Brown's Sahib

This was the loneliness of the man who feels deprived of intimacy with his native as well as his adopted culture. It stayed with Nehru, giving his persona its attractive tinge of melancholy. Barely four years before he became the prime minister of independent India, he was still telling himself that, "You do not represent India or the average Indian; you cannot walk in step with the West. It is your fate to fall between the two."

If the young Nehru appears to be someone looking for a cause that could rescue him from his loneliness, and give meaning and weight to his life, much of his restlessness, passion and impatience in later years seems to come from this realisation: that he had a whole subcontinent on which to inscribe his ideas and inspirations. Not surprisingly, his most dramatic and stirring literary creation was India—as both an ancient civilisation and as a potentially great nation.

This grand vision was what Nehru wished to convey to the majority of India’s population, the peasants, whom Nehru described as dull and "uninteresting individually" and who induced in him a "feeling of overwhelming pity and a sense of ever-impending tragedy". Their pathetic state clarified to him what he needed to do with India, which in his view had dropped out of the march of world history: "I was eager and anxious to change her outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity."

Although Nehru, like many intellectuals in the ’20s and ’30s, was fascinated by, and wished to emulate in India, the Soviet attempt to turn a primarily agricultural country into an industrial superpower, he was also, by his own wry admission, too much of a bourgeois to be a violent revolutionary. India, Nehru asserted, would be a democracy; and shortly after independence, hundreds of millions of poor, illiterate people became, theoretically at least, full and equal citizens of the Republic of India, bestowed with rights that not even the French and American revolutionaries had thought of. The possibility in India today for debate and dissent, however shrinking, owes much to Nehru’s personal commitment to democracy.

"I hunger for constructive work on a large scale," Nehru had written in the years before independence, and this hunger was to remain undiminished until the day he died, almost literally of exhaustion, in 1964. But for what seems like a long time, the sheer force of Nehru’s belief and rhetoric, and the 20th-century glamour of words like ‘democracy’ and ‘socialism’, mostly prevented close examination of the messy Indian realities behind them.

Judith Brown’s political biography is one of the first to appear after the swift undermining of Nehru’s cherished projects (secularism, socialism, and non-alignment) in the 1990s and the seizure of state power by a political organisation with a millenarian ideology. Disappointingly, Brown chooses not to reflect upon these recent events, how they might be related to the way Nehru saw and ruled India. She mentions that "the idea of India" as put forward by the Congress "was often couched in cultural terms that often emphasised the Hindu foundations of the nation". But she makes little attempt to explore the many interesting continuities between Nehru’s secular nationalism and Hindutva.

More egregiously, Brown does not have an easy way with the English language. She seems overly fond of such flat-footed phrases as "his life offered a window into Indian politics" which she uses three times within the space of five pages. Preferring analysis to narrative, she gives little attention to Nehru’s emotional life. You still have to go to S. Gopal’s biography for an account of Nehru’s intellectual development.

Nevertheless, a reasonably broad and fruitfully critical view of Nehru does emerge from Brown’s book. She does not abuse the advantage of hindsight. She acknowledges sufficiently the immense problems Nehru inherited from an imperial administration; her judgements usually seem fair. Nehru comes across as a solitary, often isolated, intellectual and visionary, exceptional perhaps in India with his western education and outlook, but bound in his thinking to the political and economic orthodoxies of his time, and limited finally by conservative members of his own government and party who had little interest in bringing about the changes he proposed.

Brown thinks Nehru realised too late in the day the fact of overpopulation, and its impact on his economic model. She claims to see pragmatism in Nehru’s foreign policy of non-alignment, although it is fair to say that Nehru believed sincerely, until at least India’s disastrous war with China in 1962, that the land of the Buddha and Gandhi should stand for something other than the crude hypocrisies of realpolitik.

She faults Nehru—and not just on China—for developing a "vast and unsuitable public role for himself". The loneliness of the western-educated, literary-minded man was a clear handicap here. For Nehru, the history of India had furnished proof of how there could be unity in diversity. When Partition exposed brutally the limits of such idealism, Nehru became even more determined to maintain what he called "national integrity"—a resolve that began to degenerate, in Kashmir and the Northeast, into the Indian state’s colonial-style obsession with law and order. And when, after Nehru, the poor grew more restive, the ruling elite more corrupt and India less governable, his daughter Indira perfected the rhetoric about national security and internal and external enemies that our current rulers use almost daily.

There is no doubt that Nehru would have been horrified by Narendra Modi’s election victory in Gujarat, by the degeneration of democracy into a crude majoritarianism that feeds on a hectic demonising of Muslims and other minorities; and that he would have been appalled to see how, while claiming to carry out the tasks of nation-building, the postcolonial Indian state has killed and uprooted its own citizens, built nuclear armouries, and threatened catastrophic wars, all this with a kind of moral authority and prestige that the colonial state never enjoyed.

Brown mentions how towards the end of his life a sad, frustrated Nehru had a "renewed appreciation of Gandhi’s concerns for the poor and underprivileged, and his insistence on working from the grassroots upwards...rather than depending on the structures of the modern state and the actions of a bureaucracy inherited from the Raj". This may be the closest Nehru came to abandoning, or even reconsidering, his faith in the ideological beliefs of his time.

He was among the many intellectuals in the mid-20th century who assumed, even if they didn’t always spell it out, that it was only a matter of time before everyone in the world became modern: i.e. started to wear a tie, work in a factory or office, vote, pay taxes and drive a car. This vision now looks increasingly unfeasible, if not absurd. The middle-class elites, western and non-western, who worry about the growing challenges to them from fundamentalist Islam, are often heartened by the example of India, the world’s largest democracy, and its growing middle class of engineers, doctors, scientists, and software tycoons. But what Brown’s study reveals is how even the most benignly paternal and successful among the great postcolonial modernisers (Nasser, Sukarno, Nkrumah) has left a bewilderingly mixed legacy for his country.

It is, of course, still possible to believe that the current chaos is only a phase to a brighter future, and that, as Nehru wrote, "the world is marching towards the desired consummation" of history. But you can’t help wondering if such metaphysical beliefs—the residue of 19th-century Europe—are meant to illuminate, or merely to help reconcile us to, the strange place where history’s march of progress has brought us.