tennis lessons at home in Allahabad; now he was to play football and cricket, for which he had no particular talent (in later years, when the two houses of Parliament, the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, played their annual cricket match against each other, the prime minister was nonetheless to be a desired member of the Lok Sabha team). His father was particularly keen on cricket and football – team sports built character, he felt – and also shooting. As a member of the Boy Scouts, that imperial character-building organisation, Joe got a certain amount of training in shooting. His father advised him never to ride a bicycle, but gave him permission to buy a horse instead (he did not buy one). More to his own taste, he went skating and swimming, and enjoyed running. He was not, however, a particularly sociable student, and acquired a reputation for studious detachment among his schoolmasters, reading a great deal, but not sharing his opinions freely. Although he made some connections with other students at Harrow, his social and intellectual contacts, holidays allowing, were mainly with his older cousins, Brijlal, son of his uncle Nandlal, studying at Oxford, and Shridhar, son of his uncle Bansidhar, studying at Cambridge. One of the books he notes as having influenced his thinking in this period was the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan’s book on Garibaldi. Having read it, he began to think about nationalism in general and about Italian and Indian nationalism in particular (a generation earlier, Indians had read and been influenced by Giuseppe Mazzini’s writings on nationalism – Gandhi being among these readers).

Jawaharlal later noted that there had been a good deal of anti-Semitism at Harrow. He made no mention of anti-Indian sentiment; he seems to have taken its existence for granted. A few years later, his letters home from Cambridge provided plenty of examples of discriminatory practices against Indians, but they were so commonplace as not to invite particular comment.

Jawaharlal was a dutiful son, writing home to his parents regularly – in elegant and increasingly self-confident English to his father, in Hindi to his mother, exchanging news on politics (with his father), public school – and later, university – life, and on the progress of his two younger sisters – the older, Vijayalakshmi, or Nan, about five years old when Joe started at Harrow, and a second sister, Krishna Kumari, born in 1907, called Betty by one of her first English governesses. Motilal seemed to take a strong vicarious pleasure in Jawaharlal’s experiences of English public school and university life, and managed to acquire a remarkable command of public school jargon.

Motilal had made clear plans for his son: he was to finish school, proceed to Cambridge, complete his degree with a First, and then pass the examinations for the Indian Civil Service (ICS). The importance of the ICS was self-evident to the Indian middle classes. An elite administrative corps recruited mostly from among public school-educated Oxbridge men, and to which few Indians had been appointed by virtue of the inaccessibility to them of this desirable route of qualification, the ICS was nonetheless a possible route through which Indians could stake their claim to participation in the administration of their own country. The age limit for the examination was set particularly low, and few Indians had completed their education early enough to qualify even to appear for the examination, heavily weighted towards the public-school-and-Oxbridge experience. It was considered a great achievement for an Indian to qualify for the ICS, in large measure because of the difficulties it involved. But it also reflected the limited goals of nationalists at the time: greater participation in government. There was a strong dichotomy between the urge for participation and the urge to dissent: did one participate in the running of the imperialist system, or did one oppose it? The answer seems to have been that one did both. Every Indian entering the ICS struck a blow against the carefully-cultivated imperialist myth of the incompetence of Indians. Dissent was to a certain extent enabled by this participation; and if dissent was to be confined to a reasoned economic nationalism and a demand for further participation in government, Indians’ membership of the ICS might well be seen as a step in the right direction. In the mean time, the ICS was a good career.

In July 1907, Joe left Harrow, bound for Trinity College, Cambridge in October, having passed the necessary entrance examinations. He spent the summer between school and university travelling through Britain and Europe. His father, meanwhile, already had a list of instructions for him for Cambridge – a world he knew of only second-hand, but he knew the things that would be important: join the Union Society; row – Jawaharlal said he was too light to be anything but cox, which he didn’t fancy (he was, eventually, cox of one of the Trinity boats); and buy a horse – Jawaharlal said it would be too expensive.

Meanwhile, Jawaharlal was, from a long-distance perspective, beginning to encounter Indian politics. The political scene was beginning to warm up in the year he began school at Harrow. The Swadeshi – which translates roughly as ‘of our own country’ – movement had its immediate cause in the partition of the province of Bengal, seen by the British as an uncomfortable seat of rising nationalism. Bengal had been the first region of India to be brought under effective colonial control, and also the first to develop a coherent anti-colonial movement centred on the city of Calcutta, then the administrative capital of British India. The...