Skip to main content

Nehru: a meeting of East and West

 


Today is the 131st birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India. A tribute.

Nehru studied in England for seven years after which he wrote: “I have become a queer mixture of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.” His profound philosophical and romantic longings made him out of place in the West while his love of science and technology rendered him out of place in India.

The India that Nehru inherited from history’s mishmash was a wretched place. In the words of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins [Freedom at Midnight], India in 1947 was a country that had a leper population the size of Switzerland. There were as many priests in India as there were Belgians in Belgium, enough beggars to populate all of Holland, 11 million holy men, and 20 million aborigines. Some 10 million Indians were essentially nomads, exercising hereditary occupations as snake charmers, fortune tellers, gypsies, jugglers, water diviners, magicians, tight-rope walkers, and herb vendors. About 38,000 Indians were born every day, a quarter of them to die before the age of 5. Ten million other Indians died each year from malnutrition, undernourishment, and diseases like smallpox.

But India was very religious. It was the motherland of a historical religion (which ironically is still searching for its roots and striving to get a facelift). It was the birthplace of Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism: all pre-eminent religions that put a premium on humaneness. It was also a country of a sizeable population of Muslims who chose to stay back in spite of the agonising Partition. Over 3 million deities watched over this new country.

Nehru was an agnostic, however. The plethora of gods horrified him. He knew they would serve no practical purpose in redeeming a country steeped in poverty, diseases, ignorance, and superstitions. The very word ‘religion’ horrified him. He despised the priests, sadhus, chanting monks, and fervent sheikhs. The gods and their men together impeded the country’s progress, Nehru was convinced.

Nehru sought to replace these serious impediments with his own version of secularism. Secularism was more of a Western concept than Indian. But Nehru Indianized it by being philosophically tolerant of religions instead of excluding them altogether. Nehru’s secularism is one of his most profound contributions to the country. Unfortunately that hybridisation of the West and the East was never rightly understood or implemented in the country. Even the Congress successors of Nehru failed in this regard. Instead of keeping religions confined to temples and the personal dark alleys and byways where they belong, the Congress used them as vote banks and corrupted the entire polity of the nation. It is this corruption, more than anything else, that cost the Congress heavily, so heavily that the party is on the verge of extinction today. Worse, the very thing that Nehru tried to put on the sidelines has emerged as the strongest force in the country, threatening to swallow the whole nation.

The greatest irony, however, is that today’s leaders who have replaced Nehru in the heart of Delhi lack any profundity or vision. Their religion is just a political tool and little more. Their vision is stuck on some gargoyles of an unduly glorified past. They splash in the bilge waters of history and imagine that they are grappling with the tides of future destiny.

Like all humans, Nehru too had his flaws and limitations. But those flaws and limitations were just little stains on a fabric that shone brilliantly otherwise. If he did not fit in well anywhere, it was because people were incapable of seeing beyond those small stains. Nehru belonged to the cosmos. That is why the east and the west met in him harmoniously.

Comments

  1. Agree with your assessment in the last para of the post.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Only with the last para?
      Anyway, that's the summary of the post.

      Delete
    2. Well, yes I mentioned the last para as it summarizes everything. It is painful to see a great patriot who always had the best interests of the nation being maligned so often these days.

      Delete
  2. I agree with each and every word of this post. In my humble view, the biggest contribution of Nehru to the democracy called India was, is and will remain to be the establishment and strengthening of democratic institutions which used to serve the system as its checks and balances, making it truly accountable. Today's rulers (who leave no stone unturned in vilifying Nehru) have virtually destroyed almost all of them, making a mockery of democracy in India.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Childhood

They say that childhood is the best phase of one’s life. I sigh. And then I laugh. I wish I could laugh raucously. But my voice was snuffed out long ago. By the conservatism of the family. By the ignorance of the religious people who controlled the family. By educators who were puppets of the system fabricated by religion mostly and ignorant but self-important politicians for the rest. I laugh even if you can’t hear the sound of my laughter. You can’t hear the raucousness of my laughter because I have been civilised by the same system that smothered my childhood with soft tales about heaven and hell, about gods and devils, about the non sequiturs of life which were projected as great. I lost my childhood in the 1960s. My childhood belonged to a period of profound social, cultural and political change. All over the world. But global changes took time to reach my village in Kerala, India. India was going through severe crises when I was struggling to grow up in a country where

Trump in Indian Media

Aroon Purie, editor of India Today , thinks that Trump owes his victory to such issues as price rise, housing crisis, influx of immigrants, and the conservative rebellion against elite wokeism. Trump presidency portends populism, nativism, isolationism, and protectionism, says Purie quoting Condoleeza Rice. The world may not be a happier place with Trump leading America. “What is the world according to Trump?” India Today ’s senior journalist Raj Chengappa asks. His answer: “… it is ensuring America’s interests first with those of every other nation coming a very distant second.” Trump thinks that hitherto the other nations were eating America’s lunch. The allusion is not only to the immigrants but also to America “paying everyone else’s bills to maintain the global order.” Though Trump would like to play a key role in bringing the two wars [Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza] to an end, he will not do anything that will involve a price tag that the US has to pay for. Chengappa worri

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand