Oxford University Press has published two books on Nehru in time for the August celebrations, one a reprint of a 1995 collection of essays by the eminent Indian historian, B. R. Nanda, former Director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, and a new biography by Stanley Wolpert, a senior American historian, notable for his studies of other Indian leaders, including Nehru's great adversary, M. A. Jinnah, founder of Pakistan. Both authors are experienced professionals in their field, but no two books on the same subject could be more unlike.

Nanda's is a cautious book, meticulous in its use of archival sources and careful in its judgments, though the author's sympathy with his subject is clear. The essay format enables Nanda to engage profoundly with different aspects of Nehru's life and career more easily than in a chronological study. Three essays, most unusually, discuss Nehru as a writer. Alone of all his contemporaries, Nehru was a serious intellectual, an avid reader and an author of considerable depth, with a beautiful English style. Long years in gaol helped his literary development. His writings included an autobiography, a study of Indian history and a collection of carefully crafted letters to his daughter, Indira, and later to the Chief Ministers of the States in the new Indian Union. Nanda devotes other essays to Nehru's relations with a range of notable contemporaries - his father, Motilal, his mentor, Gandhi, and his angry contemporary, Subhas Bose. He also focuses on Nehru's beliefs, particularly his understanding of religion and of socialism; and on issues or episodes which were crucial or controversial in Nehru's career - his role in the eventual partition of the subcontinent, his ideas on economic planning and on foreign policy, particularly the stance of non-alignment in world affairs. We are left with the picture of a human dynamo, who drove himself relentlessly, who was passionate about freedom, equality and social justice, who tackled the immense problems his country faced at Independence in a way even Gandhi did not; yet one whose policies led his country into administrative malaise and near-bankruptcy after his death. Perhaps more seriously, so great was his political stature and so mercurial his temperament that he failed to raise up and nurture political successors who could carry forward his vision and manage the increasingly turbulent politics of the subcontinent. Nanda claims to write for both students of India and the general reader. Yet this remains a professional's book, and an important one: for the general reader, there is no background on the nature of Indian politics or of British imperialism which would set the carefully reasoned arguments in a necessary context.

Wolpert's biography raises even more serious questions about readership. Totally in contrast to Nanda's measured style, judicious judgment and careful use of sources, Wolpert's is a chatty, rambling study, replete with literary and rhetorical devices and neat throw-away lines which undermine its historical credibility. It is biographical in shape, but is grossly imbalanced, with only the last ninety pages dealing with the vital years of Nehru's premiership. It is too long and detailed for the general reader but seriously deficient for the genuine scholar student of India. Its length depends on copious quotations from Nehru's letters and other writings rather than on the fruits of original research or interpretation. Evidently the author was unable to gain access to new family or official sources, and had to rely on the published Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru and numerous biographical studies and personal reminiscences.

The racy narrative style precludes serious analysis - either of Nehru himself or of his changing position in the politics of India. Among the most obvious issues are the nature of the Indian National Congress before and after 1947, particularly its socio-economic base and its relationship to the different regions of India; and the nature of Indian Islam, the reasons behind Jinnah's emergence as a "Muslim leader", and the build-up of support for the idea of Pakistan. (Significant new scholarship on these issues receives no mention at all.) Without this, Nehru's role as a nationalist politician and his peculiar position as Gandhi's "heir" but without a serious local power base (in contrast to many of the Congress grandees such as Vallabhbhai Patel) are inexplicable. We are told that in the 1950s Nehru enjoyed "unlimited, indeed, virtually unchallenged power over the Indian republic". But why, then, was he unable to achieve after Independence so many of the things which he held dear, and indeed vital for the emergence of a new India - the eradication of "communalism" and the growth of a secular ideal of the new India, the transformation of the administrative services inherited from imperial masters, radical social reform and redistribution of material resources? There is cursory mention of economic planning, but nothing on the struggles to achieve land reform, or the issues of caste, the eradication of untouchability, the status of women, or the struggle to galvanize Indian agriculture. For Nehru, such issues were central to his life and to describe that life without attention to them is to diminish him greatly. But to address them would involve analysis of his ambiguous political position in an increasingly complex political context, where the constraints of India's federal structure, of the nature of Congress as a party, and the conservatism of much of Indian society limited his real power to change affairs. Ultimately, they wore him out.

Wolpert bases his study entirely on personality. He over-credits Nehru with power and influence as an individual, but also structures the account of his life round his personal relationships in a way that is at times gratuitously distasteful. Running through the study is a strand of psychological "analysis" founded on virtually no evidence. The assumption is that Nehru was a covert homosexual who dared not face the truth about himself. Instead, Wolpert seems to argue, he compensated for his unsatisfactory marriage with a series of relationships with women, the most notable of whom was of course Edwina Mountbatten, the last vicereine. Casual asides and innuendoes are plentiful in this context. But Wolpert does not establish what difference these relationships made to his public life. More important is the treatment of Nehru's relationship with the woman who was to be central to India's public life in the two decades after his death - his only child and daughter, Indira, mother of the ill-fated Rajiv and Sanjay. Wolpert uses to good effect the letters which passed between them during their prolonged separations, and shows how she developed from a sickly student into a powerful woman, confident enough to leave her husband and establish her- [begin Page 8] self as her father's hostess and constant companion. Where Wolpert errs is to argue (often by assertion rather than from hard evidence) that Nehru was "grooming" her for succession. There is little in Wolpert's text or elsewhere to suggest that this was so: rather the contrary - for Nehru refused to undermine the democratic process by which his party should select his successor.

Nehru deserves serious scholarship and the skills to communicate his ideals and significance to a wider audience: his vision of a new India and a new world order, his struggles, his successes and failures are a window on to the making of the twentieth century, in particular the formative processes of colonial nationalism, decolonization and the creation of new states and national identities out of the experience of imperial rule. Nehru's life and writings are potentially so accessible that they are a valuable point of departure for scholars and non-specialist readers alike who have a serious interest in understanding both this century in global terms, and more narrowly how India has come to be what she is.

Nehru was the butt of jokes about being "a British gentleman" and "the last viceroy". But at a deeper level he was a crucial bridging figure between different worlds. In the period of his premiership he connected the worlds of Asia and the West, at home in both, interpreting one to another, despite misunderstandings. His unique position from the 1930s as the Congress politician who took international affairs seriously positioned him at Independence to be his own foreign minister and to sway India's foreign policy much more decisively than he could ever manage her domestic affairs. Not only did he confirm India's independence in terms of international policy and set an example for other new countries emerging from the British imperial connection; he also brought to international relations a powerful idealism, and in practical terms was one of the architects of the new Commonwealth as a free association of independent nations rather than a cosy club for the former white dominions. In the domestic world of Indian politics, he acted as a bridge between the constrained world of political participation under the Raj and the increasingly turbulent world of the test quarter of the century. His role in, and regard for, the Congress Party, his nurturing of a democratic and idealistic constitution, his commitment to parliamentary government and serious regard for the Indian parliament, and his skills as an election-winning politician all helped to build on the foundations laid by the pre-1947 Congress. His integrity and commitment to democracy and to high standards in public life served India well; the experience of her subcontinental neighbours and of many new African states, as well as of India itself under the leadership of his daughter, underlines his stature. Nehru's failures were also apparent - the costly paralysis in relations with Pakistan over Kashmir, draining much-needed resources into military spending and away from developmental projects at home; his blindness to China's intentions, despite warnings even from Vallabhbhai Patel immediately after Independence; his uncritical relationship with Krishna Menon, the defence minister who landed the army in a disastrous mess for which they were completely unprepared in 1962, when China invaded; and his failure to nurture political talent in the longer term to provide India with a broad swathe of experienced political leaders who could inherit his many roles. Despite his commitment to socialist ideals, he failed to achieve radical change in Indian society, and his commitment to planning and state regulation of the economy eventually stunted India's economic growth. Nor did he recognize the danger that a rising population would pose for India's ability to improve basic standards of health, education and employment among the poorest. Yet he was a great visionary, a man driven to the edge of personal destruction to prove that a new nation could retrieve and remake its inheritance, redeem in some sense its colonial past, and so organize its common life to aspire to ideals of justice, equality and liberty.

Back to the top

*Judith M. Brown is Beit Professor of Commonwealth History and a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.

Source: TLS, 8 August 1997, p. 7-8.