Experiments With Truth

IN the post-modern book bazaars of polysyllabic hype, new biographies stand no chance unless they come fluttering sensational pennants. Stanley Wolpert, good American, understands this well. Why would anyone want to read another book on Nehru when there are already about 20 odd biographies in the market— including S. Gopal's three-volume classic— apart from 30 volumes of Nehru's own selected works, and steepling shelves of reminiscences and memoirs by friends, colleagues and sundry countrymen? But what if there were strong suggestions of Nehru having had homosexual affairs as a young man? And of having at one point, virtually, decided to abdicate his job to go and live with Edwina in England? Well, the Dr Wolpert has us rapt, our time and attention on the line.

In the yet to be released biography Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, (OUP, New York), Wolpert, Distinguished Professor of History at California, takes a tough tack on Nehru, jabbing at him both politically and personally. In Wolpert's hands, the architect of modern India comes out in rather mixed light on the crucial issues of Partition and Kashmir. But it is not Wolpert 's telling of his public affairs but of his private conduct that will raise a storm . Wolpert 's biography hints strongly that Nehru had homosexual encounters both as an adolescent in Allahabad, as a schoolboy at Harrow, and later as a young man in Cambridge, and perhaps even later.

Wolpert also suggests in his book that in general his strong bonding with men coloured most of his relationships with women, bar a few. In fact, Wolpert writes, that the only two women who moved him "in ways that only his closest male comrades ever did, touching the innermost recesses of his mind and spirit" were Edwina and Indira, each in her own way "as courageous, brave, and masculine as any man he had loved".

According to Wolpert, the first young man for whom Nehru developed "an early attachment" was his French-Irish tutor, Ferdinand T. Brooks, hired by Motilal in 1902 when the family moved into Anand Bhavan. For the next three years, he was Nehru's "closest friend and constant companion", introducing in him the love of reading, science and theosophy. Making the circumstantial connection, Wolpert then hints darkly at Brooks' background. Before coming to India, the handsome Brooks had been a lover and disciple of Charles Webster Leadbeater, a renegade Anglican curate who was later to be accused of "child molestation and pederasty on several continents".

It was through Annie Besant, who was a great defender of Leadbeater, that Brooks joined the Nehru household. Motilal had not read any of Leadbeater's books and knew little about him, or his relationship with Brooks. He had no clue to Leadbeater's open advocacy of "mutual masturbation" with his "younger brothers" as the best way to "help them grow strong and manly". Lead-beater claimed he could tell from "a boy's aura when he needed sex, offering to relieve the pressure by masturbating him while encouraging the boy to relieve him in the same way". Wolpert quotes Leadbeater as telling his boys, the most famous of whom was Jiddu Krishnamurti, "Glad sensation is so pleasant, darling." Brooks later committed suicide. Nehru, who had been initiated into the Theosophical Society in 1902 by Besant herself, was to later lose his interest in theosophy, but retained his affection for Brooks. For that matter, Wolpert asserts that only one other man ever got as close to Nehru, and that was V.K. Krishna Menon.

In the chapter Master Joe, pertaining to Nehru's Harrow years, Wolpert loads the text with yet more innuendo, suggesting some sort of a homosexual life. At one point he writes that Headmaster Wood assured Motilal that he was "fully satisfied" with his son, making him "my special care" and giving him "my best advice", especially on the "vital question of clothing". For some puerile reason, fully, in "fully satisfied" is italicised. The biographer also makes the point that apart from Shaw and Lowes Dickinson, Nehru read and admired Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater. Making copious use of Nehru's letters to his parents, and interpreting them liberally, Wolpert asserts that the young Nehru was simply not interested in marriage. After quoting from a letter Nehru wrote his father that the "joys of matrimony appear to me wholly imaginary, and do not at all appeal to me", Wolpert provides his own authoritative analysis. He reckons that what was crucial about Nehru's seven years in England was the fact that they were lived "virtually without the benefit of any intimate or consistent female companionship". Wolpert goes on to declare that: "Between the ages of 15 and 22 there were really no important women in Jawaharlal Nehru's life. Perhaps even more significant, he never seemed to mind it."

THE one major episode with which Wolpert conjures up the spectre of Nehru's homosexuality revolves around a sudden, potentially fatal, trip that Nehru took to Norway in July 1910. His travelling companion was an unnamed Englishman, and may have been his Harrow friend who had lived with him in Cambridge for two weeks a couple of years earlier. In his autobiography, Nehru recounts the accident. While bathing in an ice-cold mountain torrent, Nehru was swept away, and but for the courage and alacrity of his companion, he would have been pulverised in a waterfall that lay a few hundred yards down-stream. Wolpert questions the cryptic quality of this retelling. Why, for instance, does Nehru refrain from naming someone who actually saved his life, referring to him only as "my companion, the Englishman"? Wolpert then conjectures that 25 years later when Nehru wrote his biography in prison his companion acquired his "Englishman" identity, thus clearly "differentiating him from the Indian nationalist leader Nehru had by then become. At the time of the accident, however, Nehru obviously felt no 'national' distance from his intimate friend with whom he must have raced nude into the mountain torrent".

If racing nude has traces of fanciful artistic imaginings, what follows reads like feverish psychoanalysis. Wolpert writes: "Can Jawahar's strange accident in Norway be read as his own carefully doctored metaphoric confession of a passionate, 'hot' and 'icy cold'— indeed 'numbing'— love affair with a young Englishman too important for him to name, too dear to forget, his heroic other?" Wolpert persists with the pregnant deconstruction: "That resourceful companion had great strength and a firm grip, which saved Jawahar when he had 'completely lost control of himself', in what might otherwise have been a fatal, or at least life-threatening 'fall', the sort of death his tutor Brooks had chosen."

Through all the passages that purport to point to Nehru's sexual peccadilloes, Wolpert skates on thin ice. Clearly he is dying to raise a ruckus, to unveil new facets of Nehru, but the facts he marshalls are waferish, never sufficient to forcefully pin anything down. One of the passages that has begun raising some dust has to do with Nehru dressing in drag for tableaux to be set up for the at-home of the Gaekwad of Baroda. "Wearing his wig, made up with lipstick, powder and eye-shadow, his body draped in silks and satins, Jawahar 'most unwillingly' offered himself up night after night to those endless rehearsals as a beautiful young girl, holding out her jug of wine and loaf seductively to her lover, Omar." Then Wolpert makes the leap: "Nor was that the only time he used those expensive silks and wigs. Artistic 'tableaux' performers much in demand for those seductively dim velvet-draped Victorian sitting rooms owned by his aristocratic Cyrenaicist companions all over London, and there was always 'great scarcity of men' willing or able to take the woman's part in the clever games they all loved to play." The assumption through all this seems to be that Nehru, rather than a routine stage actor was at that time some kind of drag queen, a highly improbable fact considering he was writing home about these activities to his father, the formidable Motilal, whose wrath he then feared like none others.

In many ways, Wolpert appears only to be living up to his resume. Controversy has dogged his other writerly essays into the subcontinent. His Nine Hours to Rama, based on Gandhi's assassination and also made into a film, was banned in India; and his biography of Jinnah, complete with the leader's diet of ham sandwiches and whisky, received the same treatment in Pakistan. It appears that Wolpert may actually be courting a controversy for, apparently, the dust jacket of the American edition of the book highlights Nehru's "early homosexual influences".

Nor does Wolp ert bypass that other great herring of Nehru- baiters. Edwina Mountbatten makes her debut in the preface of the book, and is still marking near the end. Wo lpert obviously went to great lengths to dig out some fresh dirt on the Edwina- Nehru affair, going to Broadlands to meet Lord Mountbatten's grandson and coming to New Delhi to meet Nehru's heirs, that is, Sonia Gandhi. At both places he received a polite brush-off, being told by Mountbatten's grandson that "the family line is that they are simply good friends", whereas Sonia said, "I don't want you to think we have anything to hide, but..." Provoked, Wolpert has launched a diatribe against Sonia. He declares that the "deepest passions and fears that drove and tortured Nehru throughout his adult life have always remained hidden". He attacks all those who have been zealously — basically, Nehru himself, Indira and now Sonia— concealing the documents that record Nehru's intimate thoughts and concerns, "trying more than three decades after his death to perpetuate myths and hoping to hide the true nature of that great man". He then really sticks it in: "For almost a decade, foolish British bureaucrats kept Jawaharlal Nehru behind bars, and his equally foolish heirs and self-appointed guardians have locked up his mind and heart for three times as long."

THE piqued Wolpert is, however, not to be easily derailed. He has his own memories to back him up. He recalls sitting a few rows behind Nehru and Edwina at a function in New Delhi, and being surprised at how "cheerful Nehru appeared that evening and how like adolescent lovers he and Edwina behaved, touching, whispering into each other's ears, laughing, holding hands".

But then later, towards the end of the book, in an absurdly romanticised Mills & Boon narration, Wolpert demands a great leap of credulity from his readers, as he brazenly casts himself into the mind of the Indian leader, and asserts that Nehru actually considered quitting his job to retire into the sunset with Edwina. It is 1950, and as Hindu-Muslim troubles continue, Nehru confesses to Krishna Menon that he fears that there is a " concerted effort, backed by strong forces, to drive us into war with Pakistan". At about the time Edwina decides to fly in for a 10-day visit. Wolpert writes that Nehru was "sorely tempted at this time to give up his job and fly off with her, back to Broadlands, where he could live out whatever remained of his life in its beauty and splendour. The Duke of Windsor had given up much more for much less, after all, given all that Edwina off e red compared with what Wallace Simpson possessed. He confessed to Nan (Vijaylakshmi Pandit) on the eve of Edwina's return that he was seriously thinking of resigning from the prime ministership." Well. And then there is a further flight of fantasy: "First Punjab and Kashmir, now Bengal, all the horrors Bapu alone had been wise enough to anticipate as the aftermath of Partition heaped on his weary head. Why not fly away with her? What happier escape from perdition to paradise? He felt sorely tempted."

Admirers of Nehru may take issue with other aspects of Wolpert's interpretations too. The biographer is tough on Nehru with regard to both the key issues of Partition and Kashmir. He feels Nehru's intransigence was as responsible for the cataclysmic fall-out in these areas as was Jinnah's cussedness. Wolpert feels that at least at two crucial junctures, in 1928 and 1939, Nehru passed up opportunities to collaborate with Jinnah and the Muslim League, thereby making the night-mare of Partition inevitable. Wolpert also feels that Nehru's proximity to the Mountbattens ensured that his was the only voice heard in the viceregal echelons, and this led to a critical Muslim estrangement that had "terrible consequences for India's future". Towards the end, dealing with Nehru's last years, Wolpert paints the picture of a manipulative man who embarked on some elaborate strategies— prime among them the initiation of the Kamaraj Plan— to ensure the elimination of Morarji Desai from the succession race and the foregrounding of his daughter Indira.

Historians in India are already beginning to mumble angrily about Wolpert's book. Many of them describe his interpretations as absurd and baseless. S. Gopal, Nehru's authoritative biographer, scoffs at the charges of homosexuality, the story of his envisaged flight with Edwina, and his negative role during Partition and the Kashmir crisis. "Not true," he says dismissively each time. He describes the book as "stupid and third-rate". And the author as more of the same. B.R. Nanda, historian, biographer, and founder of the Nehru Memorial Museum, finds something more pernicious at work: "He was very admiring about Jinnah in his biography, making him out to be a great hero, but with Nehru he seems to want to give the opposite impression. It's almost like an attempt to debunk the great man. It's a very superficial and thin book."

So will the Indian Government display its notorious thin skin, and take the retrograde step of banning it? Let's hope not. Let the critics shred it, let the experts damn it, but let not the politicians find in it another whip to flagellate us with. The Government may not know it but I'm sure Indians are mature enough to handle strange charges flung at their heroes. For that matter, every public schoolboy knows that innocuous brushes with homosexuality are a mere rite of passage. Nothing Wolpert writes can take away from what Nehru was and did. And to be fair to Wolpert, the majority portions of the book do attempt to be serious and scholarly, and beneath all his wacky and weird interpretations his admiration for Nehru is boundless. Even for him, Nehru is one of "the immortals".