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100 pages

English

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The author of India: From Midnight to the Millennium provides a close-up portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, the influential politician who led his newly independent nation from colonialism into the modern world, and his lasting legacy in terms of India's history and world.

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Lettres et linguistique

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	16 octobre 2007
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351180180
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0450€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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SHASHI THAROOR
NEHRU

The Invention of India
CONTENTS
Dedication
Preface
Family Tree
One: With Little to Commend Me 1889-1912
Two: Greatness is Being Thrust Upon Me 1912-1921
Three: To Suffer for the Dear Country 1921-1928
Four: Hope to Survive the British Empire 1928-1931
Five: In Office but Not in Power 1931-1937
Six: In the Name of God, Go! 1937-1945
Seven: A Tryst With Destiny 1945-1947
Eight: Commanding Heights 1947-1957
Nine: Free Myself From This Daily Burden 1957-1964
Ten: India Must Struggle Against Herself 1889-1964-2003
A Note on Indian Political Movements
A Note on Sources
Copyright Permission
Select Bibliography
Footnotes
One: With Little to Commend Me 1889-1912
Two: Greatness is Being Thrust Upon Me 1912-1921
Seven: A Tryst With Destiny 1945-1947
Copyright
to Kofi Annan who, as a young man in Ghana, admired Nehru, this book is dedicated with respect and affection
Preface

For the first seventeen years of India s independence, the paradox-ridden Jawaharlal Nehru-a moody, idealist intellectual who felt an almost mystical empathy with the toiling peasant masses; an aristocrat, accustomed to privilege, who had passionate socialist convictions; an Anglicized product of Harrow and Cambridge who spent over ten years in British jails; an agnostic radical who became an unlikely prot g of the saintly Mahatma Gandhi- was India. Upon the Mahatma s assassination, Nehru became the keeper of the national flame, the most visible embodiment of India s struggle for freedom. Incorruptible, visionary, ecumenical, a politician above politics, Nehru s stature was so great that the country he led seemed inconceivable without him. A year before his death a leading American journalist, Welles Hangen, published a book entitled After Nehru, Who? It reflected more than concern about his successor; the unspoken question around the world was: After Nehru, what?
Today, nearly four decades after his death, we have something of an answer to this silent question. As an India still seemingly clad in the trappings of Nehruvianism steps out into the twenty-first century, little of Jawaharlal Nehru s legacy appears intact. India has moved away from much of it, and so (in different ways) has the rest of the developing world for which Nehruvianism once spoke. As India nears the completion of the sixth decade of its independence from the British Raj, a transformation-still incomplete-has taken place that, in its essentials, has changed the basic Nehruvian assumptions of post-colonial nationhood.
In this short biography, I have sought to examine this great figure of twentieth-century nationalism from the vantage point of the beginning of the twenty-first. Jawaharlal Nehru s life is a fascinating story in its own right, and I have tried to tell it whole, because the privileged child, the unremarkable youth, the posturing young nationalist and the heroic fighter for Independence are all inextricable from the unchallengeable Prime Minister and peerless global statesman. A concluding chapter analyses critically the principal pillars of Nehru s legacy to India-democratic institution-building, staunch pan-Indian secularism, socialist economics at home and a foreign policy of non-alignment-all of which were integral to a vision of Indianness that is fundamentally contested today.
Nehru: The Invention of India is not a scholarly work; it is based on no new research into previously undiscovered archives; it is not footnoted, though a Note on Sources and a Select Bibliography will guide the curious toward further reading. It is, instead, a reinterpretation-both of an extraordinary life and career and of the inheritance it left behind for every Indian. The very term Indian was imbued with such meaning by Nehru that it is impossible to use it without acknowledging a debt: our passports incarnate his ideals. Where those ideals came from, whether they were brought to fulfilment by their own progenitor, and to what degree they remain viable today are the themes of this book. I started the book as divided between admiration and criticism as when I finished it; but the more I delved into Nehru s life, it was the admiration which deepened.
Jawaharlal Nehru s impact on India is too great not to be re-examined periodically. His legacy is ours, whether we agree with everything he stood for or not. What we are today, both for good and for ill, we owe in great measure to one man. This is his story.
Shashi Tharoor
THE NEHRU FAMILY TREE: FIVE GENERATIONS
ONE
With Little to Commend Me 1889-1912

In January 1889, or so the story goes, Motilal Nehru, a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer from Allahabad, in U P, travelled to Rishikesh, a town holy to Hindus, up in the foothills of the Himalayas on the banks of the sacred River Ganga [Ganges]. Motilal was weighed down by personal tragedy. Married as a teenager, in keeping with custom, he had soon been widowed, losing both his wife and his first-born son in childbirth. In due course he had married again, an exquisitely beautiful woman named Swarup Rani Kaul. She soon blessed him with another son-but the boy died in infancy. Motilal s own brother, Nandlal Nehru, then died at the age of forty-two, leaving Motilal the care of his widow and seven children. The burden was one he was prepared to bear, but he desperately sought the compensatory joy of a son. This, it seemed, was not to be.
Motilal and his two companions, young Brahmins of his acquaintance, visited a famous yogi renowned for the austerities he practised while living in a tree. In the bitter cold of winter, the yogi undertook various penances which, it was said, gave him great powers. One of the travellers, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, informed the yogi that Motilal s greatest desire in life was to have a son. The yogi asked Motilal to step forward, looked at him long and hard, and shook his head sadly: You, he declared, will not have a son. It is not in your destiny.
As a despairing Motilal stood crestfallen before him, the other man, the learned Pandit Din Dayal Shastri, argued respectfully with the yogi. The ancient Hindu shastras, he said, made it clear that there was nothing irreversible about such a fate; a great karmayogi like him could simply grant the unfortunate man a boon.
Thus challenged, the yogi looked at the young men before him, and finally sighed. He reached into his brass pitcher and sprinkled water from it three times upon the would-be father. Motilal began to express his gratitude, but the yogi cut him short. By doing this, the yogi breathed, I have sacrificed the benefits of all the austerities I have conducted over many generations.
The next day, as legend has it, the yogi passed away.
Ten months later, at 11.30 p.m. on 14 November 1889, Motilal Nehru s wife Swarup Rani gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He was named Jawaharlal ( precious jewel ), and he would grow up to be one of the most remarkable men of the twentieth century.
Jawaharlal Nehru himself always disavowed the story as apocryphal, though it was attributed by many to two of the protagonists themselves-Motilal and Malaviya. Since neither left a first-hand account of the episode, the veracity of the tale can never be satisfactorily determined. Great men are often ascribed remarkable beginnings, and at the peak of Jawaharlal Nehru s career there were many willing to promote a supernatural explanation for his greatness. His father, certainly, saw him from a very early age as a child of destiny, one made for extraordinary success; but as a rationalist himself, Motilal is unlikely to have based his faith in his son on a yogi s blessing.
The child himself was slow to reveal any signs of potential greatness. He was the kind of student usually referred to as indifferent . He also luxuriated in the pampering of parents whose affluence grew with the mounting success of Motilal Nehru s legal career. In a pattern well-known in traditional Indian families, where wives received very little companionship from their husbands and transferred their emotional attention to their sons instead, Jawaharlal was smothered with affection by his mother, in whom he saw Dresden china perfection. Years later he would begin his autobiography with the confession: An only son of prosperous parents is apt to be spoilt, especially so in India. And when that son happens to have been an only child for the first eleven years of his existence, there is little hope for him to escape this spoiling.
The young Jawaharlal Nehru s mind was shaped by two sets of parental influences that he never saw as contradictory-the traditional Hinduism of his mother and the other womenfolk of the Nehru household, and the modernist, secular cosmopolitanism of his father. The women (especially Swarup s widowed sister, Rajvati) told him tales from Hindu mythology, took him regularly to temples and immersed him for baths in the Ganga. Motilal, on the other hand, though he never disavowed the Hindu faith into which he was born, refused to undergo a purification ceremony in order to atone formally for having crossed the black water by travelling abroad, and in 1899 was formally excommunicated by the high-caste Hindu elders of Allahabad for his intransigence. The taint lingered, and Motilal s family was socially boycotted by some of the purists, but the Nehrus typically rose above the ostracism through their own worldly success.
The Nehrus were Kashmiri Pandits, scions of a community of Brahmins from the northernmost reaches of the subcontinent who had made new lives for themselves across northern and central India since at least the 1700s. Kashmiris had been largely converted to Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but Kashmiri Muslims followed a syncretic version of the faith, imbued with the gentle mysticism of Sufi preachers, and co-existed in harmony with their Hindu neighbours. Though the Pandits left Kashmir in significant numbers, they did so not as ref