THE MAKING OF NEHRU

Nirad C. Chaudhuri focuses on the unexplained contradictions of the man behind the political figure.

Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn, Mutt'ring his wayward fancies he would rove, Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn, Or craz'd with care, or cross'd in hopeless love. Thomas Gray

The only kind of writing about Jawahar- lal Nehru (14 November 1889 to 27 May 1964) which can have value and justifica- tion 100 years after his birth and 25 years after his death should have as its sole aim, one would think, historical truth. That, however, is precisely the motivation which will not be encouraged by the centenary celebrations, nor seen in centennial writ- ings. Hitler, born in the same year as Nehru and a far more controversial figure, has long since passed into history. Not so Nehru. He still remains the object of active political exploitation, as the mainstay of two apologias: the one for the vested interests of the Nehru dynasty and the Anglicised Indian ruling order; the other for the self-deception of the anti- imperialists of the West.

Yet, for a biographer of the right sort, that is, one concerned with human life, his personality and life have a compelling attraction. But this does not arise from his dual role as a leader of the nationalist movement from 1921 to 1947 and as the Prime Minister of his country from 1947 to 1964. It does from the peculiar and almost unnatural relationship between these roles and his real self.

Nehru was 31 years old when, in 1921, he entered the Gandhian nationalist move- ment actively. After that age nobody grows mentally, and all that a man exhibits later is the interaction of his formed personality with the events and circumstances through which he passes. Nehru demonstrated this interaction in a very striking manner. And yet his biographers have virtually skipped the formative period of his life, or, in any case, been perfunctory about it, thus leav- ing out the active element in the interac- tion. That reminds one of the old phrase: playing the tragedy of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. In this piece de cir- constance I shall try to show what Hamlet was like when his meeting with the Ghost (in his case, a spectre) set him on the path to self-destruction.

NEHRU was certainly a born individualist. In early life his autocratic father did not allow him to show himself as one. But by 1912, when he came back from England to India and his family from England, he had become an uncompromising one in outlook and temperament. The type was very rare in India because traditional Hindu life neither fostered nor tolerated it. But it was familiar in Europe, especially in the 19th century, due to the Romantic Movement, which preached the autonomy of the indi- vidual. As it happened, the impact the movement made on Hindu life, through the study of European literature, produced assertive individuals in Bengal. As fore- bears of Nehru, I shall cite two figures, one from each of the worlds.

The European individualist was Alexan- der Herzen, the great Russian, who on account of his very individuality had to become an exile from his country. The Bengali individualist was the poet Rabin- dranath Tagore, the greatest Bengali ever born, but vilified by fellow-Bengalis all through his life. The sad and bizarre personal destinies of both these men were fore-ordained by their characters. When he was 38, Herzen wrote to Mazzini about the central preoccupation of his life:

I have served one idea, marched under one banner — war against all imposed authority, against every kind of deprivation of freedom, in the name of the absolute independence of the individual.

Tagore, on his part, wrote at the age of 31 to his niece:

I am by nature a savage. Intimacy with men is absolutely intolerable to me. Unless I have plenty of room around myself I cannot stretch my limbs, and unpack my mind.

A year later, he confirmed this assertion of individuality to the same niece:

My mind wants to work tirelessly by itself, and its entire energy is so obstructed by the nearness of a crowd that it becomes restless. Then it beats against me from within its cage. It is only when it gets a little solitude that it can muse to its heart's content, look round itself, and express its feelings in all their meanderings, as it pleases.

In spite of living in two geographical worlds, Herzen and Tagore were in one mental world. I read Turgenev and Chekhov at the age of 16. Even at that age I felt the affinity. And I have been finally convinced of the similarity of the two mental worlds by the essays of Sir Isaiah Berlin on Russian intellectuals. Like the group to which Herzen belonged, some Bengalis could even be called 'the super- fluous men'.

NEHRU could form a triad with Herzen and Tagore. When an undergraduate of 19 at Cambridge and free from the repression imposed on him by his autocratic father, he could write even to the same father:

I am an ardent believer in a child — or for that matter a grownup person — being endowed with a lot of imagination, and can conceive of no greater evil than for a person to be devoid of it. Of course, too much Imagination is bad for one, but I had rather suffer from that than from the other ex- treme.

Thus even in adult life he preferred solitude, and could create it mentally even when forced to remain in a crowd by his political role. In the Thirties I had opportu- nities of observing him in person, and what struck me then was his capacity to detach himself in mind from those who sur- rounded him. He seemed to be totally unconscious of them. This mental solitude found its desired bodily solitude only when he was kept in jail by the British Indian administration. He then showed that stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage. Actually, he did something positive: he discovered India and revealed himself.

It was impossible for him if he obeyed his nature to be drawn into the Gandhian nationalist movement. It was a primitive if not crude mixture of popular Hindu moral- ity (= nitrogen in the air) and age-old Hindu xenophobia (= the oxygen). Gandhism, moral and political, smelted its followers in a common mould. The result was the creation of an immense human plankton moving in a swirling mass. Nehru was too sophisticated and nuanced to be absorbed in it. So he could also raise the question which Herzen did:

What will finish it off? The senile barbarism of the sceptre [Tsarism] or the wild barbar- ism of communism?

paraphrasing it to 'the senile barbarism of the British Indian administration in its last two decades or the wild barbarism of Gandhism?'

Yet he deliberately chose the second, and was found to pay the price. I shall try to give an idea of what it was by recalling the story of Owen Wingrave by Henry James, made familiar by Britten in an operatic version, I read the story when I was young and also just hearing of Nehru as an emerging nationalist. I was horrified to find Henry James inflicting death on Owen for not adopting the profession of soldiering which was traditional in his family but leaving Sandhurst out of his pacifist conviction. I could not then im- agine that Nehru would join the Gandhian Sandhurst, remain in it and become in reverse another Owen Wingrave.

THE outward cast of Nehru's life was shaped neither by his awareness of himself nor by the unconscious pressure of his nature and aptitudes, but by his father's very definite view of his career and the means he adopted to realise that. This kind of 'arranged career', like arranged mar- riage, conformed to the tradition of abso- lute parental authority in Hindu society. It was exercised by the father as well as the mother, but in different ways. The father repressed and the mother spoiled, and the son submitted from fear of the father and out of tenderness for the mother. In Nehru's case, his parents became more than normally assertive and possessive because he was an only child for 11 years "I want a divorce. I'm leaving you to become a priest.' and the only son after that.

To aggravate the domination, his father, Motilal Nehru, was no ordinary Hindu father. He was a man of exceptional intelligence, energy and ambition, who through these had risen from the humblest ranks of the Hindu middle class to the highest worldly position to which an Indian could aspire under the British regime. This success had given him unbounded self- confidence and self-will, a hard and even ruthless worldliness, and disdain for views on life which were not like his.

His spectacular rise had two sides, one professional and the other social. On account of poverty and the death of both father and elder brother, he could not complete his general and legal education and so he had to start at the lowest rung of the legal profession in India. Those who began like that could only hope to become a successful practitioner in the lowest courts in small towns. But Motilal became an advocate of front rank in the High Court of the province of Uttar Pradesh at Allahabad. Socially, he did something which no Indian even of the highest posi- tion had, to my knowledge, succeeded in doing before him. He got himself accepted as a member 'by grace' of the racial club of whites which the British community in India had become. This was all the more remarkable because by birth, education, and status Motilal belonged to the very class of Indians towards whom the British in India aired the most rancorous con- tempt.

There was nothing morally wrong in the professional rise of Motilal, but his social elevation as a Sahib (white man) was brought about by means which were dis- honest when not merely mundane. The mundane expedient was the adoption of a European style of living without any men- tal Westernisation, and that too more ostentatious than refined. On the other hand, his recognition as a fellow Sahib was earned by assiduous cultivation of the local British and abuse of Indian nationalists, and especially of Bengalis, in the most coarse British style. This made him the respectable 'loyal native gentleman' in the eyes of British officialdom. The most repulsive aspect of Motilal Nehru's currying of favour among the local British was that he was too intelligent and cynical and too good a xenophobic Hindu to have had real respect for the British in India. It was unabashed opportunism. But in this he was the most eminent practition- er of a method which was standardised among all Indians who wanted to succeed and rise in the world under British au- spices. All of them affected to be the same cads as the British were in their attitude towards other Indians, and the abused Indians who recognised this game of opportunism never took offence.

But in spite of the completeness of his success in the eyes of all outsiders, Motilal himself was intelligent enough to realise

that there was a serious weakness in his position. That was the absence of legitima- cy. In the legal profession he was a novus homo, an intruder, and as an anglicised Indian only ersatz because he was not `England-returned'. Motilal's resolve was to make his son the legitimate heir to his worldly position. That was the guiding principle of his upbringing of Jawaharlal.

THUS, in its first stage in Allahabad, he isolated his son from Indian society, did not send him to any school however good, but employed a British (really Anglo-Irish) tutor to educate him wholly at home, as he also had English governesses to educate his daughters. But when Jawaharlal was 15 he realised that home education in this man- ner would not 'deliver the goods'. So, in 1905, he took him to England and got him admitted to Harrow. From Harrow he went to Cambridge as an undergraduate at Trinity College, from which he passed out in 1910 with a second-class Tripos in science. He then went to London to be trained as a barrister in the Inner Temple. His father also permitted him to enrol himself in the London School of Econo- mics, perhaps regarding it as an extra- curricular activity which would relieve the strain of devilling for law. He was called to the bar and finally returned to India in August 1912 after an absence of seven years and when he was only three months short of being 24.

BY THAT time he had reached manhood and also discovered his individuality. He had broken out of the chrysalis of his boyhood in India. Of course, it was a natural transition from adolescence to manhood. But it was made possible by the external circumstance of his freedom from direct parental control.

Personally, the most important result of his education in England was quite the opposite of what his father expected from it. He had reckoned without his son. For one thing, it liberated Jawaharlal from the spurious and almost vulgar Anglicism that his father sported. Next, it made him incapable of feeling guilty for not sharing the worldly ambition of his father and not having his go-getter's drive. In short, it made him the real thing produced by the English education that he got, a typical upper-class English young man who took life nonchalantly. He did not do particular- ly well in examination because he would not be so untypically English as to swot. That at Harrow he was poor in Latin but good in English was also typical. He liked the OTC and at Cambridge was accepted as a cox. He was always well-dressed, but never dressy. He went regularly to con- certs, had impeccable manners, and also spent so much that he was almost always in debt, in spite of a very liberal allowance. On 11 April, 1912, he wrote to his father: `If I had £5,000 a year ]how much today?] I would spend it with the greatest ease and

then get into debt.' That was being Wode- house's Bertie Wooster or Saki's Clovis Sangrail. Yet the extraordinary thing was that he did not become that by virtue of his social life in England: in fact, he had none. He never made English friends, had no intimates, even made no impression on his fellow students, one of whom was the future Field-Marshal Lord Alexander. The Kashmiri boy became an English youth as the Ugly Duckling became the Swan.

But there was, unperceived by others, an inmost Nehru hidden in the person of the outward Nehru, which too was created by his English education, for even the gaudily extrovert Edwardian world had as its counterpart an efflorescence of the human spirit. In later life he recalled that in a somewhat apologetic way. In his auto- biography he wrote that at Cambridge he had acquired an outlook on life which might be called Cyrenaicism. The employ- ment of this very recondite word, which was the name given to the doctrines of the post-Socratic Greek philosopher, Aristip- pus of Cyrene, who taught an extreme form of hedonism, was not on Nehru's part colourlessly philosophical, it had the pe- jorative overtones which the word ,had acquired in the Victorian age. As the Contemporary Review said of a piece of writing in 1882: 'This reads like an avowal of Epicureanism or of the more selfish philosophy of pleasure, known as Cyre- naicism.' But Nehru need not have had qualms about admitting his state of mind,

only because of the word. Even Walter Pater was accused of Cyrenaicism for the beautiful conclusion to his essays on the Renaissance in which are to be found these words: `To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.' Nehru also burnt, but with the reduced intensity of a candle, in whose soft light he could maintain ceaseless re- veries, though not quite ecstasy. But this success he never achieved, or rather was not given the chance to have.

HE ALSO acquired the manners of an `English gentleman'. He was temperamen- tal and also had outbursts of bad temper during his political career. But these were due to extreme provocation. Otherwise, he was equable and unruffled in his social behaviour and often — very sensitively urbane. I cannot use illustrations from the period with which I am dealing, but have to do so from his later life, when I acquired personal knowledge of him.

I shall give the first instance from what my wife told me about a meeting of hers with Nehru. In 1928 she was enrolled in the women's volunteer corps for the session of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta, as an unmarried college student of 19, The girls were half for decoration and half for attendance on the women who came to the meetings. One day, a lady fainted from heat. The girls rushed to her and tried to restore her, and the male volunteers came with a stretcher to take her to the medical tent. Jawaharlal was sitting on the dais with his father, who was presiding over that session. He noticed the commotion from a distance and came hurrying to the spot. He helped the young men to lift the lady to the stretcher, and then said to my future wife: `Will you please go with the lady to the medical tent, and report to me about her condition?' My wife went and as soon as the patient had regained consciousness came back to the marquee. As she appeared at the door, Nehru came down quickly to her, instead of waiting in his place, and asked: 'How is she? Is she all right?' My wife replied: 'Yes, the doctor said he would look after her.' Jawaharlal finally said 'thank you', and went back to his place.

Now, no Congress nationalist would, in the first instance, have come to the lady and, next, come to a young girl volunteer. As for girl volunteers they would have either treated them as maidservants or ogled at them, for even under the camou- flage of their coarse Khaddar uniform they were recognisable as fashionable modern Bengali girls from colleges.

I myself got opportunities of observing his private behaviour about ten years later, when Jawaharlal came to stay from time to time with Sarat Chandra Bose, the leader of the Congress Party in Bengal, whose secretary I then was. Nehru had then lost his wife, and the abstractedness which I had noticed in him when I met him for the first time in 1931 had now become con- firmed. A deep and pensive melancholy had become almost a bodily feature of his. But he was always attentive and gravely polite to anyone who addressed him. Only when he had to face the common Indian fawning and importunity or disregard of privacy, did he become curt and even rough. I always addressed him as Mr Nehru, not Panditji, and never put my hands together to say namaste, and he was uniformly simple and unaffected. But I really had no experience of his strictly private behaviour.

Nonetheless, I can write about his poli- tical good manners from firsthand know- ledge, because as secretary to Sarat Chan- dra Bose I saw the letters which Nehru wrote to him, describing some of his tribulations. The Congress did indeed pre- sent a striking show on the public stage,

but behind the scenes it was rent by the spirit of faction, jealousies, antipathies and rivalries for gain which made the green- room noxious and almost stinking. Nehru could not stand that, and on 4 February 1939 wrote in a letter:

As I have grown in years I have come to attach more and more importance to faith in and understanding between colleagues. What am Ito do with the finest of principles if I do not have confidence in the person concerned? The party rivalries in many provinces illustrate this and we find extreme bitterness and often utter lack of scruple among people who are ordinarily honourable and straight. I cannot stomach this kind of politics and have kept absolutely aloof from them for many years.

He could also clearly see the bearing of these personal quarrels on the public issues, and thus added in the same letter:

So, we come to this: behind political prob- lems there are psychological problems and these are always more difficult to handle.

For his sins, he had inevitably to handle many of them. But even when subjected to personal attacks, he never replied in kind. Above all, he would not adopt the diction of the quarrels, which was either hysterical or maliciously clever. So, after seeing a typical letter, he wrote:

I have read this [letter] with sorrow.... It deals with personalities and brings serious charges against particular individuals. This brings the argument to a lower level, and it is obvious that if such opinions are held by any individual or group against another, mutual co-operation in a common task becomes impossible.

I could quote many such passages from Nehru's writings. But even those I have given will show that, although he had to inhale the stench of the Congress kitchen, he still retained that part of his English education which even in England was the result of Matthew Arnold's preaching of sweetness and light, that is, openness of mind, flexibility of intelligence, and urban- ity.

Anyone contemplating this Nehru as a participant in the Gandhian movement is bound to ask: 'What the devil was he doing in that galore?' A rational answer can be given to this question. But it has not been, simply because the biographers have not even perceived that the question arises.