Nehru

by Shashi Tharoor

  This episode led a recent biographer, the American historian Stanley Wolpert, to suggest that Jawaharlal Nehru had had a homosexual relationship with his savior. Wolpert’s conclusions are based, however, on so elaborate a drawing out of the circumstances, and such extensive speculation (on grounds as flimsy as Jawaharlal’s tutor Brooks having been a disciple of a notorious pederast), that they are difficult to take seriously. Certainly there is no corroborating evidence, either in letters or the accounts of contemporaries, to substantiate Wolpert’s claim of homosexuality. It was quite common in those days for young men to travel in pairs on the Continent, and difficult to imagine that friends, family, and acquaintances would have made no reference to homosexual tendencies if Jawaharlal had indeed been inclined that way. Nor did any chroniclers of the adult Nehru, including enemies who would have used such a charge to wound him, ever allude to any rumors of adolescent homosexuality.

  By the time he embarked for India in August 1912 after nearly seven years in England, Jawaharlal Nehru had little to show for the experience: he was, in his own words, “a bit of a prig with little to commend me.” Had he been better at taking exams, he might well have followed his father’s initial wishes and joined the Indian Civil Service, but his modest level of academic achievement made it clear he stood no chance of succeeding in the demanding ICS examinations. Had he joined the ICS, a career in the upper reaches of the civil service might have followed, rather than in the political fray. Officials did not become statesmen; it is one of the ironies of history that had Jawaharlal Nehru been a higher achiever in his youth, he might never have attained the political heights he did in adulthood.

  But there had certainly been an intangible change in the young man, for all the modesty of his scholarly accomplishment. In a moving letter upon leaving his son at Harrow, Motilal had described his pain in being separated from “the dearest treasure we have in this world … for your own good”:

  It is not a question of providing for you, as I can do that perhaps in one single year’s income. It is a question of making a real man of you. … It would be extremely selfish … to keep you with us and leave you a fortune in gold with little or no education.

  Seven years later, the son confirmed that he had understood and fulfilled his father’s intent. “To my mind,” Jawaharlal wrote to his father four months before leaving England, in April 1912, “education does not consist of passing examinations or knowing English or mathematics. It is a mental state.” In his case this was the mental state of an educated Englishman of culture and means, a product of two of the finest institutions of learning in the Empire (the same two, he would later note with pride, that had produced Lord Byron), with the attitudes that such institutions instill in their alumnae. Jawaharlal Nehru may only have had a second-class degree, but in this sense he had had a first-class English education.

  The foundations had been laid, however unwittingly, for the future nationalist leader. It would hardly be surprising that Jawaharlal Nehru, having imbibed a sense of the rights of Englishmen, would one day be outraged by the realization that these rights could not be his because he was not English enough to enjoy them under British rule in India.

  2

  “Greatness Is Being Thrust upon Me”:

  1912–1921

  The return home of the not-quite-prodigal, not-yet-prodigious Jawaharlal Nehru, B.A. (Cantab.), LL.B., was a major occasion for the Nehru family. When he stepped off the boat in Bombay, he was greeted by a relative; the family, with a retinue of some four dozen servants, awaited him at the hill station of Mussoorie, where his ailing mother had gone to escape the heat of the plains. Jawaharlal took a train to Dehra Dun, where he alighted into the warm embrace of a visibly moved Motilal. Both father and son then rode up to the huge mansion Motilal had rented for the occasion, and there was, if accounts of the moment are to be believed, something improbably heroic about the dashing young man cantering up the drive to reclaim his destiny. The excited women and girls rushed outside to greet him. Leaping out of the saddle and flinging the reins to a groom, Jawaharlal scarcely paused for breath as he ran to hug his mother, literally sweeping her off her feet in his joy. He was home.

  He was soon put to work in his father’s chambers, where his first fee as a young lawyer was the then princely sum of five hundred rupees, offered by one of Motilal’s regular clients, the wealthy Rao Maharajsingh. “The first fee your father got,” Motilal noted wryly, “was Rs. 5 (five only). You are evidently a hundred times better than your father.” The older man must have understood perfectly well that his client’s gesture was aimed at Motilal himself; his pride in his son was well enough known that people assumed that kindness to the as yet untested son was a sure way to the father’s heart. As he had done at Harrow, Jawaharlal worked hard at his briefs, but his confidence faltered when he had to argue his cases in court, and he was not considered much of a success. It did not help that his interest in the law was at best tepid and that he found much of the work assigned to him “pointless and futile,” his cases “petty and rather dull.”

  Jawaharlal sought to escape the tedium of his days by partying extravagantly at night, a habit encouraged by his father’s own penchant for lavish entertainment. He called on assorted members of Allahabad’s high society, leaving his card at various English homes. But he made no great mark upon what even his authorized biographer called “the vacuous, parasitic life of upper-middle-class society in Allahabad.” At his own home, Jawaharlal played the role of the dominant elder brother. He tormented his little sister Betty, startling her horse to teach her to hold her nerve, or throwing her into the deep end of the pool to force her to learn to swim. These lessons served more to instill fear than courage in the little girl. He took holidays in Kashmir, on one occasion going on a hunt and shooting an antelope that died at his feet, its “great big eyes full of tears” — a sight that would haunt Jawaharlal for years.

  All told, however, there was little of note about Jawaharlal Nehru’s first few years back in India, until his marriage — arranged, of course, by his father — in February 1916. Father and son had dealt with the subject of marriage in their transcontinental correspondence, but Motilal had given short shrift to Jawaharlal’s mild demurrals whenever the matter was broached. In a letter to his mother Jawaharlal had even suggested he might prefer to remain unmarried rather than plight his troth to someone he did not like: “I accept that any girl selected by you and father would be good in all respects, but still, I may not be able to get along well with her.” But for all the romantic idealism in his epistolary descriptions of the ideal marriage, he gave in to his parents’ wishes. For his parents, there was no question of allowing the young man to choose his own bride; quite apart from the traditional practice of arranging marriages, Motilal took a particular interest in seeing that his son was well settled. “It is all right, my boy,” he wrote to Jawaharlal as early as 1907 on the subject. “You may leave your future happiness in my hands and rest assured that to secure that is the one object of my ambition.”

  The Nehrus launched an extensive search within the Kashmiri Pandit community before settling on Kamala Kaul, the daughter of a flour-mill owner. When the decision was made Jawaharlal had not yet returned to India and Kamala herself was barely thirteen. Needless to say, they had never met. She spoke not a word of English, having been educated in Hindi and Urdu, and had none of the graces required for the Westernized society Jawaharlal frequented, so Motilal arranged for her to be groomed for his son by Nan’s and Betty’s English governesses. Three years of “finishing” later, on the auspicious day of Vasant Panchami, which marks the first full moon of spring, and which fell that year (1916) on February 8, Jawaharlal Nehru, twenty-six, married Kamala Kaul, ten years his junior. It was, at least in one crucial respect, a match made in heaven: Jawaharlal’s mother had insisted on comparing the astrological charts of the young couple, which a pundit she trusted assured her were compatible.

  For Allahabad high society, the wedding was the gr
andest event of 1916 — but it took place in Delhi. Motilal rented an entire train to transport family and friends to the new capital city of India (a status Delhi had acquired, at Calcutta’s expense, in 1911), where a “Nehru marriage camp” was set up in style. The celebrations lasted a week in Delhi and were repeated in an endless round of parties, concerts, and poetry recitals in honor of the young couple when they came back to Allahabad.

  Jawaharlal left Kamala behind when he went trekking and hunting with friends in Kashmir that summer and had his second narrow escape from an untimely death. Exhausted by almost twelve hours of continuous mountain climbing, and seeking to cross an ice field, Jawaharlal stepped on a pile of fresh snow: “it gave way and down I went into a huge and yawning crevasse…. But the rope held and I clutched to [sic] the side of the crevasse and was pulled out.”

  Jawaharlal Nehru had not been saved for a life of mediocre lawyering and relentless socializing. Three years after his return to India, he was bored by both pursuits. Politics began to command more and more of his attention. For several years, the Indian National Congress had been run by the Moderates, who contented themselves with the ritual adoption of resolutions exhorting their British rulers to do better by India. While this kind of politics did not enthuse Jawaharlal, neither was he greatly inspired by the Extremists, who had split from the party and established Home Rule Leagues around the country seeking self-government for India within the Empire. But the Extremist leader Annie Besant had been an old family friend, having helped initiate him as a thirteen-year-old into theosophy. So Jawaharlal joined her Home Rule League and made his first public speech on June 20, 1916 in Mrs. Besant’s defense and in protest of the Press Act,1 under which she had been prosecuted. It was a modest performance, with no immediate consequences. Father and son attended the Lucknow Congress of 1916, where a historic Hindu-Muslim pact was concluded between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, a party of Muslim notables that had been established in 1905 to advance Muslim interests (though several leading Congressmen, including three of the party’s presidents to date, were themselves Muslim). But Jawaharlal did not speak at the Congress, remaining on the margins of that great (and sadly to prove evanescent) triumph of Hindu-Muslim political cooperation.

  His father, however, was emerging as a major figure in the party. Motilal was named by the Congress to draft, together with a brilliant young Muslim lawyer called Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the principles that would govern cooperation with the Muslim League. Their work, recognizing the principle that decisions would not be taken affecting the interests and beliefs of a minority community without the agreement of a majority of that community’s representatives, formed the foundation of what was widely hailed as the Lucknow Pact. The Congress’s leading literary light, the poetess Sarojini Naidu, hailed Jinnah as the “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” and set about editing a compilation of his speeches and writings. Nineteen-sixteen was a banner year for the nationalist movement. The fracture in the Congress between the Moderates and the Extremists had been overcome with the reentry of Tilak and Besant into the party; now the chasm between the Congress and the Muslim League appeared to have been bridged as well. Jinnah declared that, after the Great War was over, “India will have to be granted her birthright as a free, responsible and equal member of the British Empire.”

  Had the British found the wisdom to embrace this demand, Jinnah might well have emerged as prime minister of an Indian Dominion within the Empire around 1918; the full independence of India from the British Raj might have been greatly delayed; Hindu-Muslim clashes leading to the partition of the country might not have occurred; and the political career of Jawaharlal Nehru might have taken a very different course. But imperial Britain had no intention of accommodating the aspirations of its Indian subjects, and it reacted to the moderate nationalism of what Jinnah called “the united India demand” by the half-hearted Montagu-Chemsford reforms,2 which even the Moderates found unacceptable, and by the more familiar method of repression.

  When the outspoken Mrs. Besant was interned by the British authorities in 1917 for seditious activity, Jawaharlal abandoned any remaining hesitancy about his opposition to the British Raj in India. Though an officebearer of the provincial Home Rule League, he had considered playing a leading part in a meeting to expand an Indian Defense Force, based on the British notion of a Territorial Army, and had even applied to enlist in such a reserve; but with Annie Besant’s arrest he withdrew his application, and the meeting itself was cancelled. Instead Jawaharlal published a letter in a leading newspaper calling for noncooperation with the government. But he did not initially have a clear idea of what that would involve; in 1918 he moved a resolution at the United Provinces Political Conference criticizing the British government for its refusal to permit an Indian delegation to travel to London to argue the case for home rule. Only later did the realization dawn on him that home rule would not come about by pleading with the British. In early 1919 he signed a pledge not to obey the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act (the “Rowlatt Act”),3 and joined a committee to propagate that pledge — the satyagraha vow, as it was known. Satyagraha, or “truth force,” was a new concept in Indian nationalist politics, introduced by a thin, bespectacled lawyer wearing coarse homespun, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who in 1915 had returned to India from a long sojourn in South Africa, where his “experiments with truth” and his morally charged leadership of the Indian diaspora had earned him the sobriquet of Mahatma (“Great Soul”).

  Starting off as a not particularly gifted lawyer engaged by an Indian in South Africa to plead a routine case, Gandhi had developed into a formidable figure. Appalled by the racial discrimination to which his countrymen were subject in South Africa, Gandhi had embarked upon a series of legal and political actions designed to protest and overturn the iniquities the British and the Boers imposed upon Indians. After his attempts to petition the authorities for justice (and to curry their favor by organizing a volunteer ambulance brigade of Indians) had proved ineffective, Gandhi developed a unique method of resistance through civil disobedience. His talent for organization (he founded the Indian National Congress in Natal) was matched by an equally rigorous penchant for self-examination and philosophical inquiry. Instead of embracing the bourgeois comforts that his status in the Indian community of South Africa might have entitled him to, Gandhi retreated to a communal farm he established outside Durban, read Thoreau, and corresponded with the likes of Ruskin and Tolstoy, all the while seeking to arrive at an understanding of “truth” in both personal life and public affairs. The journey from petition politics to satyagraha was neither short nor easy, but having made it and then returned to his native land, the Mahatma brought to the incipient nationalist movement of India an extraordinary reputation as both saint and strategist.

  Gandhi’s singular insight was that self-government would never be achieved by the resolutions passed by a self-regarding and unelected elite pursuing the politics of the drawingroom. To him, self-government had to involve the empowerment of the masses, the toiling multitudes of India in whose name the upper classes were clamoring for home rule. This position did not go over well with India’s political class, which consisted in those days largely of maharajahs and lawyers, men of means who discoursed in English and demanded the rights of Englishmen. Nor did Gandhi’s insistence that the masses be mobilized not by the methods of “princes and potentates” (his phrase) but by moral values derived from ancient tradition and embodied in swadeshi (self-reliance on indigenous products) and satyagraha.

  To put his principles into practice, the Mahatma lived a simple life of near-absolute poverty in an ashram and traveled across the land in third-class railway compartments, campaigning against untouchability, poor sanitation, and child marriage, and preaching an eclectic set of virtues from sexual abstinence to the weaving of khadi (a coarse homespun cloth) and the beneficial effects of frequent enemas. That he was an eccentric seemed beyond doubt; that he had touched a chord among the
masses was equally apparent; that he was a potent political force soon became clear. His crusade against the system of indentured labor that had transported Indians to British colonies across the world so moved the public, poor and rich alike, that the viceroy of India put an end to it in 1917 (it was formally abolished in 1920).

  Gandhi next turned his attention to the appalling conditions of indigo farmers in the north Indian district of Champaran, where he agitated for better terms for the peasant cultivators who had long been oppressed by English planters and British laws. More important, he captured the imagination of the nation by publicly breaking English law in the name of a higher law (“the voice of conscience”) and challenging the British to imprison him. The British, not desirous of making a martyr of the Mahatma, dropped all charges — and made him a national hero instead.

  It was when the British passed the Rowlatt Act in March 1919 suspending the rights of defendants in sedition trials that Gandhi, despite being seriously ill with dysentery, conceived of the satyagraha pledge that Jawaharlal Nehru signed in April. The younger man was rapidly converted to the Mahatma’s zeal and commitment to action. Motilal, though equally contemptuous of legislation that most educated Indians called the “Black Act,” and willing to challenge the law in the courts, was dismayed by his son’s willingness to disobey it in the streets. They argued furiously about Motilal’s conviction that Jawaharlal should not break the law because doing so would make him a criminal. But Jawaharlal was not swayed. His apparent determination to follow Gandhi’s call first appalled, then moved, his father: Motilal, who thought the very idea of going to jail was “preposterous,” decided to join his son if he could not dissuade him, and secretly slept on the floor to prepare himself for the rigors of the imprisonment he knew would follow. But as ever, Motilal did not give up easily. As a wise father, he had one last trump up his sleeve. He invited Mahatma Gandhi to visit him in Allahabad in March 1919. After long conversations between the two older men at Anand Bhavan, Gandhi advised Jawaharlal to put his love for and duty toward his father ahead of his commitment to satyagraha. The shrewd Mahatma had perhaps realized that the Indian nationalist movement would need both Nehrus, and sought to avoid alienating the father by winning over his son too soon.