He may be
reviled on Facebook and Twitter, but Nehru’s books have lost none of their
value and appeal.
Published
Nov 14, 2016 · 05:30 pm Updated Jan 03, 2017 · 02:59 pm.
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One
hundred and twenty seven years after his birth, the reputation of India’s first
and longest-serving prime minister would seem to be at an all-time low. As he
is perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be the founder of a dynasty, a share of
any discredit that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi or the Congress acquire attaches
itself to Jawaharlal Nehru’s name.
Nowhere
is Nehru more abused and reviled than on “social media”, as it is
conventionally understood: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. In his life, Nehru may
have been the most beloved of all Indian politicians: 50 years after his death,
virtually every failing of the modern Indian state is in some form attributed
to Nehru, often accompanied by the hashtags #BecauseOfNehru or (sarcastically)
#ThankYouNehru.
The
backlash comprises legitimate criticism of his economic and foreign policies or
failure to address health and primary education as well as rumours and theories
that range from deeply misleading (that Nehru rejected a Security Council seat
for India) to fraudulent (that he died of syphilis, or wrote a letter
describing Subhas Chandra Bose as a “war criminal”).
But if
one looks past Facebook and Twitter, and beyond his career as prime minister, a
much more expansive view of Nehru emerges: both of the man, and of how he is
regarded today. While many of India’s Founding Fathers wrote, perhaps only
Nehru, whose books enjoyed immediate domestic and international success, could
claim to have had a second career as a writer. If, to play on the title of his
most famous work, one wants to discover Nehru – to see past both official
Congress hagiography and its backlash – there is no better place than his
books. And as their reception on a very different social network, Goodreads,
shows, they have lost none of their value or appeal.
Three
classics
Nehru’s
three principal books – Glimpses of World History, An Autobiography
(sometimes published as Towards Freedom) and The Discovery of India –
were each written during Nehru’s periodic spells in jail. While
imprisonment took him away from his work for the Congress and his family, Nehru
relished the time spent in learning – both from books and from compatriots such
as Maulana Azad – and from reflection. According to the historian Sunil
Khilnani, “Years later, feeling keenly the lack of time to read or write, Nehru
would regret – only half-jokingly – the fact that he was no longer regularly
dispatched to jail.”
Glimpses came first, a series of letters
written to his daughter Indira from various prisons between 1930 and 1933.
While not as widely-read as the Discovery, it is in many ways an equally
remarkable work. No reader of Glimpses can fail to be impressed by its
sweep, or the fact of its being written without access to a library, but
Nehru’s greatest achievement in Glimpses is his recentring of world history
away from the West.
Glimpses was written by and for an Indian
reader, and Indian history consequently finds the space denied to it in Western
surveys, as well as serving as a reference point throughout the narrative. But
it is in his explorations of Asian history beyond India – above all of China –
that we see Nehru’s faith, truly radical at the time, in the possibility of a
global view of world history, written from a non-Western perspective. It is a
proudly idiosyncratic work, more impressionistic than comprehensive: “It is not
my aim in these letters to provide full and detailed pictures of anything.” Glimpses
is a book best dipped into rather than read cover to cover.
Nehru’s Autobiography
is, today, the least read of his major books (it has 309 ratings on
Goodreads, to the Discovery’s 4,430 and 1,257 for Glimpses). This
is because it is not a conventional or intimate autobiography – it is,
surprisingly, the least personal of his books. It is dedicated to his wife
“Kamala, who is no more” – but there is very little in it of his family or
private life. The one exception, his relationship with his father Motilal, is
covered as part of the book’s broader narrative, which is that of the Indian
freedom movement in the years 1919-’34. It remains as fluent and engaging an
account of that period as any written since, but its real interest, for a
discovery of Nehru, is the relationship between the writer and Gandhi – intense
filial love in the face of often profound intellectual disagreement.
Defying
categorisation
The
Discovery of India stands
alongside Gandhi’s own autobiography as one of the two enduringly popular books
from the Indian national movement. The common shorthand description – that it
surveys India’s history just as Glimpses did the world’s – does little
justice to this unique book, whose form defies categorisation. Part reflection
on contemporary politics, part memoir, it reaches into political theory, aesthetics,
economics and sociology in an attempt to craft a narrative of continuity amidst
continual change, of intellectual freedom and the assimilation of foreign
cultural influences in a rigid society. The Discovery is really Nehru’s
own intellectual autobiography.
Reading
Nehru’s books upends a number of the popular stereotypes that surround him,
most notably that he was the “last Englishman to rule India”, culturally and
intellectually Western. Nehru believed that Asia in general and India in
particular needed to develop the intellectual self-confidence not to see
themselves from a Western perspective, decades before the rise of post-colonial
theory – many readers will be surprised to see that he believed that
Hindustani, not English, ought to be the principal link language of India. Also
evident throughout is his understanding of India’s diversity and his belief in
the positive value of that diversity.
The
closest the three books have to an intellectual common thread is Nehru’s vision
of history as a narrative of the expansion of freedom and social and economic
justice. “Nehruvian socialism” is a pejorative phrase that isolates his
policies as prime minister from the moral commitment to progress and equality
that underpinned them. As he writes in Glimpses, “No sound and stable
society can be built up on the basis of inequality and injustice, or on the
exploitation of one class or group by another.” Nehru was far from an
uncritical or dogmatic Marxist, but we see in his books how Marx and socialism
appealed to his worldview and his understanding of the particular problems of
Indian society.
As
Khilnani writes, Nehru, unlike Gandhi, was no saint, but, rather, “like any one
of us – teeming with human appetites, often bewildered by life’s choices,
self-doubting, indecisive, short-tempered, needy, sometimes downcast.” More
than anything, what we get from Nehru’s books is a sense of his humanity – of
his contradictory impulses, his immense ego and self-assurance and yet his
acute consciousness of his own failings. He writes of his marriage to Kamala in
the Discovery: “I had been and was a most unsatisfactory person to
marry…we did not complement each other.” It is in Nehru’s “human appetites” and
his frank portrayal of them that the contrast to today’s politicians is most
stark.
On
Goodreads, owned by Amazon and the world’s most popular literary social
network, each of Nehru’s books enjoys broad acclaim. Five- and four-star
reviews dominate, ranging from over 80% of the ratings for Glimpses to
65% for the Autobiography. Only 2% of ratings for the Discovery and
1% for Glimpses are one-star. Reviewers, most of them Indian, are
frequently dazzled by the range of Nehru’s erudition, and by his prose style.
This says
something about Nehru’s books, but also about the nature of different social
networks. Contrast Goodreads to its parent, Amazon. On Amazon.in, recent books
by Barkha Dutt and Rana Ayyub have been subject to organised trolling by Hindu
nationalists: a majority of the reviews for Ayyub’s Gujarat Files, and
over 90% for Dutt’s This Unquiet Land, are one star. On Goodreads fewer
than 20% are one star for either book, and four star reviews are the most
common.
Honest
assessment
Some
might put this down to politics – that Goodreads, unlike Facebook, Twitter and
Amazon, is a “left-liberal” haven. But the real reason for the divergence is
that the vast majority of Goodreads users, unlike many on other social
networks, act in good faith. They review only books that they have truly read,
and offer an honest assessment of the book.
Intellectual
good faith requires a willingness to change one’s mind, rather than blind
adherence to an inflexible set of conclusions. And the reviews of Nehru’s books
reveal just how often this takes place. As one Goodreads user says of Glimpses:
“Anyone who has not read this book has not seen this side of Pt. Nehru. Most
people I know do not have respect for him for the things he did as politician.
However, the letters that he wrote to his daughter are amazing to say the
least.”
Another
writes: “My negative impression about Mr Nehru has vanished after reading this
book.” Discovering Nehru through his books, some readers no longer feel
inclined to blame him for all the ills of contemporary India. A reviewer of the
Discovery says: “Reading this book made me blame Indira Gandhi more for
the problems of India prior to 1991.”
That’s
not to say that a course of Nehru’s books will win over every hater. For some,
it may only harden their antipathy: even so, they may find they enjoy the
experience. The last word belongs to one Makarand Hazarika: “Jawaharlal Nehru
was a power hungry person with dastardly acts and meretricious character, but
that doesn’t mean he couldn’t write good books.”
