My family belonged to the bourgeoisie spawned by British rule. Wealth and stability don't make for a life at the barricades, so drama must have been their fate. It started with my grandfather, Motilal Nehru, whose early success as a barrister in Allahabad enabled him in 1900 to buy a mansion on spacious grounds that he named Anand Bhawan...
...The lawyers, professors and entrepreneurs of the Congress, which was a ‘loyal opposition' to Her (and later His) Majesty's government, depended on their dignified petitions to bring out the best in the British. They believed this buried ‘best' would respond and grant India the same self-government and equal status in the empire enjoyed by the white dominions. Trustfully, they rallied to the empire's defence in Europe's Great War. It was after the war, when the Rowlatt Act provided for arbitrary arrest and imprisonment without trial to ensure business as usual and the slaughter at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April when General Dyer's troops opened fire on a crowd of thousands celebrating the spring festival, that the political agenda abruptly changed. Mahatma Gandhi, fresh out of South Africa, introduced the non-violent technique called satyagraha he had practised there as a strategy for India and took over the leadership of the Congress. Those who found civil disobedience, arrest and imprisonment too daunting, moved away from the action. Others, including my family, plunged into it. Here it was that national and family history met — not quite as they must have done in many families whose father or son joined the struggle, loyally supported by those who stayed outside it. In mine, the entire family — grandparents, parents, uncle and aunts, and also a servant — ended its old life and started a new one in thrall to a country whose destiny it now took to be its own. The connection became rooted, emotional, permanent. It brought about a total and austere transformation in the family's lifestyle and life's goals....
...The pride my elders had in the awesome resilience of Hinduism made them reject the dogmas and orthodoxies that posed as religion... Jawaharlal's rational approach to life and his attraction to science made him impatient with other-worldliness. In a book he gave my mother, The Vision of Asia by L. Cranmer-Byng, he wrote, ‘To Nan with love on her birthday, 18 August 1934. This book contains a good deal of flabby mysticism. But there are some gems from old China.' …Above all, he was powerfully moved by the compassion of the Buddha and the personality of Jesus Christ, and he considered the Bhagvad Gita a supremely moral text: if every action has a result, it follows that every right action will have a right result. It was perfectly natural for this particular atheist to become the bestloved disciple of a deeply religious Hindu, and for his Master to choose him as his heir to lead the party and the country.
Their creed, if any, apart from freedom, was internationalism. It was almost in their blood. In his Letters from a Father to His Daughter, Jawaharlal wrote in 1929, ‘If we want to know something about the story of this world of ours, we must think of all the countries and all the peoples that have inhabited it, and not merely of one little country where we may have been born.' …That he was the architect of Congress foreign policy and kept the portfolio of External Affairs to himself when he became Prime Minister was a sign of the critical importance he attached to India's voice in international affairs, all the more so since it was the first time this voice would be heard on the world stage.
The family admired the United States and the Soviet Union for throwing off the feudal/imperial yoke and making peerless progress thereafter. They loved American jazz and were thrilled by the Russian Revolution. My father did his spinning during the Moscow broadcast in English ‘so that [I can] hear of the collective farming of the Soviets while [I ply] the charkha of Gandhi Baba'. Theirs was a multifarious canvas. Not for them one Path, one Book, one ism…
...Nehru was not ‘the last Englishman' in India as he has been labelled by some. He was clear about the debt he owed to England and felt that he owed too much to England in his mental make-up ever to feel wholly alien to that country. He had the emotional discipline we associate with Englishness, though this could have been as much the result of solitary years spent in prison. Small episodes brought it to light. His cousin B.K. Nehru (Bijju) had married a Hungarian in 1935. The bride met ‘Jawahar Bhai' in a brief jail interview in Calcutta, to which she had gone with my mother. He came into the jail superintendent's office and Fory Nehru says she fell in love with him ‘at once'! He welcomed her affectionately into the family and they talked until a warder came in and laid a hand on the prisoner's arm to take him back to his cell. Fory could not bear this and began to cry. ‘ Jawahar Bhai' looked back and said to her, ‘No tears. In this family we keep a stiff upper lip'...
...There can be too much stoicism and there is much to be said for a storm of tears. This was not a luxury the family allowed itself. The first and last time Nehru's iron discipline was breached was the outpouring of grief he could not control when he knelt beside Gandhi's blood-covered body on the evening of 30 January 1948.
No facile category fits Nehru. He had identified himself with other nationalisms and was better known as an internationalist than any figure of his time. In his own mind there was no unbridgeable divide between the Occident and the Orient. One had had the opportunity to industrialise and prosper, the other had not, and the gap would close in time. Most significantly, his involvement with India — through actual journeys over the length and breadth of the country, and his vividly imagined journeys into her past — had an impassioned ingredient that kept its hold on him. An incident towards the end of his life illustrates the strength of his involvement. The family was at the breakfast table at Teen Murti House. A visiting nephew said the country was in a mess, its problems would never be solved and he, for one, was getting out to settle abroad. Nehru who had remained silent suddenly spoke in a rage, ‘Go where you like, but if I am born a thousand times, a thousand times I will be born an Indian.'
The last paragraph of his Will and Testament requested that ‘the major portion' of his ashes be scattered from a height ‘over the fields where the peasants of India toil so that they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India'.
Jawaharlal Nehru: Civilizing a Savage World,Nayantara Sahgal, Viking, p.167, price not stated.
