CHAPTER 2
Nehru’s Personal Background
Jawaharlal Nehru was born in 1889. His father was Motilal Nehru, one of the leading Indian barristers of the day, and his mother, who was Motilal’s second wife, was Swarup Rani.
The Nehrus are Kashmiri Brahmins in origin. The title of Pandit (Doctor) applied to Nehru—against his proclaimed wishes—comes from this origin. It used to be applied to Kashmiri Brahmins, and to some others, automatically, whether they were learned in Sanskrit or not. Nehru himself did not know Sanskrit.
The Kashmiri Brahmins were coming down to the plains of India from their mountain valley in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rather as the Scots were coming down to England in the same years. They came for the same reason—poverty at home and better chances in the south for men with brains and stamina. Kashmiri Brahmins were thus found in many of the principalities in north and central India, occupying positions of trust, as well as in the service of the Mughal emperors. Like the Scots of those days, they acquired a reputation for being ambitious self-seekers, and for favouring their own kith and kin unduly.
Early in the eighteenth century a Kashmiri Brahmin called Raj Kaul, highly reputed as a Sanskrit and Persian scholar, gained the notice of the emperor Farrukhsiyar38 and came to Delhi, the Mughal capital. ‘A jagir with a house situated on the banks of the canal was granted to Raj Kaul, and, from the fact of this residence, “Nehru”* (from Nahar, a canal), came to be attached to his name. Kaul had been the family name; this changed to Kaul-Nehru; and, in later years, Kaul dropped out and we became simply Nehru.’ The family experienced vicissitudes of fortune in times of trouble. Our Nehru’s greatgrandfather, Lakshmi Narayan Nehru, became the first Vakil of the sarkar Company at the shadow court of the emperor; and our Nehru’s grandfather, Ganga Dhar Nehru, was Kotwal of Delhi until the Mutiny in 1857. The Mutiny put an end to the Nehru family’s connection with Delhi for nearly a century—until Jawaharlal Nehru returned in 1946 as the first prime minister of India.
After the Mutiny the family had moved to Agra, 120 miles south of Delhi.
Nehru’s father, Motilal, was born in Agra, in 1861, three months after the death of his father. The family seems to have been poor at this stage—the highest caste in India is not necessarily, or indeed commonly, rich—and the burden of the family fell on Motilal’s two older brothers—Bhansa Dhar Nehru, who soon afterwards entered the judicial department of the British government, and, because of being posted from place to place, was largely cut off from the rest of the family; and Nandlal Nehru. It was the latter who brought up Motilal. Nandlal entered the service of Khetri, a small Rajput principality, or rather feudatory, in the hills of north Rajasthan. He served there for ten years and, at a young age, rose to be Diwan (i.e. chief minister). He then left to study and practise law at Agra, a new profession resulting from the British bringing in their legal and judicial systems. When the high court moved from Agra to Allahabad Nandlal moved with it, taking Motilal with him. And so it was that Allahabad became the Nehru home town. Nandlal rose to be one of the leaders of the Bar there.
Motilal, whose education included a good grounding in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu, and later in English, studied law in Kanpur (Cawnpore) and then worked with his guardian brother in Allahabad. Nandlal, however, died suddenly, and, like the father, before his time. Motilal was thus left to make his own way in the world.
He did this triumphantly. Sometime after the death of his first wife in childbirth he married Swarup Rani. Their first child died. Jawaharlal—the name means ‘red jewel’—was the second child. An only son of a prosperous father bereaved twice before, and for the first eleven years of his life the only child, he was treasured highly. (Mrs Pandit was born in 1900, and the third child, Mrs Raja Hutheesingh, in 1909.) Many, including Nehru himself, say that he was spoilt. This is probable; but if so the spoiling excluded any softness.
The family background in general meant in addition to the lavish affection which is common in Indian homes, a big house with ample space and garden and flowers and fruits and horses, which is not common. Contrary to what is often said, Nehru’s background was not aristocratic. He himself always spoke of it as middle class; in English terms of that day it would have been upper middle class. His personal standards were aristocratic though he gave his life to destroying one set of conditions, and to creating another set, which could result only in the end of aristocracy. Anand Bhavan, Abode of Happiness, seems to have been not an inaccurate name for the Nehru house. It was usually full, in the easygoing hospitable Indian way, with relatives, other Kashmiri Brahmins of distinction, including Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru,39 and a varied group of Hindus, Muslims and Europeans. Allahabad, an old Mughal city with Hindu origins, still has charm. In Nehru’s boyhood it was civilised and urbane as well as tranquil, free of either mobs or factories. Motilal, its head, was by all accounts a man of considerable intellectual force, strong character, handsome presence, vitality and a winning personality, though not of so fine a clay as his son. He was a free thinker, modern and Western in outlook, contemptuous of religion in general and of Hinduism in particular, worldly, and a free spender who enjoyed all the fruits of his prosperity. Also, he was given to bouts of temper, which frightened the son, much as the son’s bouts of temper frightened people a generation or so later. Jawaharlal always admired his father. The mother was the traditional Hindu lady, with little or no formal education but with the stamp of her Brahmin caste on her. Caste in India meant breeding for quality. And no doubt she would have seen to it that the tulsi, the plant sacred to the Hindus, was in the house, that pujas were performed, and that Jawaharlal heard about Sangam, Gaya, Muttra, Puri and the other sacred places.
Nehru speaks of a lonely childhood. Whether in this environment it was or was not as lonely as he thought, it is certain that Nehru by nature was lonely, and must always have been lonely. He would probably have been lonely if he had had a brother a year older and another a year younger than himself.
Motilal being the enthusiastic Westerniser which he was in those days, pro-English enthusiasm being not uncommon in India then, the Nehrus lived in the English, not the Indian, style, as regards food, speech and dress; and the Nehru children were educated by English tutors or governesses. Jawaharlal’s tutor, called Brooks, was an Anglo-Irishman with some French blood, and seems to have influenced him considerably, notably by giving him a taste for science, also a taste for theosophy, and perhaps a taste for anti-imperialism. (Brooks for reasons which have never been established committed suicide later.)* At the age of thirteen Nehru was initiated into the Theosophical Society, Mrs Besant herself performing the rites. (A few years later, and a thousand miles to the south, in Madras, another Indian destined to become well known in the new republic of India, Krishna Menon, was inducted into one of the orders of theosophy, ‘The Star of the East’, and put on the habit of the order. In the case of neither man did the conversion endure.)
Another element in Nehru’s upbringing was the ‘Islamic flavour’. Nehru speaks of the effect of Munshi Mubarak Ali.40 But the flavour derives from more than one man. In his childhood and youth Nehru would have seen as much of Urdu-speaking Muslims of education as of Hindus; perhaps more. The governing class in his province was predominantly Muslim. Urdu, not Hindi, was the maternal language. Yet in temperament Nehru had always been Hindu, not Muslim; while in conscious attitude he tried to be just Indian and to regard being a Hindu or a Muslim first as irrelevant, and then, under the pressure of facts, and so more realistically, as subordinate to being Indian.
In 1905, Nehru, then fifteen, was taken to England by his father and put in Harrow School. Much has been made by some commentators of the Harrow background but the truth is that Nehru was an outsider there and knew it. His age as well as his race was against him; boys have no peers for conformism. For the first time in his life he felt that he was Indian. Possibly, deep down, unbeknown even to himself, the seeds of his nationalism were planted at Harrow. Two year
s later, in 1907, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read for the Natural Science Tripos, taking it in the second class. He seems to have enjoyed Cambridge, and was sensible enough to do what was possible in those days, not to concentrate on mere examinations. He coxed his college boat. After Cambridge he went on to the Inner Temple where he spent two years, also happy, in preparing for the Bar.
After he was called to the Bar, in 1912, he returned to India. He had been away continuously for seven years, at a very impressionable time of life. England had an influence on him, both positive and negative, both for attraction and for repulsion, which never ceased.
Back in India he worked in his father’s chambers at Allahabad. When he cared to apply himself he did well enough; but, to his father’s disappointment, his heart was never in the law. The legal background of himself and of the class from which he came, however, has importance. The great majority of the fomenters and leaders of anti-English nationalism were products of that new thing introduced by the British raj—the English legal system, including the profitable profession of lawyers. And they showed a brilliant aptitude for using the English law in their cause and for turning it against the English rulers. In 1916, at the age of twenty six, which was an age well beyond the normal marrying age in those days, he married Kamala Kaul. It was a typical caste marriage, she being of Kashmiri Brahmin stock and belonging to Nehru’s clan. It was also an arranged marriage. She was seventeen at the time. Indira was born in the following year. A son was born in 1927 but died almost immediately. (It was not known until later that Nehru belonged to the Rhesus negative blood group.)
In addition to the difference between them in age and in experience of the world, Kamala had little formal education. The importance of formal education, especially in the case of people marrying within high castes, where racial quality and social solidarity are primordial, has been exaggerated in our days of the neo-literate. The real difficulty in marrying a man like Nehru would arise from the fact that he was already married, and that his first marriage absorbed him entirely. He was married to a cause. The cause was overriding, and it left little or no place for family life or comfort. ‘I was,’ he wrote of himself, ‘a most unsatisfactory person to marry.’* Sometimes Nehru and Kamala quarrelled; sometimes she was a little frightened. It is characteristic of the frankness and self-criticism which Nehru, for all his reserve and finesse, was capable of, that he should say this. We can add that so fastidious a man would not have failed in delicacy or generosity, and that if his interests were not centred on Kamala they were also not centred on any other woman, or on himself.
Six years after his return to India, and in his twenty ninth year, he launched himself on his political career. In 1918 he became the secretary of the Home Rule League in Allahabad. This was the moderate movement founded by Mrs Annie Besant which looked to India’s remaining a part of the British empire. In 1919 he started, with money supplied by his father, a newspaper, significantly named The Independent; and in 1920 he attended the special session of the Congress at Calcutta held after the Jallianwala Bagh shootings. Henceforth it was Gandhi, not Mrs Besant, whom Nehru followed. In the following year, at the age of thrity two, he served his first prison sentence.
During the quarter century between then and 1946, when he became head of the government of India, Nehru was in the forefront of the independence movement. He held high office in the Congress during most of this time, and in 1929, and again in 1936 and 1937 (and also, after independence, in 1946 and 1951–54), he held the highest office, that of president.
He spent over nine years in jail—not continuously but the various terms add up to that figure. It is a measure of his conviction and his purpose that he succeeded in turning his father, Motilal, into an extremist and into renouncing wealth and comfort and the prized English clothes and European associations and into going to prison for the cause. The imprisonment was humane and civilised; but prison is always prison; as Nehru could scarcely have forgotten when his government kept Sheikh Abdullah of Kashmir in prison for eleven years—and eleven years continuously.
The young Nehru also joined battle with his fellow Indians. His contact with the Indian masses was so effective that only Gandhi could draw crowds as big as he drew. His effectiveness, united to manifest dedication, made him at a young age one of the topmost leaders. Gandhi encouraged him and supported him. He loved this rich young man who had forsaken all for the poor of India. Yet Nehru had no sympathy for Gandhi’s religion, or for any religiousness at all. He never disguised this; more than once he attacked religion bitterly. To the end there was much in Gandhi which remained a puzzle to Nehru. When I asked him about Gandhi and his relations with him, Nehru said that Gandhi had such goodness and such an appeal that one felt that one had to strive to be worthy of it and to do one’s best; one still felt this when one differed from him; Gandhi’s authority was somehow not lowered by what one felt was a mistaken judgement, for which reason entirely different people felt constrained to bow to his purpose and standards. It is clear that for Nehru, Gandhi was not as the scribes describe him but had some authenticity above the merely political. ‘The light of our lives’, as he said of Gandhi when he announced his assassination. What Nehru felt, and the kind of man Nehru was, came out in the short speech41 which he broadcast in a broken choking voice that night; with something of the greatness as well as something of the poignancy of Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg.
Nehru had conflicts with other leaders, such as Rajagopalachari, Rajendra Prasad (first President of India), and Patel, over socialism; with Subhas Chandra Bose over the fascist approach; and with Jinnah over the status of the Muslims. Nehru’s contests were always over ideas, never over any personal interests of his own, though he waged them without quarter and provoked a good deal of personal enmity.
Nehru had a vision of India in which getting the British out of it was merely the preliminary stage. What he was concerned with was a modernised India, with an industrialised economy and an egalitarian society. Nationalist leader though he was, he hated many of the things which most Hindus hold dear—cow worship, subordinate status for women, temples, sadhus, astrology, and caste. He remained remarkably consistent in these aims, as his Bunch of Old Letters shows.
From time to time, he withdrew from political life. That is why Lord Lothian42 could tell Sir Thomas Jones43 confidentially in 1936 that ‘Nehru has probably given up action for philosophic meditation for the rest of his life’.*
In addition to his political troubles Nehru also had his fair share of family troubles. His father died in 1931, to his unaffected grief. His wife’s health had already caused much anxiety. He spent nearly the whole of 1926 and 1927 in Europe so that she could get treatment for tuberculosis, a fateful malady in the days before antibiotics had been discovered. He used such of the time as he could when in Europe for pursuing his interest in international relations—always a lively interest—and in socialism. He saw such men as Romain Rolland,44 the French novelist and an authority on Beethoven, who had close relations with Gandhi, and Ernst Toller,45 the German Communist, later disposed of by the Nazis. He joined up with the League against Imperialism and attended its conference at Brussels; and, at the invitation of the Soviet government, he went to Moscow to attend the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Russian Revolution. He then saw Lenin’s corpse, and, in an odd Nehruesque burst of humourless enthusiasm, he wrote of it as having ‘a strange beauty … even his eye-brows looked peaceful and unclouded’.** Eight years later, in 1935, his wife became ill again. She left for Europe by sea. Nehru shortly afterwards joined her, travelling by air, an unusual and daring way of travelling in those days (he had always been an enthusiast for flying; he had tried to persuade his father to let him learn to fly while he was at Cambridge). She died, in Switzerland, in February 1936, twenty years after their marriage. His mother died two years later. His daughter, Indira, who had had a slight respiratory ailment, remained in Europe; she returned to India only in 1940, after the Wo
rld War II had broken out. Not long after Indira returned she made a marriage which did not give Nehru satisfaction. Before this the marriage of his younger sister had, according to that lady’s unguarded memoirs,46 given him no satisfaction either.
In 1936 Nehru published his Autobiography, dedicated to ‘Kamala, who is no more’. It had an immediate success, making Nehru as famous outside of India as he already was inside it. Over twenty printings of it have been sold since then.
Nehru was in Europe again in 1938. That summer, in company with Krishna Menon, he visited Barcelona on the invitation of the Spanish Republican government then fighting a losing war against Franco. He spent five days there and was with the Republican forces.* From Spain he went to Sudetenland47 to see for himself what the Nazi claims were worth. By the time the World War II broke out Nehru’s interest in fighting against Nazism and Fascism was second only to his interest in getting independence for India. He hoped that the British leaders would offer a political settlement which would make it possible for the Indian nationalists to join England in fighting Nazism. Linlithgow was wooden enough to declare war without a gesture to them; and Churchill was hostile. Yet, Gandhi having rejected Cripps’ Mission in 1942 and having launched the Quit India movement, miscalculating that Japan would defeat England in Asia, Nehru toed the Gandhi line, though after much inner struggle. Rajagopalachari did not. This is one of the least admirable episodes in the life of Gandhi, and one of considerable significance as regards Nehru. He argued and pleaded with Gandhi; he was revolted by the nationalists who welcomed Axis victories as a stroke against England. Defeating the Axis he saw as a priority just below getting Indian independence. But in the end, apparently out of loyalty, he bowed to Gandhi. He found himself in prison once more, serving his longest continuous sentence, three years.
Nehru Page 4
