Glimpses Of Nan

For all its bonds of kinship, the relationship between siblings, particularly two as forceful as Jawaharlal and Vijayalakshmi, might occasionally be fraught with misunderstanding, disagreement, even competitiveness. No such taint is to be detected anywhere in the 40 years of this admittedly one-sided correspondence. What is fascinating about Nehru's letters to his sister, 11 years his junior, is the process by which filial duty and love mutate into growing admiration of her public achievements and finally an unequivocal adoration. This is not true of Nehru's letters to his daughter. From his early schoolboy scrawls in England ("I am sending you a little teddy bear") to his communications as prime minister addressed to his ambassador in Moscow, Vijayalakshmi remains his "Darling Nan". He, in turn, is "Darling Bhai", the central pivot of her life, more so after the death of her husband Ranjit Pandit in 1944.

The most revealing letters date from the '20s and the '30s when Nehru is released from jail to accompany his ailing wife for treatment to European sanatoria. Ministering to Kamala in her slow, painful decline from tuberculosis and tending his nine-year-old daughter is a stressful business. He must write to ward off loneliness and to retain his sanity: "I write to you again so soon because I feel like doing so. The old year is passing as I write-and it is almost the stroke of midnight-and the desire to write to you...become strong within me. To send you all my love."

Much of the remaining correspondence is from a scattering of jails, from Naini to Ahmednagar Fort. Amidst instructions and inquiries (Are the servants at Anand Bhawan being paid enough? Why won't Indu write more regularly?), critical opinion is trenchantly aired. "What am I to say about his (Ambedkar's) recent utterances? I can understand the background of his thought but I cannot understand how an intelligent man can ask others to change their religion. If the frying pan is hot there is no reason to jump into the fire." And not just about fellow politicians. He makes his dislike of a family memoir his younger sister Krishna has written quite plain. He pricks Nan's self-importance when she is elected to the pre-Independence UP legislature with teasing rhymes about the "ignorance" of cabinet ministers. And he is blunt about Feroze Gandhi's prospects. (Among the gems here is a grovelling letter from Feroze to Vijayalakshmi declaring his love for Indira). Nor does Nehru's eye spare his own shortcomings, deploring a tendency to vent "airy, vague nothings".

In an excellent introduction, Vijayalakshmi Pandit's daughter Nayantara Sahgal asks: "Who, after all, writes a letter any more? In an era of instant communication, letter-writing is going the way of all contemplative private pursuits." She then recounts the mysterious unavailability of Vijayalakshmi's replies to Jawaharlal. Her efforts to trace them at the Nehru Memorial Library were in vain. If they have disappeared, it is a comment on the state of the national archives, a scandal worth an official inquiry. And if they have been deliberately withheld from general scrutiny, it is no less an outrage. These letters-in which public roles and private affairs merge into an unselfconscious and seamless whole-are the primary tools of history. Without them, it would be impossible to appraise the lives of the men and women who helped shape free India.