Jawaharlal Nehru's Philosophy of History 9789390758913

Citation preview

Jawaharlal Nehru’s Philosophy of History in Glimpses of World History, An Autobiography and The Discovery of India

JATIN ABHIR

Jawaharlal Nehru’s Philosophy of History in Glimpses of World History, An Autobiography and The Discovery of India. Copyright © Jatin Abhir, 2023. ISBN: 978-93-90758-91-3 Published in 2023 by Mohindra Publishing House. SCO 289, 1st Floor, Opposite Nirman Theatre, Sector 32-A, Chandigarh, India. Publisher Contact: 0172-5088686 | +919872889970 Printed by Amit Arts, Plot 205, Sector 82, JLPL Industrial Area, Mohali, Punjab, India.

All rights reserved. Except for fair use for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, without written permission of the author. Information cited in this book has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Although every effort has been made to ensure that the book is free from errors or omissions, neither the publisher nor its author shall be responsible for any errors, omissions or damages arising out of use of this information.

Contents

Nehru as a Philosopher of History

i

Glimpses of Nehru’s World History 1.1. The Decay of Civilization: India and China 1.2. Britain and the British 1.3. Decay is Inherent to Civilizations 1.4. The Historical Role of a Leader 1.5. A People’s History Nehru did not Know 1.6. The River of History 1.7. Nehru’s Tolerance and Nehru’s History 1.8. The Free and the Beautiful 1.9. Decay of Contemporary Europe 1.10. The Soviet Union in World History 1.11. Empathizing with the Past 1.12. How to Make History? 1.13. A Civilization without Decay 1.14. The Meaningful Scale of History

1 3 6 8 11 12 15 16 17 18 19 21 22 24 25

Writing an Autobiography to Situate the Self in History 2.1. Realizing a Historical Responsibility 2.2. Liberals and their Philosophy of History 2.3. The Twain Shall Meet 2.4. Marx, Lenin and Historical Progress 2.5. The Paradoxical Leader 2.6. My History is the Right One 2.7. Religions as Ideals and Ideals as Religions 2.8. Britain Suppressed Progress

29 32 33 34 36 37 38 40 42

Discovering New Historical Ideas 3.1. India’s Living Pasts 3.2. India as a Palimpsest

44 48 51

3.3. What is India? 3.4. The Inevitable Collapse of Caste 3.5. The Many Truths of History 3.6. Space, Time and the Politics of History 3.7. Unsafe Historians 3.8. Two Englands 3.9. Socialism and Realism 3.10. ‘Something God-like in Man’

52 54 55 58 62 62 63 65

A Philosophy for the Past, Present and Future

68

Selected Bibliography

73

Preface

This essay was first completed as an undergraduate thesis in December, 2022 and was submitted to the Department of History, Ashoka University, Sonipat. This short book is a revised and slightly expanded edition of my thesis. In completing the thesis, I am very grateful for the advice and encouragement of Professor Rudrangshu Mukherjee, who was my thesis supervisor. Any errors and omissions, including any typing errors, are strictly my own. Jatin Abhir July, 2023

i

Introduction

Nehru as a Philosopher of History

On 1st March, 1966, Mahdi Elmandjra, a Moroccan scholar who was then the Assistant Director-General of UNESCO, inaugurated the ‘International Round Table on Jawaharlal Nehru’s Role in the Modern World’ in New Delhi. One of the speakers in the conference was Octavio Paz, a Mexican diplomat and poet who would become a Nobel laureate in Literature in 1990. Paz described Nehru’s understanding of history in these words: In contrast to the majority of the political leaders of this century, Nehru did not believe he held the keys of history in his hands. Because of this, he did not stain his country nor the world with blood. … he neither offers us prefabricated solutions to the conflicts between industry and poetry, science and spiritual needs, technology and private life. He thought that modern society could find an answer to these antagonisms by itself. … Aristocrat and man of the people; solitary in the crowd and surrounded by it in solitude of his study; poet enamoured with science; democrat and socialist; nationalist and internationalist – Nehru’s life was a series of affirmations but his thought a renewed question about himself and India.1

Through this assessment, Paz implied that Nehru did not distort history to suit his own political program, or use violence to resolve the contradictions of history. Paz thought that Nehru had the ability to acknowledge and appreciate the diversity of history; and as a consequence, did not forcibly 1

Octavio Paz, “Nehru: Man of Two Cultures and One World,” in Nehru and The Modern World (New Delhi: Indian National Commission for Co-operation with UNESCO, 1967), 13-16.

ii

reduce the range of meanings we can derive from it. In this context, the question that arises is, what – if anything – was Jawaharlal Nehru’s (1889 – 1964) philosophy of history? The purpose of this essay is to explore this question through a study of his three major books. All three of his major books, Glimpses of World History (1934), An Autobiography (1936) and The Discovery of India (1946), were primarily completed inside prison,2 each originally written in the English language – the ‘step-mother tongue of India,’ as Nehru would have it.3 Glimpses was written as a series of letters to his daughter Indira Nehru (1917 – 1984) for two reasons: first, he wanted to place ‘vivid images of the past’4 before her to spark her curiosity in history, and second, these letters served as the father’s ‘escapes from the [jail]’5 by giving him the joy of conversation with his daughter. On the other hand, Autobiography was conceived to ‘review the past events in India’ in which Nehru had participated, to enable him ‘to think clearly about them,’6 and Discovery to clarify his mind about ‘various aspects of Indian history and culture.’7 These books are an extensive corpus and they contain, in abundant quantity, his reflections on history.8 Glimpses and Discovery, especially, are interspersed with his musings on history as he frequently paused to assess, sometimes casually and sometimes critically, what history-

The years in the parentheses are the dates of publication. Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House, 2004), 509. 4 Nehru, Glimpses, 199. 5 Nehru, Glimpses, 522. 6 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House, 2004), xxii. 7 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House, 2004), xiii. 8 Nehru as a writer was not brief. The manuscripts of all his books, including the shorter Autobiography, exceeded a thousand pages. Discovery had to come to an end for the simple reason that his supply of rationed paper in prison was exhausted, and it was not possible to demand more paper during the ongoing Second World War! 2 3

iii

writing meant to him. Out of these musings arose what I have termed Nehru’s philosophy of history. Historian Vinay Lal has observed that as a writer, the themes Nehru focused the most on were Gandhi, science and history.9 However, it must be noted that in spite of writing about history at length, Nehru claimed that he was neither a historian nor a man-of-letters. He considered himself merely a dilettante, a ‘dabbler in many things.’10 This denial was meant to forewarn the reader that he was not an authority on any history that he was narrating. Understandably, he engaged with history not as a professional pursuit, but for reasons ranging from enhancing his political knowledge to finding a solace in prison to simply a curiosity about the past. Even though not a historian, Nehru was capable of productively engaging with historical concepts and he lucidly laid out on paper the patterns he saw in world and Indian history. In this essay, I would specifically concern myself with such historical concepts and theories in his texts that contemplate on the patterns, meaning and logic of history as he saw it. His quest was to read the grand motion of history and infer from it the ideals and policies that history itself seemed to be giving its approval and legitimacy. He had built a comprehensive philosophy around his historical interpretations, and in this he was hardly limited to the past. More often than not, he directly related his observations to the present and the future – the voice of Nehru the philosopher of history, the politician, and the dreamer could often be heard in a single sentence. All classifications are to an extent simplifying and arbitrary, but I have preferred referring to Nehru not as a historian but as a philosopher of history. This provides at least one advantage. Originality, empiricism, and a sound historical method, that were anyway not possible inside a prison, are no longer our concerns as we analyse his writings. Nonetheless, even as a historian per se, Nehru received Vinay Lal, “Nehru as a Writer,” Indian Literature 135, no. 1 (January-February 1990): 41. 10 Nehru, Glimpses, 1105. 9

iv

positive comments from his contemporaries. In March 1949, British military historian Tom Wintringham wrote that although there are inaccuracies in Glimpses, they are occasional and trivial, understandable for an imprisoned writer; more importantly however, Nehru did not suffer from the more ‘serious type of inaccuracy,’ namely prejudice and unfairness. Reading Nehru’s Glimpses, Wintringham continues, children can ‘learn better history and better English’ than by reading Thomas Babington Macaulay and Edward Gibbon.11 Another historian contemporary to Nehru was Edward J. Thompson – father of the celebrated historian, Edward P. Thompson. He once wrote to Nehru pointing out at least fourteen instances of error he had noticed as he was casually skimming through some chapters of Glimpses – but nonetheless ended the letter by saying that these were ‘tiny criticisms of a splendid feat.’12 Historians writing in the 1970s and 80s continued to think that Nehru’s histories are remarkable for their factual accuracy. B.G. Gokhale thought that had Glimpses been written outside prison, it would still have been a remarkable intellectual accomplishment.13 So, there is some truth in the Tom Wintringham, “Better History and Better English,” in Nehru Abhinandan Granth: A Birthday Book (New Delhi: Allahabad Law Journal Press, 1949), 30. 12 Jawaharlal Nehru, A Bunch of Old Letters: Written Mostly to Jawaharlal Nehru and Some Written by Him (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1958), 233. However, unlike his contemporary reviewers, Nehru was less sure about the quality of his writings, either as history or as literature. In the prefaces and conclusions of his books, he diligently followed a self-deprecating ritual. A reader of Glimpses is informed from the outset that ‘of the faults that these letters contain there is no end’ and that there was no overall consistency in the book: the letters were merely ‘superficial sketches joined together by a thin thread.’ Moreover, he admitted to have copied ‘shamelessly’ from other works to write it – thus warning the reader to not expect anything original. Autobiography he declared as ‘wholly one-sided’ and ‘egoistical,’ suggesting that anyone wishing to study that period of history should rather refer to other sources of historical information. Discovery he characterized as ‘inadequate, disjointed and lacking in unity.’ See Nehru, Glimpses, xvi; Nehru, Autobiography, xxiii; Nehru, Discovery, 532. 13 There have been many famous literary jail-birds in history. Nehru himself notes that as a writer in prison, he falls in the tradition of Hugo Grotius, Miguel de Cervantes, and John Bunyan. See Glimpses, 1105. To this list, countless names 11

v

idea that Nehru had something of a historian in him. However, for Nehru, theories of history took precedence over empirically grounded arguments, and despite often getting individual facts right, he was not averse to making flights of fanciful interpretations. Noticing this, Sarvepalli Gopal called Discovery ‘an escape into a largely imaginary conception of India’s history.’14 Sunil Khilnani similarly called the book an act of ‘political and literary imagination’ and not original historical scholarship.15 In other words, Nehru narrated the past without being restrained by the protocols of the ‘historian’s craft.’16 This does not mean that the value of his works is diminished, for ‘political and literary imagination’ deserves to be studied for its own worth as much as a more carefully crafted empirical history. But it does mean that a different perspective is required to appreciate how Nehru is dealing with history, which I think is possible by looking at Nehru in a new light as a philosopher of history. How we categorize his writings – history, literature, philosophy or something else – is less important. Depending on the parameters used, his writings can fit into a comfortable variety of genres. More important is to understand the argument of his writings and probe why, if he neither saw himself as a historian nor a man-of-letters, did he write thousands of pages of history? To what end did he bother to systematically build a philosophy to think through history? Nehru’s sustained effort at writing history that ended up being three tomes seems to hold a larger story behind it than just ‘dabbling’ in history-writing. This essay tries to answer such questions by compiling and analyzing Nehru’s philosophy of history.

can be added, but no doubt, we can add another name at once – Jawaharlal Nehru himself. 14 Sarvepalli Gopal, “The Formative Ideology of Jawaharlal Nehru,” Economic and Political Weekly 11, no. 21 (May 22, 1976): 788. 15 Nehru, Discovery, xviii. 16 This term is borrowed from Marc Bloch’s well-known book The Historian’s Craft.

vi

Though Glimpses, Autobiography and Discovery were primarily written during imprisonment, the conditions of Nehru’s incarceration were not so harsh as they would have been for a less prominent politician. Due to this, he was able to grow intellectually.17 Deprived of the freedom to act or speak in public, he continued his politics in prison by other means – articulation, and subsequent publication, of what inspired him and how he interpreted India and the world, the personal and the public, and the past and the present. Luckily for him, he was allowed access to books and notebooks by the jail authorities, though since he could not collect books as an in-prison library for later reference, he usually had to rely on his notes and memory for writing.18 Beyond that, there were no restrictions on the number of books he could demand from outside, and some government-approved newspapers like The Statesman, Pioneer and Manchester Guardian Weekly continued to reach him. He had access to a variety of books from authors including Arnold Toynbee, Harold J. Laski, H.G. Wells, Rabindranath Tagore, R.H. Tawney, Louis Fischer, Leonard Woolf, Julian Huxley, Maurice Dobb and the like,19 though all imprisonments were not the same and there were some periods when he was not allowed books.20 Nehru read extensively in prison. For instance, from 15th February 1934 to 2nd September 1935, he read one hundred and eighty-eight books, ranging from Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable to Maxim Gorki’s On Guard for the Soviet Union to Karl Marx’s Selected Essays to Andre Malraux’s Man’s Walter Crocker, Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate (Noida: Random House India, 2009), 18. David Kopf also notes that the comparatively humane conditions of imprisonment permitted Nehru to grow intellectually. He could not have done what he did, had he been in a less forgiving prison system like the Nazi concentration camp or the Soviet gulag. Nehru was a class ‘A’ prisoner and enjoyed more privileges in prison, like access to books that enabled him to write well. See David Kopf, “A Look at Nehru’s “World History” from the Dark Side of Modernity,” Journal of World History 2, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 50. 18 Nehru, Glimpses, 1105. 19 Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1975), 175. 20 Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, 298. 17

vii

Fate to A. Buschke and F. Jacobsohn’s Sex Habits.21 Nehru’s habit of extensive reading and reflection, wrote the American historian and political scientist Saul K. Padover, proved to be an exceptional educational opportunity – it was like attending postgraduate courses in history, philosophy and literature from within the walls of his cell.22 His diverse reading list supplied a constant intellectual stimulus that fuelled his historical thought, inspired him to undertake writing history, and kept his mental health afloat for the nine years he would spend inside the British Indian prison network. For instance, among the inspirations that he explicitly counts for writing Glimpses was H.G. Wells’ The Outline of History.23 And speaking of outlines, to see what Nehru’s ‘postgraduate’ education in history and philosophy had taught him, we can take a look at how he outlined two broad approaches to writing any history. Contributing a preface to Mukundilal Srivastava’s book Samrajyavad: Kya Hai Aur Kaise Phaila24 in October 1933 – just two months after writing the last letter of Glimpses – he thought: There are several ways of reading history and understanding it. One view is that a variety of events take place, and great men appear and leave their powerful impact on the country and on the world. Any event is not specifically related to any other … The other interpretation of history is that events are all closely inter-related. One event affects the other and if all the developments of world history are taken together then some sort of laws and Sarvepalli Gopal, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 6 (New Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1988), 427. 22 Jawaharlal Nehru, Nehru on World History (New York: The John Day Company, 1960), v. 23 Nehru, Glimpses, xv. Glimpses equalled its inspiration (Wells’ Outline of History) in length and outdid it in scope. One reviewer of New York Times thought that Nehru’s book makes even H.G. Well’s book seem ‘singularly insular.’ See Nehru, Glimpses, back-cover. It is likely that the reviewer was Herbert J. Muller from New York Times, but I do not have access to the New York Times archive to confirm this and cite the original. 24 The title translates into ‘Imperialism: What Is It and How Did It Spread?’ 21

viii

causes emerge and we can understand the course and significance of world history. By knowing this, some light is thrown on all the events of world history and we can see our course ahead.25

He preferred the second view of history in all his works – a history that dealt with the interconnected world at large (‘macro-history’ as we might call it in today’s parlance). This approach, which privileged the larger whole of history over its smaller individual components, would ensure that we do not ‘lose ourselves in a multitude of trees and miss seeing the woods,’ as Nehru would have it elsewhere.26 To discuss these texts, I have divided them into some themes that explain the major designs of Nehru’s grand architecture of history. This essay uses Nehru’s three books as its primary source, though occasional quotations from his other writings have also been used to supplement some claims. My intention is to represent his philosophy through words that are closer to his own; therefore, the emphasis is on his actual writings as opposed to the secondary literature of later historians who interpreted them. One limitation of this thesis, which must be brought to attention from the beginning, is its insularity. This is primarily because to contextualize Nehru among the philosophers of history in twentieth-century India and the wider world (like, for example, how E. H. Carr discussed historians of Europe and their philosophy of history in his classic What is History?)27 would have required far greater time and training. It is certainly something that I would look forward to doing in a longer study in the future, but for now, I hope to be excused for a singular focus on Nehru alone.

Gopal, Selected Works, vol. 6, 199. The original preface was written in Hindi. Emphasis mine. 26 Nehru, Glimpses, 795. 27 E. H. Carr, What is History (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 7-55. 25

1

Chapter One

Glimpses of Nehru’s World History

Jawaharlal Nehru, by writing Glimpses of World History became the only notable leader of the colonized world, to have ever attempted anything resembling a world history.1 American historian David Kopf opines, If Rammohun Roy was the father of Indian renaissance, Debendranath Tagore its guru, Keshub Chandra Sen its religious synthesizer, Rabindranath Tagore its poet, and Brajendranath Seal its philosopher, Jawaharlal Nehru was surely its historian.2

When in 1960 the first American edition of Glimpses was published,3 the preface to it was contributed by Saul K. Padover. In the preface, Padover identified four elements in Nehru’s philosophy of history – rationalism, nationalism, universalism and Marxism.4 Although identifying different strands of ideologies that run through a text is useful for an analysis of this kind, unlike Padover I would present his philosophy not in terms of its ‘isms,’ but in terms of the actual arguments put forth as he chronicled the histories of different regions of the world. From the Athens of Pericles to David Kopf, “The Activist Hindu Intellectual Between East and West, Past and Present: Jawaharlal Nehru as a World Historian,” Journal of Third World Studies 4, no. 2 (Fall 1987): 144. 2 David Kopf, “A Look at Nehru’s “World History” from the Dark Side of Modernity,” Journal of World History 2, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 61. 3 The American edition was a concise version of Glimpses. Only 53 out of the total of 196 letters were published in this edition. It was published as Nehru on World History by The John Day Company. 4 If I must humbly add two more to these four ‘isms’ that Padover suggested, I would add ‘optimism’ and ‘idealism’ to the list, for they are highly significant elements of Nehru’s philosophy of history in Glimpses which should not be ignored. See Nehru, Nehru on World History, v-xiv. 1

2

the Japan of Kamakura shoguns, and from the Vijayanagara of Krishana Deva Raya to the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid, Nehru narrated a dazzling array of histories as even a mere glance at the titles of his letters in Glimpses sufficiently demonstrates. In light of this, it would be reductive to discuss Nehru’s philosophy of history only in terms of some abstract ‘isms.’ Only if we juxtapose the contours of his philosophy of history with the co-ordinates of the historical particularities he is using to substantiate his claims, can we grasp the breadth of Nehru’s thoughts in all its insights and blind-spots. To understand the texture of a text, its broad intended audience must be taken into account, and in the case of Glimpses, the answer is simple. It was addressed directly to his teenage daughter in the form of letters, obliging the father to simplify big historical concepts for his known audience. The philosophy of history as expressed in Glimpses was written in a way to be comprehensible – and interesting – to the young girl reading it. This, however, does not necessarily mean that Nehru watered-down the intellectual depth of his prose,5 especially since the purpose of the letters was not only the historical education of Indira, but also clarification and codification of his own ideas on history. Explaining why he chose history over every other genre of writing, Nehru wrote: ‘unhappy individuals and oppressed and struggling countries, all those who are dissatisfied and have little joy in the present, have a way of looking back to the past and searching consolation in it.’6 The statement sounds more like an apology than a justification, and this is deliberate. Nehru believed that an obsession with history is a colonial symptom. The colonized are oriented towards the past and not the future because of the political situation they find themselves in. This he explained by saying that a colonizer politically benefits by forcing the colonized population to not have ambitions for the future. In other 5 6

Kopf, “Jawaharlal Nehru as World Historian,” 148. Nehru, Glimpses, 664.

3

words, colonialism disorients the political ambition and imagination of the colonized, causing them to abandon the search for a better future. As a consequence, these ‘unhappy individuals’ of colonized nations console themselves by falling back on the cushion of the past, often an idealized past as Nehru would admit later. To Nehru, the political question that we should ideally ask ourselves is not what we were, but what we want to be. However, this is not possible under colonial rule because it consciously terminates the hope of a progressive future in the political imagination of its subjects, and thus the colonized are unable to properly answer what they want to be. Confused, they hark back to the past, which is surer than their dim, uncertain future under an imperial state. Having diagnosed the colonial mentalité to be afflicted with an obsession with the past, the remedy he offered Indians was to reorient their gaze towards the future. Glimpses can be interpreted as an act of writing history to establish faith in an achievable future that is better from the past and the present.7 However, it is hard to miss the gentle irony – for all his emphasis on the future, Nehru still decided to focus writing not on a socialist utopia yet to be, but in days long past. How Nehru dealt with the paradox of his own expectations – of being a philosopher of history when being a dreamer of the future was far more pressing to him – is the subject of this chapter. Out of this contest of political priorities emerged a philosophy of history with a recognizable Nehruesque flavour to it. The following subheadings are discussions of some parts of this philosophy that permit us to see the dialogue between Nehru the philosopher and Nehru the politician. 1.1. The Decay of Civilization: India and China

7

Kopf, “Jawaharlal Nehru as a World Historian,” 154-55.

4

Nehru often contemplated on what appeared to him the great riddle of history – how and why did the civilizations of Asia fall behind Europe and ended up being dominated by it? Interestingly, Nehru leaves the responsibility of finding an answer to why ‘this kind of thing happens in the history of nations’ not to historians but to philosophers.8 Nehru seems to claim that probing the ultimate origin of historical processes was a philosophical exercise, something that would not be ordinarily evident to a historian. By saying this, he implicitly demarcated the world of a historian from that of a philosopher. Before proceeding, he confronts the reader with a familiar disclaimer – that he is no philosopher. But as expected, Nehru took on the question anyway, a question he had already hurled into the territory of a philosopher. Nehru began by noting that in history, age has a similar effect on individuals and nations – old ‘races’9 are slow, conservative and afraid, while youthful ones adopt new ideas easily and march ahead.10 China was once far ahead of Europe in many aspects like engineering and gunpowder, but in the last few centuries, the energetic and youthful West overtook the old civilizations of Asia.11 He thought that this ageing manifested itself in other tangible ways too, and not just in ‘temperaments’ of civilizations. When the ‘creative spirit’ of India aged, new ideas were not encouraged and the population immersed itself only in the classics and nothing beyond. The prevalence of repetitive ideas, ornate art and no effort to increase the standard of living of the peasant

Nehru, Glimpses, 135. Nehru often used the concept of race, but according to Sunil Khilnani, this was never expressed in terms of ethno-nationalism. He never proposed a Hindu race united by common descent and kinship like some other thinkers like V.D. Savarkar did while using the same term. See Nehru, Discovery, xxi. 10 Nehru, Glimpses, 179. 11 This personification continues even in his later books, so this cannot simply be dismissed as an attempt to explain the national temperaments to his young daughter. 8 9

5

indicated a civilization which had decayed – its intellectual wit had blunted and its heyday was long past.12 Similarly, China was ‘a cultured person of middle age, rather fond of a quiet life, not keen on new adventure … [and] busy with his classics and his art,’ whereas Europe was ‘a young boy, rather uncouth, but full of energy’13 who advanced ahead with science while the middle aged man, proud of his classics was left behind. In his framework of personified civilizations, the Chinese civilization was by temperament a philosopher and not an explorer.14 Nothing could contrast better the attitude of this ‘uncouth’ English boy against the gentle Chinese elder than the looting and destruction of the Peking Summer Palace during the Second Opium War. The Anglo-French soldiers destroyed its priceless cultural treasures for they were ‘ignorant vandals,’ utterly unaware about the historical value of what they had destroyed.15 Unlike its elder counterpart, this youthful civilization simply did not value history and cultural treasures. At the scale of a macro-historical narrative concerned with the grand chess of personified civilizations, individual actions and opinions are reduced to insignificance. Nehru soon realized this problem in writing world history through the perspective of civilizations alone. In spite of all the violence that the youthful civilizations committed against the elder ones, it did not mean that the English and the French people, who were the constituent members of these youthful civilizations, were inherently violent. Nehru remarked that there exists a ‘strange contrast between the behaviour of individuals to each other and the behaviour of nations.’16 In writing a history of colonization, Nehru considered that we must acknowledge this disjuncture between nations and Nehru, Glimpses, 361. Nehru, Glimpses, 314. 14 Nehru, Glimpses, 770. Nehru also believed that in India and China, social reputation was earned through learning, and not by brute force. 15 Nehru, Glimpses, 520-21. 16 Nehru, Glimpses, 521-22. 12 13

6

nationals, between England and the English, and between France and the French. To do so, we can look at who is acting and in the name of what. 1.2. Britain and the British Nehru warned Indira that she should be under no illusion that the acts of war, violence and hatred are the will of the common people of an invading country. Treating countries like personified living beings that have opinions like that of human individuals is misleading, even though he himself often gave into this bad habit ‘acquired from books and newspapers.’17 Speaking of European colonization, he told Indira that in the nineteenth century, the governments of European nations only represented bankers and capitalists, not the people: the state of England and not the people of England should be called the conquerors of India. Similarly, in a letter titled ‘The Invisible Empire of America,’ Nehru remarked that America got wealthy from economic colonization of Central America – but this ‘America’ was not the America of the common people, but of capitalists and bankers, who had vested interests in this imperial project and accordingly earned rich dividends from the colonial exploits of the state they controlled.18 The power to wage war usually lies with a small group of people who hardly care about the masses. Unfortunately however, these people who can inflict violence and invasion are ‘so often in authority,’19 and can often seal the fate of millions in one direction or another. War is waged by rulers and states acting in the name of the people, but never actually with the consent of the people. On their own, people do not wage wars against other peoples. Thus, if on hearing the stories of colonial wars and violence Indira was angered, her father asked her to be angry at systems, not individuals – at the British Empire but never at Nehru, Glimpses, 537. Nehru, Glimpses, 661. 19 Nehru, Glimpses, 728. 17 18

7

the British people. Nehru was of the firm belief that good people are helpless in bad systems (further discussion in section 2.3).20 The British individuals who serve the Empire are ‘just little cogs’ in the huge impersonal imperial machinery, and it was foolish to be bitter at the British for they ‘were the victims of circumstances as we are.’21 Just as the Indians ended up being colonized by the British state because of their inner decay, so have the British ended up on the side of the colonizer by simply being the members of the British state, with no choice on whether or not they really want to participate in its imperial projects. As such, the structural oppression of India as a British colony was not something characteristically British: in the larger scheme of things, the British state was just an agent of history that made India suffer, and it could well have been anyone else, for decayed civilizations like India and China are easy to exploit.22 As it appeared to Nehru, nineteenth-century colonization resulted not only from the application of external force by aggressive European governments, but also from the internal failure of Asian civilizations that made them vulnerable to exploitative structures like empires. This logic he universally applied to other oppressive social structures, and the reasoning behind this universal applicability can be found in the short but telling title of the letter – ‘Marxism.’ The letter argued that just like we cannot blame individual British citizens for colonialism, we cannot, for example, blame the individual zamindar for the misery of the peasants.23 The zamindars have merely adapted to the structure of zamindari and are not individually the cause of it. Due to this nature of impersonal social systems, an individual British officer or a zamindar renouncing their position of privilege within their respective realms cannot cure the diseased system itself. Systems, and not people need to be Nehru, Glimpses, 498. Nehru, Glimpses, 634. 22 Nehru, Glimpses, 505. 23 Nehru, Glimpses, 630. 20 21

8

corrected, and Nehru often asserted that our political energy should be spent in discovering the historical and structural reasons behind poverty and exploitation rather than wasting that energy on criticising actions of individual people or nations. 1.3. Decay is Inherent to Civilization According to Nehru, historical change does not wait for the voluntary actions of individuals; it will come regardless. The hour produces its own agents of change. If a civilization lags behind, and does not adequately adjust to the changing times, there would be internal decay in the civilization. It would become a medieval anachronism in a modern world.24 In his philosophy, such a situation can be resolved only in two ways – either there will be a revolution and the anachronistic social structure would be violently altered from within, or a more vigorous ‘race’ will invade and the hollow structure of the decayed, anachronistic society would collapse upon the application of slightest external force.25 He substantiated this theory with the example of how Hernán Cortés and his few bandit-soldiers could pull down the entire Aztec empire as it was backward and ‘rotten at heart’ even before their arrival.26 This is foolproof historical logic – peoples who were ultimately colonized had already decayed, or else they would have been able to repulse the colonizer.27 In Nehru’s works, medieval is almost a synonym for backwardness. Nehru, Glimpses, 194. 26 Nehru, Glimpses, 214. 27 One also notices the echoes of M.K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj in this argument of why India, or say, the Aztecs were colonized. Gandhi’s general answer was that the Indians were going through a period of moral decadence. Indians let colonization happen to themselves. Indians’ internal weakness made it possible for an external power to conquer them. Nehru, however does not cite Gandhi here, though there are strong similarities in their arguments. See M.K. Gandhi, “Why was India lost?” in‘Hind Swaraj’ and Other Writings ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 39-41. 24 25

9

If the ultimate proof of vitality of a civilization is political freedom and no alien rule over itself, it implies that India must have lost its ‘vitality’ to have lost its freedom. It is well-established in Nehruvian philosophy of history that cycles of progress and decay were an inevitable historical phenomena, occurring to all civilizations. Nehru’s decayprogress dichotomy, it is noteworthy, was not a simple synonym of the East-West dichotomy because at different points in history each civilization had different fortunes. If today the West was seen as progressive, in the Middle Ages, and even after the Renaissance, it was torn by massacre, war and bigotry – the whole atmosphere of Europe reeked with ‘lies and intrigue, violence and cruelty, and one wonders how people put up with it.’28 Similarly, at the turn of the first millennium any comparison between Europe and Asia would favour the latter.29 Unlike the idea of a permanently static and mystical East contrasted with a dynamic and rational West,30 Nehru’s decay-progress dichotomy was not a predetermined world order, because each civilization had periods of rise and fall. Nehru refused to assign unchanging or essential characteristics to any people – after all, even the ageing philosopher civilizations like India and China were once vigorous explorers like Europe was in the eighteenth century. This was best captured in the letter ‘Angkor the Magnificent and Sri Vijaya’ where he detailed the role of India as an explorer and conqueror of South-East Asia.31 In other words, history proved that the hierarchies of power between Nehru, Glimpses, 343. Nehru, Glimpses, 208. 30 Nehru notes that: ‘What is history, indeed, but a record of change? And if there had been very few changes in the past, there would have been little of history to write.’ See Nehru, Glimpses, 11. Every country and every society have always changed throughout history. As such, every society has a history regardless of whether one is a part of ‘East’ or ‘West.’ 31 Nehru, Glimpses, 154–58. A longer discussion of the same subject is found in Discovery in the chapter ‘Indian Colonies and Culture in South-East Asia.’ See Nehru, Discovery, 211. 28 29

10

civilizations are not set in stone, as India was once itself a conqueror if today it was the conquered. In this historical dynamic of the rise and fall of civilizations, Nehru introduced one other complicating factor. In modern times, colonialism discouraged the revitalization of the colonies by freezing their feudal superstructure and perverting their natural course of historical development. In the case of India, Britain accomplished this by allying with the most reactionary and ‘medieval’ elements like religious extremists and Indian princes, as this would perpetuate their rule by preventing any natural historical progress of India.32 By treating medieval as synonymous with backward, Nehru was inheriting some of the dominant strands of thought in colonial historiography, but he brought attention to the ‘medieval’ social structure of colonies for a different purpose – he argued that the outdated feudal social structure of India still persisted due to Britain. The very existence of feudalism under the British does not justify but invalidate the official justification of its rule. He denied that the British Empire and its ruling class was a force of civilization and modernization as it often proudly claimed to be. In practice, British rulers functioned like a medieval-minded reactionary group, bent on reining progress that should have naturally arrived without Britain (further discussion in sections 2.8 and 3.8). Nehru found it striking that from Jordan to Persia to India, feudal and reactionary elements have found in the British Imperial governments a natural ally.33 In other words, Britain forced the colonized world into a sorry state of anachronism, preventing historical progress. This, however, could not continue for long as the changes in the economic base of the colonized world was inevitable due to being in continuous contact with the West. Britain introduced India to industry and newer political ideas, and however hard they tried, they could not stop the historical processes their arrival 32 33

Nehru, Glimpses, 501. Nehru, Glimpses, 889.

11

in India unleashed. Feudalism was bound to be replaced by nationalism because of the change in mode of production that had set in – a Marxist analysis (further discussion in section 2.6). In the 1930s, Nehru thought that India stood on the edge of an upturn, while Western Europe was on the edge of a downturn. He predicted that the power-dynamics of the twentieth century would be dominated not by Europe, but by Soviet Russia and the United States of America, both of which were the new centres of vitality in world history.34 The inherent, inescapable flux of civilizations again had found its new winners and losers. He was confident that the British Empire would fall, as it appeared to him from the fate of Ancient Greece and Rome – to point out commonalities in history, Nehru was not shy of taking chronological leaps millennium wide. He noted that the ancient chronicler Herodotus mentioned three stages of the decline of a nation: success, arrogance, downfall.35 Today, just like the erstwhile Roman Empire, the British Empire was ‘smug and selfsatisfied.’36 It was indicative of its upcoming fall. 1.4. The Historical Role of a Leader Upon being asked what India is, Jawaharlal Nehru once replied ‘Gandhi is India.’37 (Further discussion in section 2.5). Nehru, notes Sarvepalli Gopal, was never more satisfied when working under the influence of people more charismatic than himself. He was charmed by the ‘great men’ (and occasionally women)38 of history, even in their cruelty.39 Nehru also drew attention to the fact that both these states were relatively young compared to India or China. The age factor comes into play once again. See Nehru, Glimpses, 1093. 35 Nehru, Glimpses, 50. 36 Nehru, Glimpses, 112. 37 Quoted in Lal, “Nehru as Writer,” 20. 38 Chand Bibi, Lady Murasaki Shikibu and Catherine the Great were a few he was really impressed by in Glimpses. 39 Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, 174. 34

12

Thus, not just Gautama Buddha, M.K. Gandhi, and Ashoka Maurya, but also Genghis Khan and Joseph Stalin attracted his attention.40 For revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin, Napoleon Bonaparte and Mustafa Kemal Pasha, he had deep admiration, and devoted entire letters to the latter two. Noticing this, E. J. Thompson complained to Nehru in a letter that he ‘simply cannot understand [Nehru’s] Napoleon worship.’41 Nehru’s later biographer Michael Brecher has also noticed ‘hero-worship of Napoleon’ in Glimpses.42 Fascinated though he was with leaders, Nehru found the source of a leader’s greatness not due to their personality, but due to their historical situation – history manufactures its own heroes and heroines. The leader embodies, like a microcosm, the aims and aspirations of a people, and fulfils a historical function. Nehru thought that no great leader can be successful until the time was ripe – the leader is a part and product of their own times.43 Every act of the leader can be seen as History – with a capital ‘H’ – dictating that action. By saying this, he snatched away historical agency from the leader, and handed it over to History. This unpleasant deterministic conclusion he revisited only in Discovery and even then he had no solution to it. There indeed is an air of inevitability surrounding his characterization of both leaders and civilizations in history. The rise and fall of great leaders, like the rise and fall of civilizations, works with the invisible hand of History behind it, for reasons that often escape our little and limited minds. Thus, grasping the fullness of causes and effects history in is not possible (further discussion in section 3.5). 1.5. A People’s History Nehru did not Know In the chapter on Genghis Khan, Nehru found that it was strange ‘that this fierce and cruel and violent feudal chief of a nomadic tribe should fascinate a non-violent and mild person like me, who am a dweller of cities and a hater of everything feudal!’ See Nehru, Glimpses, 255. 41 Nehru, A Bunch of Old Letters, 229. 42 Quoted in V.G. Kiernan, “Nehru the Historian,” World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues 2, no. 2 (December 1993): 10. 43 Nehru, Glimpses, 357. 40

13

The subtitle of Glimpses reads ‘Being further letters to his daughter, written in prison, and containing a rambling account of history for young people.’ This indicates the book’s pedagogical tone. A major reason for conceiving Glimpses was Nehru’s concern over Indira’s historical education. He considered that the two great failures of textbook histories taught at schools was their obsession with national histories and an omnipresent Eurocentrism. ‘I dislike very much boys and girls learning the history of just one country … history is one connected whole and you cannot understand even the history of any one country if you do not know what has happened in other parts of the world.’ Furthermore, the unconnected, national histories taught at schools also create the illusion that there are fundamental differences between peoples and nations.44 It is only possible to discern worldwide historical phenomena that function across political boundaries only when we zoom out from the scale of national histories.45 (Further discussion in section 1.14.) Additionally, as he explained in the preface to the Hindi edition of Glimpses in November 1937, books on world history were mostly written by Europeans and on Europe only. To rectify that, he ‘endeavoured to write more detail about Asia. A complete picture emerges only when both are seen together.’46 The mission was to rectify both nationalist and Eurocentric biases. By saying this, Nehru had set an extraordinary goal for himself – to write a history that goes against the grain – and do it from prison. This decision was partly made possible by the positive reception of his earlier book published in 1929, Letters from a Father to a Daughter, which gave him the confidence to envision the much wider world history that Glimpses would become.47 Soon enough, however, he became Nehru, Glimpses, 5. Emphasis mine. Nehru, Glimpses, 559. 46 The emphasis is mine. Quoted from Gopal, Selected Works, vol. 10, 669. 47 Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Jawaharlal Nehru: Oxford India Short Introductions (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019), 108. 44 45

14

conscious of a gulf that separated the kind of histories he would ideally like to write and the ones he currently would be able to write. The gulf was not about the execution of writing, but about the sources and notions of history that he would be depending upon. His English schooling of an upper-class background in Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge had tinted his historical lens accordingly. One way to remedy this was to read more, which he regularly did in prison, but another way was to try to highlight his blind-spots consciously. The most visible attempt at this are those chapters of Glimpses which talk about great men in history. He thought that real history was the history of the masses,48 and yet, by his own admission, he simply did not know enough of it to write it properly. ‘What could I do,’ he asked, ‘if my own education was defective and the history I was taught topsy-turvy?’49 Thus, paragraphs declaring that real history was a history of the people were uncomfortably glued to the end of classic Great Man narrative chapters like the one on Napoleon. Nehru admitted that glorifying history is usually based on our ignorance about the past. If we are fascinated with certain historical periods, that is because we equate the times with just a handful of lives lived by some inspirational great personalities, ignoring the condition of the masses. This was a false picture, he argued, because the masses have continued to live miserably throughout history.50 But he does not know how to include the masses in his history for now. Therefore, for the ‘miracle’ of going beyond conventional history, he must depend on his power of imagination.51 The history of the common people must be made conspicuous by constantly reminding Indira of its very absence in the letters she was reading. In other words, Nehru was setting out to rectify the Nehru, Glimpses, 6. Nehru, Glimpses, 67. 50 Nehru, Glimpses, 1012. 51 Nehru, Glimpses, 199-200. 48 49

15

bias of his education and historical sources by using ideology and imagination as the corrective. 1.6. The River of History To Nehru, dividing history was a matter of convenience and not reality. Chronological divisions make little sense for events run into each other.52 One cannot divide history, like one cannot divide the flow of a river – both are unending successions without any breaks.53 This unity of movement and the indivisibility of history is necessary to maintain while writing any meaningful historical account – for meaning in history lies precisely in that unity, and the meaning of the organic whole of history is destroyed by arbitrarily slicing it into smaller and unrelated constituents. In Nehru’s schema, isolated histories were unacceptable, and the conceptual importance of viewing history as a causally interrelated whole of past, present and future has been best captured in his analogy of the ‘river of history.’ The river of history, as he envisioned it, flows continuously towards an ‘unknown sea’54 – a future that we do not know yet. As inherent in this analogy of a continuously flowing river, events in history always have a long backlog – for historical events ‘do not just happen like miracles,’ out of the blue.55 In this philosophy, there was no end to history, because whether we like it or not, ‘this world of ours rolls on, and the men and women and children in it laugh and weep, and love and hate, and fight each other unceasingly. … The river of life is never still.’56 Since human activities keep on changing, history too keeps on accumulating in all its varied forms, like an endless river

Nehru, Glimpses, xx. Nehru, Glimpses, 181. 54 Nehru, Glimpses, 199. 55 Nehru, Glimpses, 519. 56 Nehru, Glimpses, 1089. 52 53

16

theoretically heading towards a sea, but never quite reaching there. This suggests that if we are talking of the future in the longue durée, Nehru does not offer a teleological view of history, although he did believe that for the near future the direction of history was certainly an international socialist civilization. The further we try to look into the future, the fuzzier our vision becomes; although for the near future, guesses can be made with more certainty (further discussion in section 1.13). 1.7. Nehru’s Tolerance and Nehru’s History Commenting on the religious politics of 1930s in India, Nehru unhappily remarked that ‘some people, ignorant of history, imagine that [communal trouble] has been India’s fate right through the ages.’57 He believed that many political questions floating around in the Indian political atmosphere were pure rhetoric devoid of any factuality. An article that he penned captured rather well the historical basis of his religious tolerance, where he stressed that political narratives built against Muslims do not pass the test of historicity. In August 1934, writing for the newspaper Tej, he remarked: I wonder how many know that Chengiz Khan was not even a Mohammedan? Or that Timur was as fond of erecting his favourite pyramids of heads in western Asia where Islam flourished as in India? Or that Mahmud of Ghazni treated the Khalif [sic] at Baghdad with dire penalties? … It may surprise many that one of the main charges actually brought forward in Spain against the [Muslim] Saracens by Christian King Philip III was their spirit of toleration. … Intolerance is always due to want of understanding and ignorance of each other. Let us therefore try to learn.58 57 58

Nehru, Glimpses, 114. Emphasis mine. Gopal, Selected Works, vol. 6, 437-38. Emphasis mine.

17

While tolerance too can be based on a factually incorrect understanding of history, Nehru does not explore this theme here. His focus remains on how bigotry sustains itself by distorting historical facts, contexts and meanings for its own ends, a theme he tackled in more detail in Discovery. Similarly, wrong history makes people believe that Europe always ‘bossed it over’ Asia,59 as if the world order was set in stone since the beginning of civilization (previous discussion in section 1.3). This myth was perpetuated by the British Indian education system. It was alleged that the British Empire was a saviour of civilization who brought peace to warring Hindus and Muslims. Thus, it justified Asia as a backward continent which was destined – or rather, deserved – to remain under European control.60 Here Nehru is arguing that if we counter this false history by trying to learn history dispassionately, communities of India can live in lasting peace and the claim of Britain to rule India would become even more untenable. 1.8. The Free and the Beautiful Intellectual freedom and the aesthetic sense of a civilization were intertwined for Nehru. If one notices that in a particular historical time period the quality of art has deteriorated, good chances are that civilization was also on a decline, for ‘art of a people is a true mirror of their minds.’ Recalling the simplicity of ancient Buddhist art, he thought that later Indian art had forgotten beauty, becoming ornate,61 or even grotesque.62 He hoped that with the independence of India, its filthy streets, homes, cities and even the metaphorical filth in our lives would be swept clean – the urge to freedom and the urge to beauty are co-related. Nehru, Glimpses, 285. Nehru, Glimpses, 511. 61 Nehru, Glimpses, 97. 62 Nehru, Glimpses, 209. 59 60

18

The first prerequisite for revitalization is freedom from colonization and freedom of thought, and as a consequence of freedom of thought, a good aesthetic sense would naturally emerge.63 Like art, knowledge also evaporates during periods of decline.64 All civilizations have gone through ‘dark ages’ inevitable due to the flux inherent in history. Nehru gave the example of the Dark Ages in Europe – in this period, he thought, knowledge accumulated in the society was forgotten, and the dogma of the Church was a major factor that froze the intellectual life of Europe.65 The aesthetic capability of Europe and its networks of knowledge were restored only once the Church was challenged, which developed into the Reformation and the literary and artistic outbursts of the Renaissance. Similarly, a colonized and unfree India cannot rise to its aesthetic potential, whether in art or in street hygiene. Major structural changes, the foremost of which were the decolonization and democratization of India, needed to happen as a prerequisite for the much-needed renaissances in India. To sum up, beauty was implicit in how Nehru saw freedom, and a revitalized civilization would never engage in polluting one’s surroundings. 1.9. Decay of Contemporary Europe Discussing the state of contemporary world civilization, with a special focus on Europe, India and the USSR was a recurring theme in Glimpses. Nehru found that Europe was once again about to experience a seismic shift, but this time for the worse. Europe had armed itself to the teeth, employing science not as a tool of civilization but of barbarism. The conservatism of Western Europe had drowned the old vigour in the region, and the ideals of French Revolution lied forgotten. Europe was unlikely to Nehru, Glimpses, 133. Nehru, Glimpses, 161. 65 Nehru, Glimpses, 128. 63 64

19

recover from the predicament until the life-breath of revolution reached them once again, like it had reached Soviet Russia. The old colonial game of clinging on to colonies would bring no respite, for the colonies were now capable of asserting themselves. New winds of history were blowing, but how might Europe change? ‘There are no barbarians who are strong enough to destroy European civilization. But sometimes, civilized people themselves act barbarously, and if this happens, civilization may destroy itself.’66 These words were written in June, 1932 – Mussolini had already Marched on Rome a decade ago and Adolf Hitler had just finished second in the April 1932 German presidential elections. Nehru was hinting towards the rise of Fascism and Nazism in Europe, and the challenge to European civilization taking root inside the continent itself – inner decay once again. Slowly, the decayed Europe would likely lose its superlative position in world history to the freshly revolutionary Russia and the United States of America. 1.10. The Soviet Union in World History The argument about the success or otherwise of the Five Year Plan is rather a pointless one. The answer to it is really the present state of the Soviet Union. And a further answer is the fact that this Plan has impressed itself on the imagination of the world. Everybody talks of “planning” now, and of the Five-Year and Ten-Year and Three-Year plans. The Soviets have put magic into the word.67

Parallel to the decline of Europe was the rise of the Soviet Union. Nehru had a special regard for the USSR, for he considered it an unprecedented social experiment in history, with the goal ‘to raise a backward country industrially within a framework of socialism.’68 Ideals of social service Nehru, Glimpses, 211. Nehru, Glimpses, 995. Emphasis mine. 68 Nehru, Glimpses, 994. 66 67

20

were already important enough for Nehru, and the promise (and working proof) of rapid industrialization had its own appeal to a poverty-ridden, undernourished people living under a foreign and irresponsible government. Yet, apart from the practical promise of progress, there was also the ideological promise. How important an optimistic belief in the progress of humanity was to Nehru has been captured in these lines from his last letter in Glimpses, ‘… history teaches us of growth and progress and of the possibility of an infinite advance of man.’69 Nehru was not oblivious to the flaws of the USSR, but despite its faults, saw it as an earnest attempt to build a new world. He admitted that it was an undemocratic system, with absolute control of the state, but trusted that all its exploitation was for the benefit of the masses. Even being a dictatorship, the Soviet Union maintained the ‘goodwill of the workers.’70 Another great ideal that the Soviet Union proved as a feasible goal was replacement of ‘profit motive’ with the ‘social motive’ of production, which could lead to the development of a more humane and less exploitative economy.71 Nehru even claimed that following the Revolution and expansion of literacy, there had been such a drastic change in the mentality of the Russian workers that now they preferred reading engineering books to novels!72 It is not my intention to comment on how Nehru developed such an impressive picture of the Soviet Union. More important is to see its purpose in his philosophy of history – the Soviet Union demonstrated to Nehru the historical possibility of realizing in practice the fastest recovery of an oppressed people. By his reading of history, he had already come to the conclusion that liberal democracy – which merely promised political liberty but no economic security – was not democracy in fact, for to ‘call a starving Nehru, Glimpses, 1108. Emphasis mine. Nehru, Glimpses, 957. 71 Nehru, Glimpses, 1000. 72 Nehru, Glimpses, 1001. 69 70

21

man free is but to mock him.’ To substantiate this, he contrasted the USSR with the United States. The American Declaration of Independence was a huge leap forward from feudal Europe, and yet the black people of America were not allowed to have a share in the fruits of progress. ‘“All men are born equal” – and yet there was the poor Negro, a slave with few rights! What of him?’73 This was an example of how liberal democracy only gives superficial freedom to its citizens, for it never strikes at the root cause of all problems – economic injustice. Economic liberty is the fundamental component of true political liberty, and ‘only in one country’ had economic liberty been achieved. And that was the Soviet Union.74 1.11. Empathizing with the Past To read history without feeling it and empathizing with it was not something Nehru encouraged in Indira. ‘Let us think of the past in terms of the present, and of the people in those days in terms of ourselves,’ he urged. Here he does not mean that we should judge the past by the yardstick of the present. Employing the morality of the present to judge the past is ‘absurd,’ for no one can defend slavery today, ‘and yet the great Plato held that slavery was essential.’ Similarly, it is equally unreasonable to judge the present by the morality of the past – old customs and religions should not define our present beliefs.75 What Nehru really meant by thinking history in the ‘terms of the present’ is to foreground everyday life and human activity in history, and not the occasional war. This historical thinking favoured having a human empathy with our historical characters and entering, as far as possible, the mental landscape of our characters. Only then would history appear to us in a way it actually was – not as a dictionary of wars and violence, but as a ‘mighty procession of living men Nehru, Glimpses, 418. Nehru, Glimpses, 269. 75 Nehru, Glimpses, 1105-6. 73 74

22

and women and children in every age and every clime, different from us and yet very like us, with much the same human virtues … and failings.’76 Real history should not deal with ‘a few individuals here and there, but with people who make up a nation, who work and by their labour produce the necessaries and luxuries of life, and who in a thousand different ways act and react on each other. … It is the story of man’s struggle for a living.’77 Only once we realize the humanity of our historical subjects, and only once we have the right sense of proportion of what events constituted their lives, will we have a human feeling for them, and history would come alive. To Nehru, good historiography produces meaningful narratives we can relate to, and not merely a compendium of facts presented in a dry prose. 1.12. How to Make History? Invoking once again the metaphor of the river of history, Nehru divided human beings into two categories based on the roles they play – the drifters, who merely drift on the river of history, having nothing in control; and the changers, who play an effective role in changing the course of history.78 The latter believe in gathering knowledge and basing their actions on knowledge while the former trust the supernatural to do things for them. This distinction seems superfluous and classist79 because even the changers have the Nehru, Glimpses, 1105-6. Nehru, Glimpses, 68. Emphasis mine. 78 Nehru has given no specific terminologies for the two ‘categories’ of people, but we may call them ‘drifters’ and ‘changers,’ based on the language used in the chapter where this argument occurs. See Nehru, Glimpses, 934. 79 Nehru is referring to the matter as if the people of India who believe in religion do little to change the world around them, and due to their beliefs, are prone to inaction, and hence are ‘drifters.’ This is not the only instance where Nehru had a patronizing attitude towards common people, especially the peasants or what we may call the ‘masses.’ He considered the masses as one who acted on instinct and not a long-term plan; they were easy to deceive because they were short-sighted, and did not see the benefits that freedom would grant them. He 76 77

23

invisible hand of History behind their actions as he had stated earlier in his own words. In this scheme of historical agency, his advice to Indira was to be a changer, not a drifter. The means to do so were two-fold: placing primacy on action, such that all thought should be directed towards meaningful action for social change, and secondly, appreciating the aesthetic delight in courageous acts. Using another metaphor, this time of mountaineering, he explained that history is not made by living in comfortable valleys, but atop risky summits. Therefore, metaphorically speaking, history is made at the peaks of human endeavour.80 To live in a fictional world of imagination and enjoy only the good things of life was not the right thing to do. We should have the courage to confront the ugly parts of reality and try to change the situation – for as human beings, we owe selfless service to other human beings, and this service we must perform truly joyfully, without complaining.81 Through the words of G.B. Shaw (and interestingly, not through the words of M. K. Gandhi) Nehru affirmed that the truest joy of human existence lied in exhausting oneself for the selfless service of humanity.82 Even as the world had been turned into a convoluted jumble of ‘isms’ like feudalism, communism, socialism, capitalism, syndicalism, anarchism, communalism and opportunism; the supreme ‘ism’ of idealism should remain our guiding star and we should not betray the selfless ideal of social service. Thus, rather than evading the real world problems that history presents us with, our duty is to accept and confront this world which is on the brink of wars and revolution. Only then can we play our part in the making of history – and relish ‘the joy of great and noble adventure, and the feeling that our

used the words ‘simple [minded]’ and ‘poor unsophisticated people’ for peasants. See Nehru, Autobiography, 56-62. 80 Nehru, Glimpses, 1109. 81 Nehru, Glimpses, 1108. 82 Nehru, Glimpses, 1102.

24

“steps are merging with those of history.”’83 In other words, developing a sense of unity with History and nurturing highest ideals of sacrifice was the key to be a changer. For the aesthete in Nehru, the finest aesthetic of life was the pursuit of ideals and sacrificing oneself for a ‘mighty purpose.’ Nothing mattered if our steps were in the right direction, synchronized with the march of History. How dear idealism was to Nehru is best captured in his article ‘Whither India?’ published in November, 1933, just months after his release from the prison.84 A just society, built on ideals … is not such an empty idealist dream as some people imagine. It is within the range of the practical politics of to-day … We may not have it within our grasp but those with vision can see it emerging on the horizon. And even if there be delay in the realisation of our goal, what does it matter if our steps march in the right direction and our eyes look steadily in front. For in the pursuit itself of a mighty purpose there is joy and happiness and a measure of achievement.85

1.13. A Civilization without Decay In all historical civilizations, decay was inherent. Nehru wondered, can we build one free from decay? He thought that socialism had the answer. By reforming the society continuously and ensuring co-operation among all its members, a socialist political setup can ensure a self-renewing society. This society will not collapse, for there would be no loss of freedom, which has so often been the cause of social, political and aesthetic stagnation in history. At the same time, this socialist civilization would be a worldwide phenomenon. This way, collapse from the inside would be mitigated by the guarantee of freedom to everyone; and collapse from the Nehru, Glimpses, 1103. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, 177. 85 Gopal, Selected Works, vol. 6, 16. Emphasis mine. 83 84

25

outside would be mitigated by the guarantee of industrial equality and international interdependence of all nation-states, ensuring that no opportunity would arise for one to invade another. Lack of liberty and colonialism will decline in tandem, as the society would become capable of continuously reforming itself and growing.86 This completes Nehru’s argument on the origins of colonialism encountered earlier. If colonialism resulted from external forces preying on societies facing internal failure, then the only permanent cure would be a worldwide socialism that guaranteed freedom and common economic development to everyone, such that situations favouring the development of exploitative institutions like empires would not develop in the first place. In other words, an interconnected and socialist world civilization would be capable of keeping itself free from exploitation by preventing unequal growth in different regions of the world. In an equal socialist world, coercive political interactions would be ruled out as only co-operation is possible among true political equals. He employed his favourite analogy of history as a river once again. Internationalism is like a river, and nationalism is a dam: no matter how hard we try to make dams, we would not be able to contain the river for long. Nationalism is a barrier doomed to be breached by the flow of history into the future, and the result of this would be the creation of an international, interdependent, socialist world civilization.87 Although I would not push the following argument too far, it is hard not to see parallels to this in Nehru’s panAsian foreign policy programs during his tenure as the Indian Prime Minister. Perhaps, the conceptual basis of his foreign policy lied in this worldview that he expressed in Glimpses. 1.14. The Meaningful Scale of History 86 87

Nehru, Glimpses, 211. Nehru, Glimpses, 931.

26

To Nehru, there were clear dangers of ignoring the larger movement of history and having knowledge only of one slice of the world’s history. Edward Gibbon, speaking of the Roman world, had once claimed that the happiest and most prosperous periods in human history were between 96 CE to 180 CE. To this Nehru commented, ‘I am afraid Gibbon, with all his learning, has said something with which most people will certainly hesitate to agree. He talks of the human race, meaning thereby the Mediterranean world chiefly, for he could have had little or no knowledge of India or China or ancient Egypt.’88 Glimpses was a challenge to Eurocentrism,89 but unlike Discovery, the argument was made not by writing a new history of India alone, but by writing a history of the world. Indeed, not all parts of the world found (or could have found) a mention in his world history. One constraint on Nehru, as he frankly admitted, was that he had little or no knowledge of regions like Africa or the preEuropean pasts of the American continents. As a consequence, his new ‘world history’ should more appropriately be called a new Eurasian history. Another reason was the issue of value. Not every facet of the past was valuable enough to be included in a worldwide historical account. If selection of facts is inevitable in writing a history, by what criteria should we select what to 88 89

Nehru, Glimpses, 104. Some words of one critic are worthy of consideration in this case. This was the American novelist Albert Guérard, who reviewed Glimpses in 1942. Before reading the book he had the impression that Glimpses offers a new perspective on world history, different from ‘European’ and ‘Christian’ ones. Much to his disappointment, he found that despite the book being ‘very able,’ India remained ‘dark an enigma as ever’ as Nehru’s attempt to forefront India and China was similar to a Voltaire or Wells. Nehru is not Indian enough, he implies. ‘Nehru, for all his protest against European imperialism is purely and simply a European.’ See Albert Guérard, “Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru,” Books Abroad 16, no. 2 (Autumn 1942): 438. Nehru himself admits to have done so, for he thought that he ‘approached [India] almost as an alien critic, full of dislike for the present as well as for many of the relics of the past that I saw. To some extent I came to her via the West, and looked at her as a friendly Westerner might have done.’ See Nehru, Discovery, 41.

27

include in a world history? Nehru thought that since not all regions have had equally important consequences for the wider world, it would be safe to skip minor players in history. He takes the example of ancient and medieval Japan. Not that we should deliberately ignore Japan’s premodern history – but in case we must ignore it for some reason, that would not make a great difference to our understanding of events in Asia at large.90 On the other hand, he considered that if we ignore modern Japan, it would be an inexcusable exclusion from any world history for it has had a major influence on the course of Asia and the world. Nehru favoured the larger forces of history at the cost of smaller ones – once concluding that ‘the world would not have changed very greatly with the nose of Cleopatra.’91 In summary, Jawaharlal Nehru’s histories favoured the larger over the smaller, and the connections that were definitive of the whole as opposed to those that apparently were not. To write a national history to demonstrate the importance and achievements of India by concentrating on India alone was not the only way to counter colonial historical narratives, after all. As Glimpses of World History attempts, it could also be done by penning a global history to demonstrate the erroneous significance granted to Europe, trying to undo the continent’s near-monopoly over world historical narratives. It was a Eurasian history where Gautama Buddha got as much attention as Jesus Christ, Turkey as much as Spain, the Caliphs as much as the Holy Roman Emperors, and Jalaluddin Akbar as much as Oliver Cromwell. History was not all about the ‘quarrelsome little continent of Europe’ as he would put it bluntly in Discovery.92 On the whole, Glimpses was a bold narrative endeavour, not least because it was written from a jail cell, and not from a wellNehru, Glimpses, 136. Nehru, Glimpses, 89. The thought experiment that Cleopatra’s nose could alter world history was first coined by Blaise Pascal. 92 Nehru, Disccovery, 212. 90 91

28

stocked library or archive. Even as we may disagree with the historical-philosophical claims he arrived at, readers of Glimpses can hardly fail to notice Nehru’s remarkable grasp over histories of multiple regions across Eurasia. In terms of its style however, this book contrasts well with The Discovery of India, where the same man would use history, twelve years later, in quite another way. By then, the philosopher of national history would take precedence over the philosopher of global history in lieu of a changed context that he found himself writing in (further discussion in Chapter 3 and Conclusion).

29

Chapter Two

Writing an Autobiography to Situate the Self in History

Nehru as a writer received the highest praise from his contemporaries for his autobiography, and the book became a best-seller.1 The Australian diplomat Walter Crocker, a contemporary of Nehru, believed that even if Nehru had never become the Prime Minister of India, ‘he would have been famous as the author of the Autobiography and the autobiographical parts of The Discovery of India.’2 In a letter addressed to Jawaharlal Nehru on 31st May, 1936, Rabindranath Tagore famously described it as a book that ‘leads us to the person who is greater than his deeds and truer than his surroundings.’3 In 1943, the pioneer AfricanAmerican historian, sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois read Nehru’s autobiography (which was then published as Toward Freedom) and arrived at a certain conclusion about the current historical struggle of all peoples across the world. He said: One rises from the reading of this book with a feeling that the so-called race problems of the modern world are essentially one: primarily they are matters of economic exploitation, of racial arrogance and the utter failure to recognize in people of different color, appearance and ways of life, the essential humanity of all mankind.4

Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Nehru and Bose: Parallel Lives (Gurugram: Penguin Random House, 2014), 136. 2 Crocker, Nehru, 22. 3 Nehru, Bunch of Old Letters, 179. 4 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Towards Freedom by Nehru,” Phylon 4, no. 1 (1st Qtr., 1943): 91. 1

30

That an autobiography could give insights into ‘essential humanity’ of all people as Du Bois saw it, says volumes about its style and content. Richard J. Walsh, the author of the preface to the first American edition of Toward Freedom similarly emphasized, through quoting John Gunther, that the book captured ‘the story of a whole society, the story of the life and development of a nation.’5 On the whole, this book earned the reputation of an outward-looking autobiography. Unlike the autobiographies of Gandhi, Rousseau and Augustine, it was not a confessional text. Rudrangshu Mukherjee has noted that the book gives the impression that the author’s life was important because it was a part of a wider history rather than for its own sake. Differently put, in Autobiography, the self of Nehru got its value from the historical events it was a part of.6 Nehru downplayed the importance of his isolated self, because to him, understanding his own self cannot be divorced from understanding the environment he found himself in. As a politician, he had a rare capacity to self-criticize – and earnestly. Take for instance this remarkable article dated 5th October, 1937. Written by a certain Chanakya for the Calcutta newspaper The Modern Review, it attacked ‘Rashtrapati Jawaharlal’7 with an unusually intimate knowledge of Nehru’s politics and personal quirks. Opposing the re-election of Nehru to the Congress Presidency on grounds of his authoritarian tendencies, Chanakya observed: From the far north to Cape Comorin he has gone like some triumphant Caesar passing by, leaving a trail of glory and a legend behind him. … Men like Jawaharlal, with all their capacity for great and good work, are unsafe in democracy [sic]. He calls himself a democrat and a Jawaharlal Nehru, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (New York: John Day Company, 1941), ix. 6 Mukherjee, Nehru and Bose, 133. 7 ‘Rashtrapati’ was a popular term to refer to the Congress President. 5

31

socialist … but every psychologist knows that the mind is ultimately a slave to the heart and logic can always be made to fit in with the desires and irrepressible urges of a person. A little twist and Jawaharlal might turn a dictator … he has all the makings of a dictator in him – vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride, organizational capacity, ability, hardness, and with all his love of the crowd, an intolerance of others and a certain contempt for the weak and the inefficient. … is it not possible Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar?8

As this article created a ruffle, Nehru observed with ‘great interest’ the reaction of his colleagues as they made ‘wild guesses’ at who wrote the article.9 Of course, Chanakya was none other than Nehru himself. According to Sunil Khilnani, this ability of Nehru to detach himself from and reflect on his own ‘will to power’ is ‘rare in successful political leaders.’10 Nehru’s ability to contextualize himself in the wider society he lived in makes Autobiography an unusual autobiography: it was more concerned with recent history, politics and society of India than it was with Nehru’s private life. Observing this, American journalist Edgar Snow concluded that the book was not only one of the ‘treasures of English literature,’ but also was ‘indispensable to any student of Asia.’11 M. K. Gandhi, however, seemed less impressed, for reasons that will become apparent in this chapter. When Nehru gave Gandhi the manuscript of Autobiography, Gandhi sure read it, but in his bathroom. The only other book to share this distinction of being awarded a place in the Mahatma’s bathroom library was Mein Kampf, the autobiography of Adolf Hitler!12

Gopal, Selected Works, vol. 8, 520-23. Nehru, Autobiography, 628. 10 Nehru, Autobiography, xviii. 11 Edgar Snow, “The Great Soul’s Heir,” in Nehru Abhinandan Granth: A Birthday Book (New Delhi: Allahabad Law Journal Press, 1949), 88. Emphasis mine. 12 B. N. Pandey, Nehru (London: Macmillan, 1976), 151. 8 9

32

In all three of Nehru’s books, the self is never invisible. In Glimpses he would turn to his own personal feelings in some letters, while the first drafts of Discovery were meant for expanding his autobiography. The initial chapters of Discovery still remain an intimate, if translucent, expression of his private life. And in Autobiography of course, the self of the narrator is present along with Nehru’s insights into the wider events in India and abroad. The importance of Autobiography in his philosophy of history arises from the ways in which Nehru tried to relate his self to the larger movement of history in India. The first step towards understanding his historical situation and responsibility as a politician was to learn about the people he was politically accountable to. 2.1. Realizing a Historical Responsibility Nehru’s first ‘discovery of India’ actually happened in Autobiography, or at least was first narrated here. With this discovery, a frightening and distressing sense of responsibility dawned upon him. Before 1920, Nehru said that he was ‘totally ignorant of labour conditions in factories or fields’ and his ‘outlook was entirely bourgeoisie.’13 The discovery he had made was of the real face of India – the ‘semi-naked sons and daughters of India’ who were starving and lived a life of hopeless poverty. Trespassing his social bubble of privilege, he came in close contact with the peasants and proletariat of United Provinces in the 1920s. As a consequence, ‘a new picture of India seemed to rise’ in his mind, that spoke of the unending degradation of human life.14 A new, massive moral responsibility of doing something concrete to alter the state of misery of these ‘sons and daughters’ of India fell on his mind heavily. That the imperial British Indian government had little concern for peasants and workers did not help either. It was clear to 13 14

Nehru, Autobiography, 54. Nehru, Autobiography, 57.

33

Nehru that this problem of human misery in India was intimately connected with the entire social structure as it then functioned – a historical change in Indian society was overdue. To demonstrate the urgency of a major social change in India, he recalled an episode from 1931, during a time when Gandhi was in London attending the Round Table Conference. During that year, the Congress had advised the peasants of the United Provinces to pay whatever land rent they could for the time being, to keep aloft the banner of truce with the government until Gandhi came back. The peasants followed all their advice but many returned injured, beaten by the zamindar’s agents and dispossessed of their land. The best Congress could do was help them in being treated in a hospital. But the root cause remained, and due to this, such a thing would predictably happen again. Nehru watched his and his party’s helplessness to rectify this preventable situation, and the realization haunted him. ‘I felt like running away and hiding myself somewhere, anywhere, to escape this dreadful predicament.’15 The only permanent remedy to this situation was to uproot the entire system of agrarian debt and economic violence through new agrarian laws and policies. The need for radical changes in the basic structure of the Indian rural world was pressing, but the required changes, according to Nehru, may never happen without political freedom first. Without freedom, Indian politics was doomed to live a superficial life, incapable of any lasting structural change. Bandages could heal the wounds of the peasants, but the new task was how to prevent the injury in the first place. 2.2. Liberals and their Philosophy of History According to Nehru, many politicians of India, especially the ‘liberals,’ thought of politics in terms of 15

Nehru, Autobiography, 317.

34

‘persons rather than of principles.’ The liberals he criticized included P. S. Sivaswamy Iyer, C. Y. Chintamani, Tej Bahadur Sapru and others. Nehru accused them of nourishing the empty hope that the state of India can be improved by rectifying some aspects of British governance as they failed to see that imperialism was based not on the ‘personal views’ of Viceroys, but on the principles of imperialism. It cannot be reformed beyond a threshold without eliminating the core of the system – the British Empire itself.16 In a similar vein, the liberals would sometimes demand release of some political prisoners here and there, but by focusing on individual redress at the cost of systemic changes, they failed to question the basis of the police state itself.17 To Nehru, it was shocking that the liberals busied themselves with trivial questions of policy changes or demanded benevolent conduct from the colonial administration – while being completely severed from the sentiments of the masses and the kind of politics they wanted. Building on this, Nehru questioned the liberal politicians’ sense of history itself – they have ‘no understanding of human convulsions like the great French Revolution or the Russian Revolution. … For them the Bastille has not yet fallen.’18 Their poor philosophy of history seemed to explain their poverty of commitment to the people, the new protagonist of history. A sense of one’s past was thus a critical element for Nehru’s present politics, a politics which is theoretically committed to the ‘people’ before anything else. 2.3. The Twain Shall Meet In June 1932, Jawaharlal Nehru was transferred to the Dehra Dun jail from Bareilly under the cover of darkness. Just as they were about to depart for the new jail, an English police officer, in a heart-warming gesture, handed Nehru Nehru, Autobiography, 297-8. Nehru, Autobiography, 405. 18 Nehru, Autobiography, 421. 16 17

35

some German magazines for he had learnt that Nehru was practicing German in prison. Nehru was ‘touched.’ During the overnight car and train journey, he pondered on this. How was the possibility of friendship, that naturally arises between two people who inhabit the same space, forcibly terminated in British India? How could neither the Britons nor the Indians realize that they shared a common humanity before anything else? Each appeared hostile and unfriendly to the other, and yet ‘neither realized that there was a decency and kindliness behind the mask.’19 Behind the racial hatreds of his times, lied sheer ignorance of the human face of the other side. Indians had little individual contact with the British, and to them, the British usually appeared as inhuman officials; similarly, the Indians with whom the British were most likely to interact, thought Nehru, were political opportunists. In such a situation, neither is able to form a good opinion of the other. Unless the exploitative structure of the Empire was removed from the equation, there would be little human relationships between the two. In the present relationship between Indians and Britons, the element of Empire added an inherent hierarchy that prevented them from interacting as equals. With a human appreciation of each other, all hatred, misconceptions and ignorance can be forgotten; but this would only be possible in a world without the British Empire. Only when Britain is no longer the racially superior emperor and India its racially inferior subject, can the people of these states interact as equals. Only then would Indians and Britons develop friendships, empathy and love at the individual level. Only then would they co-operate wilfully to build a joint future together. That is how the ‘twain shall meet.’20 19 20

Nehru, Autobiography, 361. This phrase is taken from Rudyard Kipling. In 1889, Rudyard Kipling wrote the now oft-quoted poem ‘The Ballad of East and West.’ Its opening line read, ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’ Rudyard Kipling, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (New York: Doubleday and Company Inc., 1940), 233.

36

2.4. Marx, Lenin and Historical Progress … the theory and philosophy of Marxism lightened up many a dark corner of my mind. History came to have a new meaning for me. … it became an unfolding drama with some order and purpose, however unconscious, behind it. In spite of the appalling waste and misery of the past and the present, the future was bright with hope, though many dangers intervened.21

It is not insignificant that Nehru ended Autobiography with his views on Marxism and its application by Lenin. By adapting Marxist theories to present circumstances of Russia as Lenin had done,22 Nehru thought that Lenin had developed an organic connection with life and history, and as such, he could be said to be ‘marching step by step with history.’23 History and the meaning of life was an important question that Nehru wanted answers to, and Marxism seemed to give him precisely that – he was soothed by its long-term optimism. A Marxist philosophy of history, where history has an end or goal or telos, however dim it appeared, gave Nehru’s own philosophy its indefatigable hope. This optimism was especially important for him because it gave him solace in the face of Gandhi’s decisions like suspension of the Non-Cooperation Movement. Initially, he felt betrayed, but then taught himself to not be disheartened because even though the national movement was suspended, history marched on, inevitably preparing India, even through reversals, for freedom.24 History was a longer process (‘longue durée’ in today’s parlance), in which short term reversals were not uncommon. Thus, in the inevitability of history Nehru found a sigh of relief – whatever Nehru, Autobiography, 378-79. Nehru, Autobiography, 610-11. 23 Nehru, Autobiography, 611. 24 Nehru, Autobiography, 379. 21 22

37

happens, there will be freedom, as his longue durée perspective seemed to suggest. Indeed, the book was true to another one of its many titles: Toward Freedom. Elsewhere, Nehru had written in August 1934 that ‘all history teaches us … lesson of general progress, and indeed life would be a burden difficult to carry if we did not believe that a better order of things is gradually evolving itself in this world of sorrow.’25 History affirmed his faith in life because it confirmed the possibility of a better future, a future which is worth struggling for even as we face recurring defeats in the present. This faith, as we shall see, had cracked by the time he would write Discovery. 2.5. The Paradoxical Leader Nehru venerated Gandhi on the whole, but in Autobiography he also registered a rebellion against his master. Entire chapters are dedicated to commenting on, sometimes in harsh words, the beliefs of Gandhi. Yet Gandhi remained a mystery to him, whose complexity evaded his reasoning. He saw in Gandhi the same mysteries he saw in India, for not only did Gandhi represent the ‘conscious and subconscious will’ of millions of Indians, he practically embodied his people, meaning that ‘he is the idealized personification of those vast millions.’26 If Gandhi was the finest representative and leader of peasant India, Nehru believed that he also shared the same flaws of a peasant’s worldview and ‘outlook.’27 Gandhi was paradoxical enough – ‘amazingly backward’ at times and yet he was the ‘greatest revolutionary’ of India.28 The power of Gandhi, Nehru tried to comprehend, lied in how he revived the historical memory of India and ‘gave her glimpses of her own soul.’ He prepared India for a better and achievable future. With his guidance, India learnt to look both ways: into Gopal, Selected Works, vol. 6, 435. Emphasis mine. Nehru, Autobiography, 266. 27 Nehru, Autobiography, 266. 28 Nehru, Autobiography, 381. 25 26

38

its past but also towards a future.29 The historical role of Gandhi was to make India conscious of its past and future alike; and he himself represented, like a living paradox, both the past traditions and the future aspirations of India. Nonetheless, Nehru disagreed with the way Gandhi did it. One reason why he was at odds with Gandhi was because he believed that his historical sense – and as a consequence, his political imagination – was wrong. 2.6. My History is the Right One Based on his belief in the onward march of history and the global dawn of socialism, Nehru thought of his historical understanding as superior to the so-called traditionalists and liberals. He declared the ‘history and sociology and economics’ of religious leaders, moulvis and swamis as all wrong (often Gandhi would also be relegated to this same group of saints with little knowledge of history, sociology and economics.) Despite his disagreements, Nehru did not find himself in the position to challenge Gandhi. He consoled himself that Gandhi’s ‘backward’ views can be allowed to prevail, for no one else can mobilize a mass movement like he can – but only for now. Once independence is achieved, Gandhi’s ‘fads and peculiarities’ must not be encouraged.30 Especially since he realized that Gandhi’s political end was not the ‘socialist objective,’31 an unbridgeable ideological chasm opened between him and Gandhi. Nehru found it best to continue on the defensive: whenever a disagreement arose, he preferred compromise to confrontation. David Kopf has observed that Gandhi was a leader who could mobilize masses for popular agitation in a way that other leaders like Motilal Nehru, C.R. Das and Jawaharlal Nehru could not.32 Nehru and the Congress were Nehru, Autobiography, 267. Nehru, Autobiography, 79. 31 Nehru, Autobiography, 269. 32 Kopf, “Jawaharlal Nehru as World Historian,” 146. 29 30

39

dependent on Gandhi, however much they disagreed with some aspects of his worldview – and they were conscious of this. Partha Chatterjee takes a critical view of Nehru and his idea of history in the wider context of Indian nationalism. He notes that Jawaharlal Nehru and other ‘progressives,’ based on their understanding of history, arrived at the idea that the greatest impediment to the progress of India was British control over the Indian state, and a national state must replace the British one and become the primary agent of nationwide progress. They believed that the peasants failed to comprehend that the progressives’ political program would be in their objective interest. The Indian society, which was primarily agrarian, was deemed unreceptive to socialism, and only Gandhi’s religiously-tinged way of mobilization seemed to work well here. But once independence was achieved (via Gandhi’s appeal), his religious beliefs, and other ‘backward’ aspects must be discarded even as Gandhi would nominally remain the guiding star of independent India’s policies.33 Chatterjee does not mean that this process was equivalent to a deceitful usurpation of the Indian national movement by the progressives. The second idea of nationalism was critically dependent on the first one for its very existence – Gandhi’s nationalism was the prerequisite for Nehru’s nationalism to function.34 The change simply demonstrated the maturation of Indian nationalism. It was the final stage in the development of the rational nation-state in India which was capable of using force in the name of progress.35 To rephrase it crudely, for the achievement of Indian independence, Gandhi’s would be the means, but once the checkpoint of political freedom is reached, Nehru’s means towards a socialist end can take over, and Gandhi’s utopia of villages can go to historical oblivion. Even if for now Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and The Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1993), 152-155. 34 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and Colonial World, 155. 35 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and Colonial World, 161-2. 33

40

Gandhi’s saintly appeal should do the trick of mass mobilization, once the new nation-state gains a surer foothold in India, it would take over and follow the path of industrial progress with the socialist objective. The ‘right’ historical understanding must displace the ‘wrong’ one, and so should the ‘right’ political vision prevail. Lastly, Nehru also disagreed with Gandhi on the absolute rejection of violence. He thought that even though the state must avoid violence as far as possible, the socialist state can in certain situations, and with a certain spirit, commit violence. In his view, he found it ‘impossible to ignore the importance of violence in the past and present. To do so is to ignore life.’36 It should be considered legitimate to use violence, but only when there is no malice in our intentions and the sole purpose of it is to remove obstacles that prevent a greater public good.37 Nehru accepted that in statecraft, violence would anyway be necessary, for the masses do not behave like individuals do. No doubt, all violence must be minimized, but he never denied that for building a better society through the intervention of the state, violence would be necessary. As a neutral tool for progress, violence should remain – ‘if force is used it should not be in the spirit of hatred or cruelty, but with the dispassionate desire to remove an obstruction.’38 2.7. Religions as Ideals and Ideals as Religions Nehru’s Western education and ideology proved to be a barrier for him to understand in depth the religion and culture of India. As Nehru considered himself a modern and rational individual, he was inclined to dismiss religion as dogma, superstition or vested interests.39 As he himself admitted, ‘… do what I will, I cannot get rid of the habits of Nehru, Autobiography, 570. Nehru, Autobiography, 570. 38 Nehru, Autobiography, 571. 39 Mukherjee, Jawaharlal Nehru, 114. 36 37

41

mind, and the standards and ways of judging other countries as well as life generally, which I acquired at school and college in England.’40 Nehru distilled the meaning of religion in such a way that he was left with something that his modern ideologies also approved of. Rationalizing religion, he arrived at two ideas. First, there are some human ideals, like that of social service, that have remained constant throughout history even though the form in which these ideals are expressed keeps on changing historically. In other words, idealism is a human characteristic that cuts across all history and geography. Second, all religions held similar ideals of social service and sacrifice in their core. Religion was an expression of the stable ideal of selfless social service in historically variable forms. These two conclusions on religion were adapted from John Dewey and Romain Rolland; by these intellectuals’ definitions of religion, much that Nehru agreed with counted as religion – socialism, communism, humanism, nationalism and rationalism.41 Nehru was prepared to see himself as a religious man with this redefinition of religion as a pursuit of high ideals, appropriate for a particular historical space and time. Buddhism in fifth century BCE Gangetic plains, Islam in seventh century CE Arabia and socialism in twentieth century India could all be said to be striving for the same human ideals. The kind of religion Nehru disliked was religion as an ‘asocial quest for God’ for one’s own spiritual growth, leaving the wider society untouched. The self might have become perfected by this, but the service of society was ignored. What was worse was that organized religion often developed into a vested interest.42 Most significantly, he was not convinced that the inner quest of religion can be fulfilled without improvements in the outer conditions of life. Material wellbeing is necessary for cultural and spiritual progress, because Nehru, Autobiography, 436. Nehru, Autobiography, 396-7. 42 Nehru, Autobiography, 384. 40 41

42

a starving person strives not for spiritual growth, but for the next meal.43 It might be possible for a few individuals to achieve a higher state of spiritual consciousness, but for large groups, it is virtually impossible to have inner development in an outer environment that was poor and deprived. To put this in religious vocabulary, Nehru was promising salvation to an entire country through socialism. Socialism was for him the modern manifestation of an ancient urge for the greater good. 2.8. Britain Suppressed Progress Drawing on statements from the Report of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform of 1934, Nehru dived into the topic of whether or not Britain deserved any credit for its alleged transformation of Indian society by ensuring the rule of law and stable government. Although he thought that the coming of Britain did introduce some changes in India for the better, he did not credit Britain for that. These changes were the result of impersonal forces of history that came with the British arrival to India rather than coming because of British effort. Britain was not a conscious agent of historical change. Much of the progress India had made was common with the rest of the world, and in fact Britain was an obstacle to it and not its catalyst.44 Thus, Britain’s first contact with India only ‘opened India’s window to the West,’ but having brought ‘one aspect’ of Western thought and technology, Britain stifled all developments that would naturally arise from this contact. As a matter of policy, Britain ‘preserved all the out-of-date feudal and other relics they could find in the country.’45 Nehru believed that there was no reason why progress would not have come had India not been ruled by Britain – he was not being ‘needlessly cankerous and perverse’ to suggest that Nehru, Autobiography, 537. Nehru, Autobiography, 450-51. 45 Nehru, Autobiography, 452. 43 44

43

India could have industrialized even without British colonization.46 Changes like nationalism, unitary state, modern industry and infrastructure would have come anyway to India because these changes were part of a larger world historical movement, and not a result of some British initiative bestowed upon Indians. The only good Britain did was to establish a link between India and the West, but beyond that, it actively fought against historical progress. If Japan, the USA, the USSR and Turkey could start from humble beginnings and become mighty nation-states, India could too. India only wanted to share in the universal progress of history, but Britain’s political control over India would not permit that. The culmination of this mode of thought was the conception of The Discovery of India. Nehru wanted to develop a new conceptual framework to understand India in its present state. What was India? Where did it come from? Why was it the way it was? Was India even what he had always assumed it to be? Having discarded the Eurocentric interpretations of India’s history, culture and people, Nehru needed something to fill the theoretical gaps. In other words, a re-discovery of India was impending. He would finally get the opportunity to do so after 9th August, 1942, when the police whisked all the major leaders of the Congress and landed them in jails across India for adopting the Quit India resolution.

46

Nehru, Autobiography, 451.

44

Chapter Three

Discovering New Historical Ideas

If Autobiography was arguably Nehru’s best prose, Discovery was his most consequential one.1 On 7th March, 1949, historian and diplomat K.M. Pannikar wrote that the defining qualities of Jawaharlal Nehru as a historian were his internationalism; placing India on a world-wide canvas; merging past, present and future; good factuality; having a balanced idea of the past with all its good and bad; nationalism; and hope.2 He found that The Discovery of India was being criticized for merely being a literary writing without original historical value. The critics, continued Pannikar, forget that: Originality in history is mainly in presentation, in bringing known facts into focus, and in discovering the underlying relationships of what seem to be disconnected events. In this sense, the Discovery of India is a work of great originality, a history in the best sense of the word.3

Malcolm Pitt, an academic reviewer of Discovery also agreed that the chief merit of the book was ‘not fact, but interpretation.’4 All three of Nehru’s works show this kind of interpretive originality, of representing a new historical perspective that does not consider Europe as the focal point of its narrative, even as he extensively used concepts, terminology, ideals, and of course language, borrowed from Mukherjee, Jawaharlal Nehru, 114. K.M. Pannikar, “Nehru as Historian,” in Nehru Abhinandan Granth: A Birthday Book (New Delhi: Allahabad Law Journal Press, 1949), 50. 3 Pannikar, “Nehru as Historian,” 49. 4 Malcolm Pitt, “The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru,” Pacific Affairs 20, no. 2 (June 1947): 231. 1 2

45

the ‘West.’ In terms of both the style and content, Discovery had both continuities and discontinuities with Nehru’s earlier writings. According to Sarvepalli Gopal, Glimpses contrasts well with Discovery, for in the latter Nehru paid lesser attention to socio-economic change or great men. His Marxism faded and he was more inclined towards non-dualistic Vedanta philosophy. The most striking change was the ‘astonishingly narrow nationalist tradition’ invoked in Discovery.5 It was written in a time when the nationalist movement in India was at its lowest ebb, and in this political situation, Nehru prioritized giving a message of national hope through his preferred medium of history.6 The book was written between April and September, 1944 in the Ahmadnagar Fort prison, and by that time, another world war and another cycle of police repression had been inflicted upon the people of India without the consent of its elected legislature (however limited the franchise). With all the major leaders including Gandhi imprisoned, the future seemed bleak to Nehru. Expectedly, he once again turned to his old solace of oppressed humanity – the past. The epitaph Nehru gave to this book speaks of this. Taken from a sonnet by William Shakespeare, it reads: ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past …’7 Mukherjee has noted that through Discovery Nehru possibly wanted to reinvent his own self and find his roots in Indian history by slowly shedding the Western basis of his thought.8 In this light, it was as much a discovery of his own Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, 299. Gopal also adds that upon reflection in hindsight, Nehru would have been ashamed of many things in Discovery, including the concept of race he used. 6 Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, 299. 7 The epitaph may not be available in the later editions of Discovery including the 2004 edition by Penguin Random House. For the epitaph, see Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Calcutta: The Signet Press, 1946). 8 One example can be found in Discovery itself, where he was so disturbed that the idea of even visiting England had become ‘distasteful,’ though he immediately corrected himself by saying that it was wrong of him to treat the English in this way. This statement captures well the frustration Nehru felt as a political leader at the political impasse with the British. He believed that only with the 5

46

self as it was a discovery of India, and in this process, he idealized the Indian past by giving it a modern, rationalist interpretation. Or should we rather say that it was a reinvention of his self as it was a re-invention of Indian history? By this point in his life, his philosophy of history has matured, and it became noticeably more diverse not only in terms of his own ideas, but also in terms of the thinkers he intellectually borrowed from and built upon. While we had seen historians like G.M. Trevelyan and writers like H.G. Wells featured in his older works, now we encounter new names including Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Bertrand Russell, Aurobindo Ghose and even the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Gandhi and Tagore, as usual for his books, continue to feature here also. Sunil Khilnani has stated that if Glimpses was one of the first challenges to Eurocentrism prevalent in historywriting, Discovery was another step in the same direction.9 Not only does the book show a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between ‘West’ and ‘East,’ it countered the claims of many British politicians and historians that India had no history or historical trajectory of its own to speak of, and that it was an invention with no cultural continuity across time.10 As a response, Nehru made a simultaneous bid for nationhood and freedom for India. Freedom was the essential goal and the past could be a means to it – but if freedom comes only to nations politically organized as states, what was the basis of nationhood? What was India’s national identity based on? It struck Nehru that a study of history might illuminate the answer. If nations are built with history, Discovery is most forceful in making that claim of India’s nationhood. (Further discussion in Conclusion.) independence of India could normal non-hierarchical relations develop between the two countries. See Nehru, Discovery, 550; and Mukherjee, Jawaharlal Nehru, 115. 9 Nehru, Discovery, xxii. 10 Nehru, Discovery, xxi.

47

Although the narrative of Discovery certainly followed a narrower nationalist line, the book remains a rare example in the nationalist literature of the twentieth century for its refusal to indulge in the politics of exclusion.11 Nehru’s goal in writing Discovery was not to consider India’s exclusive historical heritage severed from the rest of the world, but its ‘special’ heritage within the wider, interconnected world.12 Nehru arrived at two key conclusions in Discovery. First, India was a pluralist culture, in which all communities lived in a peaceful existence, for much of its history. Communities of India cannot be segregated from each other without denying their history. Second, any inheritance of the past that does not aid progress must be discarded.13 Before we proceed, it must be also recalled that what Nehru wrote was for an undivided India, equally applicable to what would later be called East and West Pakistan. What Nehru had in mind while discovering his India was an even much larger geography, society and heritage than what we know as India today. The work also demonstrated Nehru’s philosophy of history in a finer form. He successfully put the East and West and the past and present onto one single plane of argument, as some themes discussed in this chapter will show. Nehru’s romanticism, ‘one of the deepest layers of his mind, which he never shed,’14 was already evident in Glimpses, and in Discovery it became noticeably more frequent. By now, big realizations had dawned upon Nehru and he revised his older positions on several issues. A decade had passed since the politically optimistic Glimpses, and Nehru had grown more contemplative and less sure of his worldview and the future of the world. Another world war had dented his faith in

Nehru, Discovery, xxi-xxii. Nehru, Discovery, 25. 13 Sunil Khilnani, “Nehru’s Judgement” in Political Judgement, ed. Richard Bourke and Raymond Guess (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 260. 14 Gopal, “Formative Ideology of Jawaharlal Nehru,” 787. 11 12

48

certainties like historical progress.15 A simple model of linear progress no longer sufficed in the uncertainties of the 1940s, and something new was needed. He was initially even distrustful of his faith in humanity – he pondered if human nature was ‘so essentially bad that it would take ages of training … before it could behave reasonably and raise man above that creature of lust and violence and deceit that he now was?’16 Even as some pessimism crept into his writing, his faith in humanity was only shaken, not terminated. When this man of a shaken faith picked up his pen again, he reformulated many of his older ideas and assumptions. The end-product of this was his most influential historical thesis. 3.1. India’s Living Pasts Once again, imprisonment was the ‘urge to action’ for Nehru. He described the decision to write yet another history in words that were much more direct than before: ‘In prison … we try to find some sustenance for our starved and locked-up emotions in memory of the past or fancies of the future.’17 Nehru had by now become more inclined to think that the past controlled our present more significantly, or in fact, deterministically – we are ‘its products and we live immersed in it.’ Now also arose the concern to establish a definite relationship between the past, present and future – and harmonizing the three Nehru called the very essence of understanding life.18 In trying to conceptually merge lives lived in the present with the lives lived in the past, his ‘bare intellectual understanding’ of Indian history was replaced by ‘an emotional appreciation’ of its people. His imagination of the past was now populated by ‘living beings, who laughed and wept, loved and suffered.’19 Nehru, Discovery, 12. Nehru, Discovery, 12. 17 Nehru, Discovery, 7. Emphasis mine. 18 Nehru, Discovery, 7. 19 Nehru, Discovery, 43. 15 16

49

New concepts like historical memory expanded the vocabulary of his philosophy of history. Also new was his tendency to discuss history, memory and nationhood together while talking about either of the three. While Autobiography recounted his first discovery of India, Nehru made yet another – equally consequential? – discovery during his extensive travels across India while canvassing for the 1937 provincial elections. He realized, more acutely than ever, how the people of India related to their pasts. The conversations he had with the peasants around epics and folklore like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, especially fascinated him. He was astonished when a political conversation about contemporary matters would be given a ‘literary turn’ by the common peasants recalling something from the epics that was etched onto their historical memory.20 This reinforced the idea that there was an essential continuity between the Indian past and present – if Indians forget their historical memory, India would ‘no longer remain India.’21 Establishing a link between history, memory and nationalism, he defined nationalism as a ‘group memory of past achievements, traditions and experiences.’22 Lastly, this memory need not be restricted to modern national boundaries. He thought that because India had ‘nourished’ parts of South East Asia in the past, many people from places like Indonesia have had an affection for India.23 Old bonds were snapped by new (colonial) political boundaries, and yet old connections and affections remained. These historical ties can serve as major planks in transnational co-operation in the future. Nehru was sure to remind that however powerful mythologies are, they are mythologies still and have little factual truth. Nonetheless, they tell us something ‘equally important – what people believed had taken place … and what Nehru, Discovery, 61. Nehru, Discovery, 567. 22 Nehru, Discovery, 573. 23 Nehru, Discovery, 222. 20 21

50

ideals inspired them.’24 This was another new strand of thought: history was not only facts culled out by academics but also something which common people directly engaged with in their everyday lives. Slowly Nehru realized that for hundreds of millions, the meaning of history was hardly limited to facts of a bygone era. For the people of India, their pasts were populated by lores, myths, ideals, expectations, norms, ethics, and imagination. Their pasts were still alive and had a vital presence in their present. Even academic history should involve an active engagement with our historical memory and try to understand it as an important facet of human social existence. Nehru thought that the historical memory of Indians was precisely what enabled the first criticisms of Indian history as taught in the British education system in the nineteenth century. There was a disagreement between the histories of India taught in English colleges and what the Indians of the older generations remembered and passed on to the later generations. Especially in the case of the history of the year 1857, British sources told what appeared to be plain lies to the Indian students. As such, writing history was always a deeply political act, across the world. The histories of the American Revolution were written differently across the Atlantic, Lenin was a saviour and villain in different nations, and the numerals 1-8-5-7 evoke entirely different memories to the British and the Indians.25 These instances reminded Nehru that how we choose to engage with the past from the vantage point of the present is a matter which deserved some serious thought. Understanding the past cannot be disassociated from understanding the present, for the present is where we reside, from where we always take the first step to access the past. Nehru often reminded the reader that facts do not vanish even if they are ignored. They are independent of the 24 25

Nehru, Discovery, 100. Emphasis mine. Nehru, Discovery, 314-15.

51

subjective observer. And yet, even when facts are the same for everyone, what differs is the interpretation of those facts, and different histories can arise from the same facts. Similarly, another limitation on the historian is the nature of their sources. Nehru claimed that Indians destroyed or hid their archival records that show their perspective on the year 1857, so almost invariably any historian has to depend on the British sources that only tell half the tale.26 Therefore, relativism is not only caused by subjective interpretation or personal vagaries of a historian, but also by the kind of sources that remain accessible to write their histories. Nehru is careful to add that he does not think that an Indian historian would give a more objective account of Indian history – both Indian and British historians are likely to distort the past, but, as is implicit in his previous arguments, their distortions are of a different kind. The British imperialists write different histories from the Indian nationalists, but the latter should not be confused with the more objective (further discussion in section 3.7). To summarize, in historiography, both the historian and the archive matter. 3.2. India as a Palimpsest Closely related to history, memory and nationhood, another fresh element in Discovery was the use of psychoanalytic vocabulary. India, says Nehru, ‘was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed,’ but each new layer could never completely erase the layers of the past below it.27 All pasts live in us, if only faintly and subconsciously, affecting our behaviour without us realizing. It is this subconscious past inscribed onto us, that unites a people, creating a common emotional bond across the nation. History writing, then, becomes ‘a process similar to that of psychoanalysis, but 26 27

Nehru, Discovery, 314. Nehru, Discovery, 51.

52

applied to a race or to humanity itself instead of to an individual.’28 Historiography liberates an entire nation from the burden of its past, just like psychoanalytic therapy relieves the burden of an individual’s suppressed memories. Young nations like the Soviet Union, which were supposedly unperturbed by their past while also being future-oriented in their politics, appeared to Nehru the best instances of how much can be rapidly achieved by simply discarding the burden of our past memories and starting anew. If India must progress, it must discover itself anew and discard whatever weighed it down. A corollary arises – what even was the ‘India’ Nehru was talking about? Who must discover what? 3.3. What is India? There were no wrong answers in describing what India was. The cool mountains or the hot plains, the Assamese or the Malayalis, the Christians or the Muslims, were all valid answers. Not one, but many images arose simply because of the diversity of India and its people.29 What then was India as a whole, if there were so many differences within it? Nehru resolved this by saying that the unity of a nation becomes apparent only when we contrast it with others. A nation can only be defined in opposition to some other nation, because until we contrast a nation with another one, it has enough diversity within itself that no pattern of internal unity emerges. He observed that perhaps ‘the essential characteristic of national consciousness is a sense of belonging together and of together facing the rest of mankind.’ Continuing, Nehru added a significant caveat. He thought that defining a nation is nothing but ‘theoretical abstractions’ that do not always have a bearing on reality. And anyway, the most powerful modern states were multinational, 28 29

Nehru, Discovery, 25. Nehru, Discovery, 56.

53

like the Soviet Union and the United States.30 Nehru was conscious that the theoretical concept of a singular identity that encapsulates all there is to a population so large is an impossibility. This idea was best captured in the epilogue of the book, where he answered the title of the book – what had he discovered after all? It was presumptuous of me to imagine that I could unveil [India] and find out what she is today and what she was in the long past. Today she is four hundred million separate individual men and women, each differing from the other, each living in a private universe of thought and feeling. … Yet something has bound them together and still binds them. India is … a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads. … She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive.31

It was not so that Nehru failed to arrive at a definite answer to the question of the title of his book. Political theorist Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee has stated that although it appears that Nehru ended Discovery on an abstract or empty note, this seemingly nebulous answer was Nehru’s successful critique of the idea that the meaning of history can be expressed in objective language. Nehru succeeded in showing, through his ‘presumptuous’ attempt, that human reality does not correspond to rationalist certainties.32 History is too variegated for the fullness of its meaning to be easily captured in words. India was four hundred million ‘private universe[s]’ and though there was an overlap between these four hundred million private universes, it was not quite enough that they all could be described at once, clumped together into a generalization. Nehru, Discovery, 432. Nehru, Discovery, 627. Emphasis mine. 32 Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee, Nehru and The Spirit of India (Gurugram: Penguin Random House, 2022), 181. 30 31

54

Nehru’s ideas on national identity are not free of contradictions. There is an instructive example of such contradictions co-existing in a single argument: although Nehru considered it absurd to ‘talk of an impulse, or an idea of life, underlying the growth of Indian civilization,’ because civilizations have constantly changed throughout history, yet he continued to believe that there was a ‘basic identity’ in India and China that has remained despite the changes.33 He does not elaborate any further on this ‘basic identity.’ The reader is left guessing, but perhaps we can end by applying his own words onto him – Nehru had many strands of thought, not all in harmony with each other, completing the philosophy of the man in all its contradictions. His contradictions arose not out of dishonesty, but out of new realizations that keep adding to and morphing the truths he held. A uniform agreement among all the various facets of his philosophy was hardly something he was aiming at. 3.4. The Inevitable Collapse of Caste Nehru was in no doubt that as history moved onward, some archaic institutions like caste would fade away. While historically caste had its function, it would become irrelevant in the future as the material base of Indian society would change. He saw caste, along with the village community and the joint family as the three pillars of Indian social life in the past. Such a social structure was not unique to India, for he pointed out similar features in trade guilds of medieval Europe and the village communities of Russia, the mir.34 However, the old order cannot continue any longer. To explain why caste would dissolve in the future, Nehru employed the Marxian idea of the relationship between base and superstructure.35 We cannot rescue caste by reforming it Nehru, Discovery, 146-47. Nehru, Discovery, 266. 35 I have used the term ‘Marxian’ rather than ‘Marxist’ for the reason that this idea of base and superstructure can be traced back directly to Karl Marx and not 33 34

55

because the economic forces that would change the base of the society would also change the superstructure, and with the superstructure, caste will go.36 This was proved by Indian history, he added. Caste was able to survive the attacks of its critics like Buddhists, Muslim rulers and Hindu reformers precisely because back then there was no change in the economic base of the Indian society; but now caste has gradually become untenable because ‘conditions of life have changed and thought-patterns are changing so much that it seems impossible for the caste system to endure.’37 Interestingly, that the institution of caste was doomed also suggested to Nehru that we must study it urgently – historical knowledge about caste and its functions would be useful to anyone who wants to see it replaced with a more just social arrangement, for once caste is dissolved, we should know what functions it served so that something else can be put in its place to fulfil the old social needs.38 3.5. The Many Truths of History In some parts of Discovery, Nehru has specifically dealt with the problems of historiography – the entire process of writing a history. He pointed out several challenges involved in historiography. The first one arises from our selection of facts to support an argument:

only to later Marxist thinkers. Marx had written in the preface to the A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, that it is ‘not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production… From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.’ Emphasis mine. See Karl Marx, A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 21. 36 Nehru, Discovery, 264-65. 37 Nehru, Discovery, 264. 38 Nehru, Discovery, 265.

56

In any country, and especially in a huge country like India with its complicated history and mixed culture, it is always possible to find facts and trends to justify a particular thesis … We shall find [in history] what we seek, and on this preconceived basis we can build up a structure of belief and opinion. And yet that structure will have untrue foundations and will give a false picture of reality.39

There are enough contradictory events in history that any event can be isolated and used as evidence for a claim that will otherwise be untenable if we consider the larger picture. Hard though it is, it is not impossible to grasp the larger picture. Since in history an ‘infinite number of factors and relations’ interact with each other, it is not possible to comprehend it all at once. However, it is possible to understand history by analysing the ‘dominant forces’ and through ‘experiment and practice, trial and error, grope our way to ever-widening knowledge and truth.’40 Therefore, a wider, macro view of history is necessary because it prevents us from isolating events and basing major historical claims on a narrow base of facts to the exclusion of all other relevant facts. While an ever expanding historical knowledge is possible, the illusion of absolute knowledge is also dangerous. A case in point is historical causation, and in this aspect of his philosophy of history, he concluded that the present was fully determined by the past. In history, we simply cannot know what is a cause and what is not because causes are not discreet and demarcated constituents of history. Every part of the past goes into making the present. Any event is ‘a link in an unending chain, caused by all that has preceded it.’41 Even the figure of the leader, who on the surface appears to shape history with their free-willed leadership can never exceed the

Nehru, Discovery, 314. Emphasis mine. Nehru, Discovery, 18. Emphasis mine. 41 Nehru, Discovery, 533. Emphasis mine. 39 40

57

limits set by history,42 because free-will is conditioned by the past, like Schopenhauer argued. Nehru did not like the implications of rejecting free-will and believing in a predetermined world. ‘All my sense of life rebels against’ determinism, Nehru remarked, but the logic of Schopenhauer was too secure for him to challenge – ‘a man can do what he will, but not will as he will.’43 Nehru ended up concluding that his very rebellion against this idea of determinism was possibly a result of all his past determining him to do so.44 He found no way to disprove determinism, but he thought that the lack of free-will does not mean we should quit trying to act and change the world. Life should continue regardless, for just by acting, one gets a sense of fulfilment, even if the action, theoretically speaking, was predetermined. Or as Khilnani puts it, Nehru’s philosophy of human action considered that human beings should act ‘as if free’ to do so.45 If subjectivity results in selective evidence-gathering, and if we cannot think freely without being influenced from our past, objectivity or absolute knowledge becomes an impossibility for the historian. The best one can do in this situation is to realize there is ‘no such thing as true objectiveness. If the subjective element is unavoidable and inevitable, it should be conditioned as far as possible by the scientific method.’46 So even if an absolute Truth exists in theory, in practice it does not. It is not humanly possible to grasp Truth for we can only understand it by reducing it to smaller, manageable portions, and even that is mediated through our individual mental faculties and ‘the prevailing ideology of the period.’47 There is no Truth; only a variable, historically changing set of truths. Nehru, Discovery, 533. Scopenhauer is quoted in Discovery as saying, ‘a man can do what he will, but not will as he will.’ Nehru agreed to it and thought that free-will is actually conditioned will. Nehru, Discovery, 8. 44 Nehru, Discovery, 8. 45 Khilnani, “Nehru’s Judgement,” 261. Emphasis mine. 46 Nehru, Discovery, 16. 47 Nehru, Discovery, 568. 42 43

58

While our finite mental capacity makes truth variable, Nehru hoped that our truths will also progress with the progress of history. Whatever new truths we find, they should reflect the growth of our thought and a higher capacity to think. Only then ‘does it become a living truth for humanity, supplying the essential need for which it craves, and offering guidance in the present and for the future.’48 In the Nehruvian paradigm, the truths we hold are by nature reflective of the present we live in. 3.6. Space, Time and the Politics of History The second kind of problem in historiography arises from our limited area/space of research; the third from the changing meaning of language over time, and the fourth from the imperialist/nationalist control over history-writing. A limited area of research leads us to historical ignorance about large portions of humankind. According to Nehru, since all important history was assumed to be happening in the Mediterranean, the world beyond the Mediterranean was never properly historically investigated. Consequently, a chronic ignorance about the Orient developed. Naturally, an idea gained currency that there were essential differences between the Orient and the Occident while in reality the only difference between them was that the West became an industrial economy, while the East remained an agricultural one: but this too was a recent historical development, likely to change soon.49 If the reason why this dichotomy developed was historical ignorance, its only cure was historical knowledge. Due to the exclusion of large parts of the world like Asia and Africa from history-writing, we are kept in the dark about their past and present alike. In order to sustain this artificial division of the world into the Occident and the Orient, we had to assume arbitrary links between the 48 49

Nehru, Discovery, 568. Nehru, Discovery, 156.

59

past and the present.50 By an ‘odd process of rationalization,’ he observed, Greece had become the alleged fountainhead of Western Civilization, no matter how far removed the West was from the ideals of ancient Greece. In reality, he argued, modern India was closer to ancient Greece than was modern West. In this light, the Occident-Orient division of the world was flawed, and the dichotomy can be dismantled as soon as we historically compare regions rather than inventing lineages. In today’s parlance, we might say that Nehru was conscious of the role of ‘invention of tradition’ in history.51 While the dichotomy of East-West can be remedied by bringing Asia into picture, the next problem that slowly affected historiography perhaps had no solution – the constraint of language. The ideas of the past, said Nehru, were ‘clothed in the language and symbols of that age. … it is often difficult to understand the sense, much less the spirit, of that ancient writing.’52 Since the meanings we see in languages and images have changed, the past becomes less and less capable of being accessed in its true form. If we try to read a historical text without paying attention to the changing meaning of words over time, large periods of human history will become incomprehensible over time. Without a grasp over the changing meaning of language, a historian would arrive at conclusions apparently supported by convincing textual evidence, but in fact these conclusions would be wrong due to the historian’s miscalculation of what that text meant. On the other hand, this phenomenon also meant that for guidance in our modern world, we cannot depend on those ancient truths that human beings arrived at millennia ago. Their solutions were developed for a different historical society, and are anachronisms now – perhaps gems for their own times, but worthless for modern problems. Nehru, Discovery, 154. The term ‘invention of tradition’ is borrowed from the title of a book, The Invention of Tradition, co-edited by historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. 52 Nehru, Discovery, 568. 50 51

60

The last challenge of historiography was imperialism and nationalism. Nehru noted that using historical falsehoods to justify conquest was not new, for even early Aryan records glorify themselves and denigrate the conquered. But there was something unique about nineteenth century colonialism. While in the ancient period, there was no need to justify war and enslavement because enslavement was considered part of the natural order of the world, in modern times, the narrative of justification had arisen.53 This was because there was a disjuncture between ideals of the conquerors and the reality of their conduct. Britain preached liberty at home, but domination abroad. To hide the hypocrisy, history came to the rescue. Imperial histories were primarily an ideology of domination functioning under the convenient and respectable shroud of objectivity. Imperialist historians wrote histories as ‘apologies for and panegyrics of British rule.’54 This was done by employing ideas like the tripartite division of Indian history. Dividing Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British periods was ‘neither intelligent nor correct’ for then, the story of Indian society would be simplified and equated to the religion of its rulers. The ‘superficial changes at the top’ do not tell us anything about the ‘essential changes’ happening in Indian society.55 The division was not ‘intelligent,’ but it was favoured by the imperialist state as it could be exploited politically. Nehru himself had long tackled the second and the fourth challenge – his idea was that if history was the tool that sustained East-West power relations by justifying their non-existent essential differences in the name of history, it can also be used as a tool for undoing that very dichotomy. Nehru made the case that we must ensure that the production of historical knowledge is no longer monopolized by Europe or is only concerned with Europe. In a world free from European political control, historical knowledge would also Nehru, Discovery, 313-14. Nehru, Discovery, 103. 55 Nehru, Discovery, 254. 53 54

61

be freer. But Nehru did not stop here. History must be liberated not only from imperialism, but also from nationalism. Like imperialism, nationalism also subverts history for its political ends. 3.7. Unsafe Historians Historically, Nehru thought that India lacked historians. In the past, unlike China, Greece or the Arabs, India had no historians except a few like Kalhana, the twelfth century historian of Kashmir. This lack of ‘historical sense,’ added Nehru, did not affect the masses, for they always had their myths that they kept alive through generations. Nonetheless, the general consequence of this was that Indians became less concerned about factual accuracy and were vague in their ‘outlook.’56 This historical drawback need not remain for long. This could be remedied with more histories being written and more historians being trained from now on, who would go beyond the idea of British, Muslim and Hindu histories. Yet this dream of new historical research sprouting from India would not be possible without independence. Nehru thought that so long India was not independent, there can be no good historical works, because nationalism will take precedence over critical reasoning.57 As he summarized in Glimpses: ‘nationalism is good in its place, but it is an unreliable friend and an unsafe historian.’58 Bad it may be, but Discovery attests that nationalism may become temporarily attractive even for someone like Nehru who was otherwise unsympathetic to it. Whatever the case, Nehru was fully conscious of what he was. An unsafe historian. Safer histories shall have to wait once the nationalist fervour had receded in India. Nehru, Discovery, 101. Nehru, Discovery, 102. 58 Nehru, Glimpses, 514. 56 57

62

Once both imperial and nationalist histories are dealt with, a more humane history devoid of crude political rhetoric should be prioritized. This idea is notable for it was written at the twilight of the British Empire in India – Nehru not only had the old order but also the unborn new order in mind as he expressed his concerns over the nationalist distortions of history, which could be as dangerous as imperialist ones. Independent India needed to nurture scholars that could grow out of both the imperial and nationalist moulds and write safer, ‘living’ histories that tell us about the experiences of common people rather than being chronologically arranged collections of unconnected facts dedicated to the service of either empires or nation-states. 3.8. Two Englands The hypocrisy of imperialism was reflected not only in history-writing, but also in its political behaviour. Nehru noted that the colonizers of India suffered from a dissonance. There existed ‘two Englands’ – one was the England of William Shakespeare and John Milton, of the ideals of revolution, freedom and science; the other was the England of ‘savage’ penal code, feudalism and conservatism. Nehru considered that although these two cannot be demarcated clearly, the latter England came to India.59 This England distorted history for its political ends, and it was unlike the other, more honourable England, which valued the pursuit of truth and justice. As he had commented pointedly in Autobiography, ‘English words seem to change their meanings when they cross the Suez Canal.’60 The conservative ruling class of England was feudal in its outlook, preferring to ally with all the feudal elements in India, and since unlike Britain, there was no middle class in India to challenge it, it functioned without restraint.61 If any Nehru, Discovery, 312. Nehru, Autobiography, 518. 61 Nehru, Discovery, 309-10. 59 60

63

social change came to India, the British were neither the conscious agents of it nor did they represent a mission for progress. Change came in spite of Britain and not because of it.62 Sarcastically, Nehru remarked that had Britain not bothered to take the great burden of civilization and teach India selfgovernment, India would be freer and more prosperous, because Britain did not rescue India from anarchy, as evident from India’s history.63 Here Nehru pulled out his counterfactual card – if in its long history, India had arrived at a stable government on its own after periods of instability, there was no reason why it would not have been able to do so once again without Britain. If anything, Britain itself was a contributor to the anarchy it promised to relieve India of. Lastly, India was not devoid of history when Britain arrived. ‘No people, no races remain unchanged’ as Nehru had reiterated many times already.64 India’s own historical dynamics could have brought political stability back to it. In other words, Nehru was claiming that Indians were capable of changing their own future. They did not need a Britain to be civilized and freed from the temporary political anarchy they had found themselves in the eighteenth century. 3.9. Socialism and Realism Glimpses introduced the idea of an unceasing flux of civilization. To Nehru, the impending downturn of his contemporary world was visible in the superficiality of everything – we eat ‘ersatz foods produced with the help of ersatz fertilizers; we indulge in ersatz emotions and our human relations seldom go below the superficial plane. The advertiser is one of the symbols of our age… to delude us and dull our powers of perception and induce us to buy unnecessary and even harmful products.’65 Nehru’s Nehru, Discovery, 315-16. Nehru, Discovery, 312. 64 Nehru, Discovery, 47. 65 Nehru, Discovery, 618. 62 63

64

romanticism for the past, the fullness of life he saw in the pagan ways connected with nature, resurfaced. He thought that although there can be many other causes to it, the capitalist, metropolitan society has caused ‘a divorce from the soil, from the good earth.’ While modern industrial society was not the only one to suffer from decline, the rise in alcoholism, the decline of fertility rates in industrial countries, the lack of appreciation of nature’s beauty, and the worship of wealth threatened to undo modern civilization.66 The solution to this decay, as in Glimpses, was a socialist society. That socialism can ensure full development of the human mind and body without making us lose touch with nature revealed his aesthetic expectations from socialism. The power of science and industry, if properly utilized with the socialist spirit, can give us the benefits of technology, chemistry and material development without sacrificing that touch of nature which Nehru found too dear to renounce for a complete life. That socialism was indeed the future also depended on his reading of the large trends of European history. In analysing the historical development of democracy, he had already pointed out that democratic ideas in Europe developed in the pre-industrial era. That is, the material conditions in which the idea of democracy was first conceived was a non-industrial society. Since ideas are slower to change compared to material conditions, a historical lag between democracy and industry developed.67 Therefore, the suitable ideological counterpart to industrial economies is socialism, not pre-industrial liberal democracy, for only that is a true democracy which guarantees a fair distribution of industrial production. The biggest challenge to the ideals of socialism came from the so-called realism. Nehru critiqued realism, for it was based on ‘past myth and dogmas’ that considered human society and behaviour as historically static. Such an ahistorical ideology challenged humanism and fuelled 66 67

Nehru, Discovery, 620-21. Nehru, Glimpses, 615.

65

Nazism and fascism. Realism also preached an unequal world order and the continuation of empire rather than international co-operation.68 Not realism but only socialism was capable of responding to the historical situation of the rise of industrial economies across the world, and accordingly, it had become necessary to counter the ahistorical ideology of realism while simultaneously striving towards the great socialist ideals. We can only manage to evade a potential historical downturn if we build a socialist world that does not delude us through consumerist advertisement-based economy, but serves our material needs without chaining us to material desires (previous discussion in section 1.13). With the world on the verge of another fresh cycle of historical change, realism shall be of no help for it gives old answers to new questions. 3.10. ‘Something God-like in Man’ According to Nehru, the illusion of modernity is founded on its pride in knowing the Truth arrived at through rational thought. We should caution ourselves against this mirage of certainty, for we too are possibly the prisoners of our own age, ‘just as the ancients and the men and women of medieval times were prisoners of their respective ages.’69 Since every age deludes itself by thinking that it has all the answers to life, we should not conflate our own views with an absolute Truth. Moreover, every individual can have their own way of looking at the world. In each human being, there are ‘inconsistencies and contradictions’ that pull us in different directions; but to resolve this contradiction we need not favour one truth over another. Truth is ‘not a monopoly of any group or nation,’ for the same truth can take many forms, each being one of the many valid ways of seeing one part of the truth.70 There is always more than one acceptable Nehru, Discovery, 602. Nehru, Discovery, 19. 70 Nehru, Discovery, 625. 68 69

66

way of representing reality, and our own truths do not simply falsify someone else’s truths. The whole picture is indeed a contradictory picture. Even science cannot be relied upon for every aspect of life for science does not yet guide us about the ‘purpose of life … or at least give us some glimpses which illumine the problem of human existence.’71 Having rejected not only God, but also the certainties of science and rationality, where did Nehru’s faith lie, in face of this moral vacuum that rejection of God created, but science did not yet fill? Marxism, non-dualistic philosophies of Vedanta and even Bertrand Russell’s philosophy were of help to Nehru; but above all, Nehru paid his homage to the ‘spirit of man,’ and the idealism of humanity. Throughout history, ideals have always changed; yet what had remained unchanged was the human ‘capacity to self-sacrifice… and because of that, much may be forgiven to man, and it is impossible to lose hope for him. In the midst of disaster, he has not lost his dignity or his faith in values he cherished … Whatever gods be, there is something godlike in man, as there is also something of the devil in him.’72 The modern human who is in tune with the modern times, Nehru concluded in Discovery, has ‘humanity as its god and social service its religion.’ If a God must be found, it lies in our own god-like beliefs and acts. No doubt, morality is not something historically constant; but rather than worrying about that, Nehru advised the reader to ‘function in line with the highest ideals of the age we live in.’ The highest ideals of his historical age, he thought, were ‘humanism and scientific spirit.’73 It is significant that living with the highest ideals of one’s age and not clinging to the archaic past (and by implication, thinking in terms of the future) is what Nehru concluded Discovery with. The implicit message being that there are some ideals that lead to progress, and we are best off when we align ourselves with them. If we stick to the high Nehru, Discovery, 621. Nehru, Discovery, 21. Emphasis mine. 73 Nehru, Discovery, 622. 71 72

67

ideals of our age, whatever happens, whatever mistakes we make, we would be able to save ourselves ‘from triviality and an inner shame and cowardice.’74 Nehru foregrounded the god-like in humanity by ending Discovery with an emotion reminiscent of Glimpses: through the pursuit of mighty ideals of social service, we can bring out the god-like in ourselves. He quoted the following words from the Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovsky to bring to a halt The Discovery of India: live life in a way that whilst dying you could say that all of your life was ‘given to the first cause of the world – the liberation of mankind.’75 In setting out to discover India, Jawaharlal Nehru had also discovered new ideas for his philosophy of history, making it conceptually more robust. Discovery dealt with a much greater diversity of concepts – historical memory as living pasts, the historical method as functionally similar to psychoanalysis, the politics of the production of historical sources, subjectivity of the historian, the changing meaning of language and symbols, and the challenge of writing national histories when a nation is constituted by millions of private universes. In addition, unlike Glimpses and Autobiography, Discovery had longer and more intricate discussions on historiography. Discovery not only explored the meaning of history like his older works, but also the experiences and challenges of the process of finding sources, interpreting them, and then writing meaningful histories. In other words, The Discovery of India offered the widest and the deepest articulation not only of Nehru’s philosophy of history, but also of his understanding of the ‘historian’s craft.’

74 75

Nehru, Discovery, 632. Nehru, Discovery, 632. Emphasis mine.

68

Conclusion

A Philosophy for the Past, Present and Future

The phrase ‘philosophy of history’ may create the illusion that Nehru concerned himself with the study of the past for the sake of the past alone. However, according to this study, he spent his energies in writing histories not only for his love of history, but also for developing his ethics for the present and having certain expectations from the future. Treating the past, present and future as an interrelated continuum is one of the major constituents of Nehru’s philosophy of history. History showed Nehru the way forward, or so he imagined. To be sure, he acknowledged that history can potentially lead us to any conclusion we want, provided that we are selective enough and distort our evidence to suit our hypotheses. Nonetheless, if we are careful enough in studying history, we can hope to be guided about the present and the future. History surely does not offer guidance on minute points of policy, but only on – to use some Nehruesque vocabulary – the matters of our outlook. History should remain in the back of our heads, making sure that we are gazing in the right direction. Further, Nehru had divided the society into changers and drifters – and historical knowledge was the requisite of being a changer, because human beings, encompassed as they are by their past, must know its implications before acting towards achieving a meaningful change. And act they must without any metaphysical inhibitions of living in a deterministic world. An unusual political ability of Nehru was that he could not only look at the past from his vantage point of the present, but also imagine himself looking back at his present

69

from the future.1 In other words, he could historicize himself. He always emphasized that caring about the past does not exhaust our responsibilities, for we have an even greater responsibility to our future, to all generations yet to be.2 Therefore, in deciding to act, neither can we disregard understanding the present through studying history, nor can we act in a vacuum, without being responsible for the generations of human beings yet to be. Social justice or institutionalized inequality, fair economic distribution or concentration of wealth, a free world order or neo-colonial invisible empires, tolerance or civil war, social service or selfindulgence; all such choices affect our future, and we can choose either, but in choosing some options, we are not only doing it at our own cost, but also at the cost of all the future generations. To Nehru, it was clear that we should choose the former options over the latter – and the reasons for choosing them he inferred from his study of history. In other words, at least hypothetically, Nehru’s philosophy of history also served as the core argument for his political philosophy and political judgements. The relationship also worked the other way round, for Nehru’s political inclinations also coloured the lens through which he peeked into history. Nehru was conscious of this and therefore never claimed absolute knowledge of history. The observation of Octavio Paz rings true: he never claimed to hold the keys to History. To understand where our responsibilities really lied in this past-present-future continuum, Nehru also felt the need to have faith, though not in something supernatural. He believed that our faith must lie in a humanism arrived at through reasoning and not in religious dogma,3 because only a faith arrived at through reasoning would represent a dynamic historical truth that has kept up with the changing times, and not an anachronistic adoption of ancient morality. Khilnani, “Nehru’s Judgement,” 261. Nehru, Glimpses, 1107. 3 Sunil Khilnani, “Nehru’s Faith,” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 48 (Nov. 30 – Dec. 6, 2002): 4793. 1 2

70

Nehru believed that for all the changes in human history, the ideal to lessen human misery and find an unconditional delight in serving others is a timeless ideal, and socialism seemed to be the modern manifestation of this ideal. In this way, even though Nehru rejected a supernatural foundation for human morality, he placed his faith in socialism and humanism. One reason for writing history at length was that it represented precisely this faith, a hope in humanity, which got him through prison and politics alike. Another aspect from which his histories can be analysed is nationalism and its relationship with history. Discovery can be especially seen as a claim to Indian nationhood, for Nehru re-evaluated Indian history and foregrounded the cultural continuities in India, sometimes even at the expense of appearing naïve. Writing in 1978, B.G. Gokhale concluded that nationalism is deeply interconnected with the growth of historical consciousness, and almost every leader of the Indian independence movement evoked history, though each differed in the ways of using it.4 Another more profound opinion is found in Eric Hobsbawm’s reflections on the relationship between historians and nationalism – ‘what makes a nation is the past, what justifies a nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.’5 I do not wish to give the impression that these words should be treated as aphorisms or generalized truths of history, for this statement was made in a context not historically particular for Nehru or even twentieth-century India. Yet, it does not seem to be a coincidence that Nehru the philosopher of history was also Nehru the politician and vice versa. To find a larger relationship between Indian nationalists, their politics and their philosophies of history is a

4

5

His claim is based on a survey of studies on nationalism in Asia and Africa by Elie Kedourie, Hans Kohn and Boyd Shafer. See B.G. Gokhale, “Nehru and History,” History and Theory 17, no. 3 (Oct., 1978): 311. Eric Hobsbawm, On Nationalism (United Kingdom: Little Brown, 2021), 308. Emphasis in the original.

71

matter for further research. And so is contextualizing Nehru among the philosophers of history in the twentieth century. Sarvepalli Gopal captured the contradictions and complexities of Nehru by calling him a ‘Marxist who rejected regimentation, a socialist who was wholly committed to civil liberties, a radical who accepted non-violence, an international statesman with a total involvement in India and, above all, a leader who believed in carrying his people with him even if it slowed down the pace of progress.’6 Nehru’s philosophy of history bears some resemblance to Gopal’s overall impression of the man. From romanticism to Marxism; from Great Man portraitures to people’s history; from ‘Western’ interpretations of India to anti-Eurocentrism; from an idealization of the past to a sombre sense of responsibility to our future; we encounter a vast philosophy that can hardly be condensed into a single concluding sentence. Many threads of thought form the fabric of Nehru’s philosophy of history, and the texture of that fabric is not uniform. A general estimate of the overall texture is captured in one prominent reader’s exaggerated words. His general impression of the Nehruvian corpus also provides us with an opportunity to end this essay. Nehru’s emphasis on keeping in mind where we came from and what we owe to the future as we act in the present moment is recalled by his British reader. Contrasting Nehru with British Prime Ministers like Stanley Baldwin, whose pessimistic prose and hopeless political imagination had allegedly plunged their nation into an ideological despair, Tom Wintringham wrote: Some of us in Britain who have read these Glimpses of World History, the Discovery of India, or Nehru’s Autobiography, feel envious of India. And is it not easy to see why? Our own past rulers taught despair and greed. Our present leaders take a tepid pride in persuading us to endure, without hope or aim great enough to stir us, some inconveniences. It is natural we should envy a nation led 6

Gopal, “Formative Ideology of Jawaharlal Nehru,” 792.

72

by a man aware of the whole world’s agony, past and present, yet inspired by its “possibility of infinite advance.” Some of us … would claim Nehru as a world’s leader rather than a nation’s.7

Political hope. Great aims. Infinite advance. Such was the immediate appeal of Jawaharlal Nehru’s philosophy of history. But as this more detailed analysis has shown, it was also much more than that.

7

Wintringham, “Better History and Better English,” 31.

73

Selected Bibliography Bhattacharjee, Manash Firaq. Nehru and The Spirit of India. Gurugram: Penguin Random House, 2022. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and The Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? London: Zed Books Ltd., 1993. Crocker, Walter. Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate. Noida: Random House India, 2009. Du Bois, W.E.B. “Towards Freedom by Nehru.” Phylon 4, no. 1 (1st Qtr., 1943): 89-91. Gokhale, B.G. “Nehru and History.” History and Theory 17, no. 3 (Oct., 1978): 311-22. Gopal, Sarvepalli. Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 1. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1975. –––––. Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 6, 8 and 10. New Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1988. –––––. “The Formative Ideology of Jawaharlal Nehru.” Economic and Political Weekly 11, no. 21 (May 22, 1976): 787-792. Hobsbawm, Eric. On Nationalism. United Kingdom: Little Brown, 2021. Khilnani, Sunil. “Nehru’s Faith.” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 48 (Nov. 30 – Dec. 6, 2002): 4793-4799. –––––. “Nehru’s Judgement.” In Political Judgement, edited by Richard Bourke and Raymond Guess, 254-79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Kiernan, V.G. “Nehru the Historian.” World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues 2, no. 2 (December 1993): 9-15.

74

Kopf, David. “A Look at Nehru’s “World History” from the Dark Side of Modernity.” Journal of World History 2, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 47-63. –––––. “The Activist Hindu Intellectual Between East and West, Past and Present: Jawaharlal Nehru as a World Historian.” Journal of Third World Studies 4, no. 2 (Fall 1987): 144-157. Lal, Vinay. “Nehru as a Writer.” Indian Literature 135, no. 1 (January-February 1990): 20-46. Mukherjee, Rudrangshu. Jawaharlal Nehru: Oxford India Short Introductions. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019. –––––. Nehru and Bose: Parallel Lives. Gurugram: Penguin Random House, 2014. Nehru, Jawaharlal. A Bunch of Old Letters: Written Mostly to Jawaharlal Nehru and Some Written by Him. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1958. –––––. An Autobiography. Gurgaon: Penguin Random House, 2004. –––––. Glimpses of World History. Gurgaon: Penguin Random House, 2004. –––––. Nehru on World History. New York: The John Day Company, 1960. –––––. Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru. New York: John Day Company, 1941. –––––. The Discovery of India. Calcutta: The Signet Press, 1946. –––––. The Discovery of India. Gurgaon: Penguin Random House, 2004.

75

Pannikar, K.M. “Nehru as Historian” In Nehru Abhinandan Granth: A Birthday Book, 47-50. New Delhi: Allahabad Law Journal Press, 1949. Paz, Octavio. “Nehru: Man of Two Cultures and One World.” In Nehru and The Modern World, 13-16. New Delhi: Indian National Commission for Co-operation with UNESCO, 1967. Pitt, Malcolm. “The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru.” Pacific Affairs 20, no. 2 (June 1947): 230-31. Snow, Edgar. “The Great Soul’s Heir.” In Nehru Abhinandan Granth: A Birthday Book, 86-92. New Delhi: Allahabad Law Journal Press, 1949. Wintringham, Tom. “Better History and Better English.” In Nehru Abhinandan Granth: A Birthday Book, 29-31. New Delhi: Allahabad Law Journal Press, 1949.