Nehru
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4 The acronym “U.P.” so entered the Indian consciousness that after independence the government renamed the state Uttar Pradesh (Northern Province) in order to retain the initials.
3
“To Suffer for the Dear Country”:
1921–1928
In 1920, Gandhi declared that India would have swaraj (self-government) within a year, a promise Jawaharlal Nehru described as “delightfully vague.” Less vague was the slogan that drove Gandhi’s followers in the civil disobedience movement of 1921: “Go to the villages!” Jawaharlal found himself traveling to impassioned meetings in rural areas (by car, train, and horse-drawn carriage, and once on an improvised trolley sent wheeling down the railway track after he had missed his train), calling for freedom for India, the restoration of the Khilafat in Turkey, and economic self-reliance (to be achieved through boycotting foreign goods, spinning khadi at home and consigning English suits to the bonfire). Nonviolence, Hindu-Muslim unity, harmony between tenants and landlords, and the abolition of untouchability were the pillars of the movement on which Gandhi had launched the nation. “Noncooperation” with the British was the slogan, but like so many other Indian political negatives, from nonviolence to nonalignment, it was imbued with a positive content transcending that which it sought to negate.
Jawaharlal Nehru, no longer the diffident political neophyte, plunged himself into the campaign with great zeal. He revealed, or at any rate developed, a talent for both oratory and organization: when on one occasion a government order was served on him prohibiting him from addressing a meeting, he marched four and a half miles with the entire assemblage to the next district and resumed his speech there. He formed and drilled volunteer squads, inspiring them to paralyze life in various U.P. towns through “hartals,” or work stoppages, in the name of noncooperation with the colonial authorities. The mounting momentum behind these efforts caused alarm among British officialdom, already tense about the impending visit to India of the Prince of Wales. On December 6, 1921, both Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru were arrested, each for the first time in his life.
Jawaharlal had spent part of the morning at the district court attending the trial of fellow Congressman K. D. Malaviya. “The poor judge [was] in a bad way,” he wrote in his diary. “He appeared to be the convict and the prisoners the judges.” When father and son were taken away by the police, Motilal issued a message to his compatriots: “Having served you to the best of my ability, it is now my high privilege to serve the motherland by going to jail with my only son.” Jawaharlal was taken to Lucknow for detention and trial, principally for his leadership of the volunteers, whose organization had been declared illegal. He was sentenced (under the wrong section of the penal code, as it later turned out) to six months in prison and a fine of a hundred rupees or a further month of imprisonment. Motilal, after a farcical trial in which an illiterate witness “verified” his signature on a seditious document while holding it upside down, was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and a fivehundred-rupee fine. (His refusal to pay the fine resulted in the seizure of property from his home worth several times that amount.) Both father and son, in their separate jail cells, declined the special privileges offered to them in view of their social standing. Jawaharlal relished his status as a prisoner of the Raj. A fellow Congress worker noted that “the smiling and happy countenance of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru stood out in relief amongst the persons in the lock-up.”
It was not to last. The increasing violence of the noncooperation movement, and in particular the murder of two dozen policemen by a nationalist mob in the small U.P. town of Chauri Chaura on February 5, 1922, led Mahatma Gandhi to call off the agitation, fearing that his followers were not yet ready for the nonviolent attainment of freedom. Thanks to a technical error in his sentencing, Jawaharlal was released in March 1922, with only half his sentence served. He was bitterly disappointed with Gandhi’s decision and its effect on his volunteers, who had made such headway in destabilizing British rule in U.P. But his faith in the Mahatma remained, and he wrote to his colleague Syed Mahmud: “You will be glad to learn that work is flourishing. We are laying sure foundations this time. … [T]here will be no relaxation, no lessening in our activities and above all there will be no false compromise with Government. We stand,” he added in a Gandhian touch, “for the truth.”
It is said that Motilal enjoyed such close relations with the British governor of U.P., Sir Harcourt Butler, that during his first imprisonment he received a daily half-bottle of champagne brought personally to the prison by the governor’s aide-de-camp. With his father still in jail, Jawaharlal continued his efforts to promote disaffection with British rule, and for his pains he was arrested again on May 12, 1922. Refusing to defend himself, he issued an emotional and colorful statement: “India will be free; of that there is no doubt. … Jail has indeed become a heaven for us, a holy place of pilgrimage since our saintly and beloved leader was sentenced. … I marvel at my good fortune. To serve India in the battle of freedom is honor enough. To serve her under a leader like Mahatma Gandhi is doubly fortunate. But to suffer for the dear country! What greater good fortune could befall an Indian, unless it be death for the cause or the full realization of our glorious dream?”
The British may have dismissed such words as romanticized bombast, but they struck a chord among the public beyond the courtroom, giving the thirty-three-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru national celebrity as the hero of Indian youth. The trial court was his platform, but his real audience was young Indians everywhere. By the summer of 1922, Motilal, now released and traveling across the country, found his son’s fame widespread, and his already considerable pride in Jawaharlal grew even further. “On reading your statement,” he wrote to his son, “I felt I was the proudest father in the world.” This time the younger Nehru drew a sentence of eighteen months’ rigorous imprisonment, a fine of a hundred rupees, and a further three months in jail if he did not pay the fine. There were no judicial irregularities to mitigate his punishment.
Despite poor health, which required homeopathic medication in jail, and food that was “quite amazingly bad,” Jawaharlal welcomed his imprisonment. He seemed to see it as confirmation of his sacrifices for the nation, while writing to his father that no sympathy was needed for “we who laze and eat and sleep” while others “work and labor outside.” He used his time to read widely — the Koran, the Bible, and the Bhagavad Gita, a history of the Holy Roman Empire, Havell’s Aryan Rule in India with its paeans to India’s glorious past, and the memoirs of the Mughal emperor Babar and the French traveler Bernier. These works fed a romanticized sense of the Indian nationalist struggle as a version of the Italian Risorgimento; in one letter he even quoted Meredith’s poem on the heroes of the latter, substituting the word “India” for “Italia.” This, as Gopal has observed, “was adolescent exaltation, yet to be channeled by hard thinking.” Jawaharlal was suffused with “the glow of virginal suffering, … in love with sacrifice and hardship. … He had made a cradle of emotional nationalism and rocked himself in it.” A British interviewer in late 1923 noted that Nehru had no “clear idea of how he proposed to win Swaraj or what he proposed to do with it when he had won it.”
Once again Jawaharlal was released before he had served his full sentence, emerging from prison at the end of January 1923 following a provincial amnesty. But the premature release would be more than made up for in seven more terms of imprisonment over the next two decades, which gave him a grand total of 3,262 days in eight different jails. Nearly ten years of his life were to be wasted behind bars — though perhaps not entirely wasted, since they allowed him to produce several remarkable books of reflection, nationalist awakening, and autobiography. His first letter to his five-year-old daughter Indira (asking her whether she had “plied” her new spinning wheel yet) was written from Lucknow jail. This largely one-sided correspondence would later culminate in two monumental books painting a vivid portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru’s mind and of his vision of the world.
During this time Jawaharlal found his leader unwilling to lead. Gandhi “refused to look into the future, or lay down any long-distance program. We were to carry on patiently ‘serving’ the people.” This, despite the ironic quotation marks around the word “serving,” Jawaharlal continued to do, focusing particularly on the boycott of foreign cloth and the promotion of homespun, a cause which bolstered Indian self-reliance while uniting peasants, weavers, and political workers under a common Congress banner. But he was too dispirited to do more than extol khadi; in particular, he took no specific steps to combat the growing communalization of politics. Devoid of religious passions himself, with many close Muslim friends whom he saw as friends first and Muslims after (if at all), he could not at this time take religious divisions seriously; he saw them as a waste of time, a distraction from the real issues at hand. “Senseless and criminal bigotry,” he wrote in a speech delivered for him when he was ill in October 1923, “struts about in the name of religion and instills hatred and violence into the people.” Three years later he wrote to a Muslim friend that “what is required in India most is a course of study of Bertrand Russell’s books.” The atheist rationalism of the British philosopher was to remain a profound influence; religion, Nehru wrote, was a “terrible burden” that India had to get rid of if it was to “breathe freely or do anything useful.”
The young idealist was also disillusioned by the cliquism and intrigues which were taking over the Congress itself. Some nationalists were accepting office under the Raj; Jawaharlal himself was sounded out about becoming the provincial education minister, a suggestion to which he gave short shrift. Instead he became general secretary of the All-India Congress Committee, in which capacity he made an abortive attempt to persuade partymen to dispense with the profusion of honorifics encumbering Indian names, starting with the “Mahatma” before “Gandhi.” (He was quickly slapped down by Muhammad Ali and, chastened, never repeated the attempt.)
But the party was split on a more important issue. A section of Congressmen, including Motilal Nehru and Bengal’s Chitta Ranjan Das, decided to contest elections to the legislative council, which offered limited self-government to Indians in a system of “dyarchy” under British rule. They called themselves the Swaraj Party; by cooperating with the British political machinery it seemed they had resurrected the old Moderate faction from under Gandhi’s suffocating embrace, though in fact they saw their role as a new form of noncooperation (since election would offer Indians the power to make legislative demands and obstruct British governance if these demands were not met). Gandhi and the majority of the Congress, however, opposed this approach, Jawaharlal among them. Motilal did not try to wean his son away from the Mahatma, but Das did, unsuccessfully. The elections of November 1923 saw the Swarajists winning convincingly, bringing the voice of Indian nationalism into the ruling councils of the Raj. But Gandhi did not approve of their participation in the colonial system, and Jawaharlal’s support for him exasperated his father. In September 1924 Gandhi wrote to Motilal to say that Jawaharlal “is one of the loneliest young men of my acquaintance in India. The idea of your mental desertion of him hurts me.… I don’t want to be the cause, direct or indirect, of the slightest breach in [your] wonderful affection.”
A third round of imprisonment had meanwhile punctuated the burgeoning Nehru curriculum vitae. A nonviolent agitation by the Sikh Akali movement in the Punjab, principally aimed at wresting control of Sikh shrines from British-appointed Hindu overseers, caught Jawaharlal’s attention, especially since the Sikhs’ discipline in peacefully courting arrest was the effective application of a Congress tactic. In September 1923, visiting the “princely state” of Nabha (a principality nominally ruled by an Indian rajah but in fact under the control of a British Resident, or administrator) to observe the Akalis in action, Jawaharlal found himself arrested on dubious legal grounds and incarcerated in a vile cell in abominable conditions. Motilal came to visit his son and was dismayed that his courageous intervention — which included cables to the viceroy, whose office overruled the Resident and allowed him to see his son without preconditions — had only irritated Jawaharlal, who was clearly relishing the role of the unjustly imprisoned martyr. Departing unhappily, Motilal sent his son a tart letter: “I was pained to find that instead of affording you any relief, my visit of yesterday only had the effect of disturbing the even tenor of your happy jail life. After much anxious thinking I have come to the conclusion that I can do no good either to you or to myself by repeating my visits.… [P]lease do not bother about me at all. I am as happy outside the jail as you are in it.” Jawaharlal was instantly contrite and apologetic, even agreeing to replace the defiant statement he had drafted for the court with a cooler piece of legal reasoning prepared by his father. Eventually he was sentenced to thirty months’ rigorous imprisonment, but Delhi ordered that the punishment be suspended, and Nehru and his companions were bundled out of the state. The British thought they had triumphed; Jawaharlal saw it differently, and his experience of cooperation with the Akalis led the Congress to assign him party responsibility for Punjab affairs.
At this time Jawaharlal was exercising another function, one which afforded him a great deal of satisfaction. Despite the split with the Swarajists over the Viceroy’s Council, the Congress did decide to contest local elections for municipal bodies, and in April 1923 Jawaharlal found himself elected chairman of the Allahabad Municipal Board. This was a position he did not seek but won because he was the Congressman most acceptable to the city’s Muslim councilors, who had rejected the party’s official nominee, the traditionalist Congress leader P. D. Tandon. Unprepared for office, Jawaharlal at first grumbled that it would distract him from the national cause, but he soon took to the job and performed creditably, earning a reputation for hard work, incorruptibility, a stubborn management style (with a low threshold of tolerance for inefficiency), and a refusal to play the patronage game. He cut through much of the self-serving cant that surrounded officialdom, refusing to declare a holiday on the anniversary of the Amritsar Massacre because he believed the staff was more interested in a holiday than in mourning the tragedy, and overruling a petty bureaucrat who had denied a prostitute permission to buy a house. (“Prostitutes,” he pointed out, “are only one party to the transaction”; if they were obliged to live only in a remote corner of the city, “I would think it equally reasonable to reserve another part of Allahabad for the men who exploit women and because of whom prostitution flourishes.”)
But his de facto mayoralty was not only about good civil administration; he unabashedly promoted his nationalist agenda, making Muhammad Iqbal’s song “Sare Jahan se Achha Hindustan hamara” (“Better than all the world is our India”) a pa
rt of the school curriculum, declaring Tilak’s death anniversary and the date of Gandhi’s sentencing to be public holidays (in lieu of “Empire Day”), and refusing to meet the visiting viceroy, Lord Reading. He even introduced spinning and weaving into the school system. At the same time he had no patience for sectarian causes; he opposed a Hindu member’s proposal to ban cow-slaughter, and won the Board’s unanimous support. Though Jawaharlal gave up the chairmanship of the municipality after two years in order to devote his energies to national affairs, he missed the job and sought it again in 1928, only to lose that election by a single vote to the pro-Raj “loyalist” candidate.
Political pressures during this period were augmented by personal stress. In November 1924, Kamala gave birth prematurely; her infant son did not survive. Shortly thereafter, her increasingly fragile health took a turn for the worse, and doctors began to suspect tuberculosis. Jawaharlal, repeatedly bedridden with fever, himself underwent a surgical operation in March 1925 for an undisclosed minor ailment. It became clear that he would soon have to take Kamala to Europe for treatment, but he had no money for such an expensive undertaking. Once again Motilal came to the rescue, arranging a legal brief for him with the princely retainer of ten thousand rupees (a sum that Jawaharlal’s modest professional experience could not possibly have justified, but which ensured that Motilal himself would keep an eye on the case). It was time, in any case, for a break from the practice of politics; the national movement was not going anywhere, and “as for our politics and public life,” Jawaharlal wrote to a friend in November 1925, “I am sick and weary of them.” On March 1, 1926, Jawaharlal, Kamala, and the eight-yearold Indira sailed for Europe.