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 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

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...