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

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

Abdullah’s Religion

O Abdulla Renowned Malayalam movie actor Mohanlal recently offered special prayers for Mammootty, another equally renowned actor of Kerala. The ritual was performed at Sabarimala temple, one of the supreme Hindu pilgrimage centres in Kerala. No one in Kerala found anything wrong in Mohanlal, a Hindu, praying for Mammootty, a Muslim, to a Hindu deity. Malayalis were concerned about Mammootty’s wellbeing and were relieved to know that the actor wasn’t suffering from anything as serious as it appeared. Except O Abdulla. Who is this Abdulla? I had never heard of him until he created an unsavoury controversy about a Hindu praying for a Muslim. This man’s Facebook profile describes him as: “Former Professor Islahiaya, Media Critic, Ex-Interpreter of Indian Ambassador, Founder Member MADHYAMAM.” He has 108K followers on FB. As I was reading Malayalam weekly this morning, I came to know that this Abdulla is a former member of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Kerala , a fundamentalist organisation. ...

Lucifer and some reflections

Let me start with a disclaimer: this is not a review of the Malayalam movie, Lucifer . These are some thoughts that came to my mind as I watched the movie today. However, just to give an idea about the movie: it’s a good entertainer with an engaging plot, Bollywood style settings, superman type violence in which the hero decimates the villains with pomp and show, and a spicy dance that is neatly tucked into the terribly orgasmic climax of the plot. The theme is highly relevant and that is what engaged me more. The role of certain mafia gangs in political governance is a theme that deserves to be examined in a good movie. In the movie, the mafia-politician nexus is busted and, like in our great myths, virtue triumphs over vice. Such a triumph is an artistic requirement. Real life, however, follows the principle of entropy: chaos flourishes with vengeance. Lucifer is the real winner in real life. The title of the movie as well as a final dialogue from the eponymous hero sugg...

Empuraan and Ramayana

Maggie and I will be watching the Malayalam movie Empuraan tomorrow. The tickets are booked. The movie has created a lot of controversy in Kerala and the director has decided to impose no less than 17 censors on it himself. I want to watch it before the jingoistic scissors find its way to the movie. It is surprising that the people of Kerala took such exception to this movie when the same people had no problem with the utterly malicious and mendacious movie The Kerala Story (2023). [My post on that movie, which I didn’t watch, is here .] Empuraan is based partly on the Gujarat riots of 2002. The riots were real and the BJP’s role in it (Mr Modi’s, in fact) is well-known. So, Empuraan isn’t giving the audience any falsehood as The Kerala Story did. Moreover, The Kerala Story maligned the people of Kerala while Empuraan is about something that happened in the faraway Gujarat quite long ago. Why are the people of Kerala then upset with Empuraan ? Because it tells the truth, M...

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...