Jawaharlal Nehru (1888–1964)

If you're Indian and can read English, you should definitely read this book (or a translation)! But why this ancient tome now? Aren't there newer history books with topics and narratives that match our interests? The book's selling point used to be that its author is Jawaharlal Nehru. But what appeal does that have today, given that the past eighty years have rubbed some shine off his name?

For me at least, the book stood this test of time and even felt relevant for today. Nehru’s show more “history” spans the Indus Valley Civilization to the Quit India movement, and is fun and engrossing enough to be read for its own sake. You will find him writing memorably about Sanskrit dramas and comparing them to Greek tragedies, about mathematics in ancient India, the Upanishads, Mahabharata, the Gita, Yoga, Indian philosophical ideas (Satt Darshanas), multiple dives into Buddhism and some exquisite exposition on it, the many invasions in ancient times, India's caste system, the expansion of Indian kingdoms into South East Asia, the Guptas, Chanakya's ideas, Adi Shankara, connections between India and Iran/Persia, the spread of Islam between the 7th and 12th Century AD, Akbar's claim to fame, Amir Khusrau's popularity, descriptions of Nalanda University, India-China connections, how different cities and communities reacted to British rule, and much else.

But it’s also not “learning a mass of facts and dates and drawing conclusions and inferences from them, unrelated to my life's course". Nehru pauses to reflect on what these facts imply, what could have been, why it was so, and so on. In theory, anyone can attempt such a book. But the depth and staying power of this one could have only come from the historic life-experiences of its author. Consider this: "There is, in the Upanishads, a continual emphasis on the fitness of the body and clarity of mind, on the discipline of both body and mind, before effective progress can be made. The acquisition of knowledge, or any achievement, requires restraint, self-suffering, self-sacrifice. This idea of some kind of penance, tapasya, is inherent in Indian thought, both among the thinkers at the top and the unread masses below. It is present today as it was present some thousands of years ago, and it is necessary to appreciate it in order to understand the psychology underlying the mass movements which have convulsed India under Gandhiji’s leadership". You can dismiss that as romanticization of some cherry-picked text. But you could also look at it as an honest effort by someone to examine a slice of India through their own intellect and experience - and I believe the bulk of this book will lead you to the latter viewpoint.

As a basic qualification, Nehru was well read in history and had done some amount of history writing. But more crucially, by this time he had spent around thirty years in intense political action and thought. He had worked closely with people of the calibre of Gandhi, Patel and Rajagopalachari. He had front row seats or an active role in major political events. Thanks to his teenage and student years at Harrow and Cambridge, he is well versed in European ideas and culture. When he explains Indian philosophy he is taking help from Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and his prison mate is the highly educated Abul Kalam Azad who knew Islamic history like few others!

Thus this book takes all his theoretical knowledge and world-historic life experiences, and tries to figure out logical links in a long chain of events with an eye on the future: "The roots of that present lay in the past and so I made voyages of discovery into the past, ever seeking a clue in it, if any such existed, to the understanding of the present". It raises and tries to answer big questions: What are the foundations of Indian social life? What kind of unity can be seen across this large and old country? How could the caste system have started? Did ancient India have democratic practices? How does one approach "Hinduism"? How was British rule qualitatively different from earlier foreign rulers? Was India falling behind even in the medieval era? What are “The Two Englands”? However, beware (or rejoice?) that half the book is about British rule and its aftermath.

Nehru is not an academic historian or columnist who is paid to write, and far from a full time propagandist who twists history to confound. He is primarily a political activist who has an irrepressible urge to communicate. Due to this the book is shot through with a rare, vivid earnestness. "For only they can sense life who stand often on the verge of it, only they whose lives are not governed by the fear of death". He does not hang his hat on any one ideology or way of understanding history. “Life is too complicated and, as far as we can understand it in our present state of knowledge, too illogical, for it to be confined within the four corners of a fixed doctrine”. And, "... within these limitations, the general Marxist approach, fitting in as it more or less does with the present state of scientific knowledge, seemed to me to offer considerable help". He is not blind to historical inequities although they don't exhaust his version of India: "India’s success and achievements were on the whole confined to the upper classes; those lower down in the scale had very few chances and their opportunities were strictly limited".

Generally speaking, he doesn’t view history along sectarian lines and urges the same outlook from the reader: "What is my inheritance? To what am I an heir? To all that humanity has achieved during tens of thousands of years, to all that it has thought and felt and suffered and taken pleasure in, to its cries of triumph and its bitter agony of defeat, to that astonishing adventure of man …". Thanks to this outlook and Nehru’s keen perception, this book can transcend barriers and serve as a long and wonderful account of humanity and the human condition itself. His own contribution towards what he yearns for here: "it seems more essential than ever that a synthetic view of human life and man's adventure through the ages should be encouraged. This view will have to take into consideration the past and the present, and include in its scope all countries and peoples".

On the whole, it is still worth seeing through Nehru's own words what the long past of a country like India meant to people like him. You will feel also the intensity of his desire for India's freedom and unity, the scale of his ambition for modernisation, industrialization and economic progress, and his impatience with communal politics, feudal landlords or anything else that stood in the way of all that. Today's "Congress" is not a patch on the movement that spearheaded India's freedom struggle, despite keeping the name and (due to?) having his descendants in it. ".. able, earnest, and courageous persons were drawn into the Congress", he writes at one place. Not to forget his famous intro to Gandhi which has this bit: "The essence of his teaching was fearlessness and truth, and action allied to these, always keeping the welfare of the masses in view". More tragic are the efforts to tarnish the image of a Nehru or a Gandhi, because the common sense, integrity and drive of leaders from that era are exactly what’s missing in India's public life.

Towards the end of this book is pretty much a manifesto for the soon-to-be independent nation, where Nehru outlines his expectations from both the new State and (enlightened?) citizenry. And these suggestions tie back quite nicely to the history of India that you just read! If today we can sit back and choose from a wide variety of books about the splendours (and horrors) of this country, we owe that to people like Nehru who worked hard to set the stage.

An analytical tone
However great the temptation, Nehru sticks for the most part to a modern, analytical approach - whether he is discussing the Vedas, Adi Shankara, the Buddha, Akbar or Jinnah. The book neither glorifies India nor is despondent about it. From a great section titled "Mathematics in Ancient India": "We must assume then that these momentous inventions were not just due to the momentary illumination of an erratic genius, much in advance of his time, but that they were essentially the product of the social milieu and that they answered some insistent demand of the times. Genius of a high order was certainly necessary to find this out and fulfil the demand, but if the demand had not been there the urge to find some way out would have been absent, and even if the invention had been made it would have been forgotten…”.

And: ".. Shankara was a man of amazing energy and vast activity. He was no escapist retiring into his shell or into a corner of the forest, seeking his own individual perfection and oblivious of what happened to others. Born in Malabar in the far south of India, he travelled incessantly all over India, meeting innumerable people, arguing, debating, reasoning, convincing, and filling them with a part of his own passion and tremendous vitality. He was evidently a man who was intensely conscious of his mission, a man who looked upon the whole of India from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas as his field of action and as something that held together culturally and was infused by the same spirit".

It's safe to say that there's no political nuance that escapes his attention, no big social trend that doesn't merit some remark, and no paradigm shift he is not capable of conceptualizing. For example, "The idea of progress is modern and relatively new even in the west; the ancient and medieval civilizations thought far more in terms of a golden past and of subsequent decay. In India also the past has always been glorified. The civilization that was built up here was essentially based on stability and security, and from this point of view it was far more successful than any that arose in the west. The social structure, based on the caste system and joint families, served this purpose and was successful in providing social security for the group and a kind of insurance for the individual… "

He cites the newest scholarly works, many of them from European authors who wouldn't likely be partial to India. He has no qualms diving into primary sources/translations (Chanakya, Megasthenes, Hiuen Tsang, Alberuni etc) but prefers to skip commentaries ("Nor was I interested in long commentaries and glossaries"). And luckily for us emerges repeatedly with brilliant summaries and observations.

The book is remarkably consistent over hundreds of pages as far as the basic problems underlying India and the shape of solutions are concerned. This again points to decades of contemplation, not rote learning done for press meets and TV debates. There are passages that stay with you long after you've read them: "In the constructive schemes that we may make, we have to pay attention to the human material we have to deal with, to the background of its thought and urges, and to the environment in which we have to function. To ignore all this and to fashion some idealistic scheme in the air, or merely to think in terms of imitating what others have done elsewhere would be folly". Or, "Whether we are conscious of it or not most of us worship at the invisible altar of some unknown god and offer sacrifices to it - some ideal, personal, national or international; some distant objective that draws us on, though reason itself may find little substance in it".

Curiosity and joy
A sense of curiosity, wonder and joy prevail for large chunks of the book. The history starts with the Indus Valley civilization, which was relatively recent knowledge when he was writing in 1944. That section ends with a quintessentially Nehruvian observation: "... creating not only things of beauty, but also the utilitarian and more typical emblems of modern civilization - good baths and drainage systems"! This is followed by descriptions of the Aryans and the Vedas. There are caveats about how hard it is to arrive at a definition for Hinduism, and the fact that even the word "Hindu" does not find a mention in ancient texts (for obvious reasons, since it's a corruption of the word "Sindhu").

As he is picking out his favourite verses from the Vedas and pondering over their meaning, we get pulled deeper into his mode of exploration. If the Vedas are full of the "spirit of inquiry" at the world, how can you not apply that mode to the scriptures themselves? What is of permanent value in them? What was temporary? How do you see them now in the light of Buddhism and many later developments that followed? What could be the temptation for someone in Nehru's particular predicament: "A country under foreign domination seeks escape from the present in dreams of a vanished age, and finds consolation in visions of past greatness. That is a foolish and dangerous pastime ...".

At one point he writes, "I have digressed and made a sudden jump to modern times, and must go back to the medieval period after the Afghans had established themselves in Delhi". Except that a few pages later we are treated to a top notch set of essays about the foundations of Indian social life. In his opinion they are: the joint family, caste and village self-government. And that, "All the three pillars of the Indian social structure were thus based on the group and not on the individual." After this wonderful digression, he again chides himself with, "To go back. The Afghans had settled down in India …"! Such reflections are present throughout. Somewhere in the beginning he admits that, "my reaction to India thus was often an emotional one, conditioned and limited in many ways. It took the form of nationalism".

What I wasn't expecting was a grudging admiration for political expansion! He doesn't find political fights and conquest deplorabe per se. He writes in detail and in praise of "colonization" by South Indian kings stretching into what are today Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia. Similarly, he notes that Arabian political influence ("this triumphant career of a people") was expanding even before Prophet Mohammed, but still "the Prophet of Islam vitalized his people and filled them with faith and enthusiasm". He finds striking "the intellectual curiosity, the adventures in rationalist speculation, the spirit of scientific inquiry among the Arabs of the eighth and ninth centuries". This history of Islam during the many centuries before it entered India as a political force (traversing Syria, Northern Africa, Iraq and Persia) is refreshingly non-polemical and makes an apt preface to his later analysis of the Afghan and Turkish/Turanian kings who were the ones to actually embed the religion in (North) India. Of the latter lot he is far less appreciative: "It was nearly 600 years before it reached the heart of India and when it came to the accompaniment of political conquest, it had already changed much and its standard-bearers were different". I thought that these bits and in general his admiration for ancient and medieval kings who ruled vast swathes, betrayed his own political ambition and inspirations! He makes a clear distinction between these "foreign" kings and the colonial British rule (more on that further below).

As he gradually turns serious about recent events, you realize that the first half of this book turns out to be like those moments in the morning where you’re admiring the scenery from your balcony with coffee in hand, before the real work of the day begins!

Anarchy and the quest for unity
In any country, and especially in a huge country like India with its complicated history and mixed culture, it is always possible to find facts and trends to justify a particular thesis, and then this becomes the accepted basis for a new argument. That previous sentence isn't by me! It is from a para deep inside the book where Nehru is about to explain the decline of India under British rule. Evidently, Nehru knew history and the narrative potential of history writing quite well, So what could be his thesis and the facts and trends he marshals?

I'd call out "unity" (of India) as the predominant theme. A simple search for "unity" in the book yields nearly hundred occurrences. To foreign observers this book might have come across as a response to British claims that India is not even a "country". But Nehru's initial tepidity that he's approaching India just like a "friendly Westerner" is soon forgotten. Be it the Indus Valley civilization, the Vedic era, Guptas, the South Indian kingdoms, or medieval Mughals, Rajputs etc, he looks for common themes and feels a sense of kinship. "Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization", "the mass of the Indian people, in their infinite diversity and yet their amazing unity", "the unity of India was no longer merely an intellectual conception for me: it was an emotional experience which overpowered me. That essential unity had been so powerful that no political division, no disaster or catastrophe, had been able to overcome it”. Towards the end ("The Importance of the National Idea"), he identifies one specific pattern in India's "unity" across time: "Sometimes the new, though very different, appears in terms of pre-existing patterns, and thus creates a feeling of a continuous development from the past", and, "... Because of this there is no sense of cultural break in it and there is that continuity, in spite of repeated change, from the far distinct days of Mohenjo Daro to our own age".

The motivation behind this quest for unity isn't hard to find. Because just before this, in a long chapter about the 18th Century, he describes how India fell to the British, piece by piece. The antics of Aurangzeb led to the decline of the Mughal empire and multiple political rivalries were ongoing. The Marathas were a major force and so was Tipu Sultan. There was Ranjit Singh in Punjab and the remnants of the Mughal empire in UP-Bihar-Bengal. The French were not a negligible power. But over the course of 60-70 years of political upheavals, the British East India Company ended up defeating or subjugating all the rest. This long period of anarchy and the lack of political unity as a "nation" was to set India back disastrously (recently this period was investigated by William Dalrymple's "The Anarchy" - my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3845802514). Nehru replays in fairly honest and painful detail those events, and analyzes why the British reigned supreme. What could have been their military, economic and social advantages? Was it India alone that was subjugated thus? I found this to be one of the high points of the book. Later, a last attempt in 1857 is also squashed (Nehru's own grandfather fled from Delhi to Agra after this). The British started by taking sides, ended up as rulers, and then kept playing different groups of Indians against each other for nearly a hundred more years. Thereby stems Nehru's determination to put to rest once and for all Indians' tendency to fight each other giving foreigners a chance to get a foothold.

Colonization and racism
During his analysis of medieval India he's noticing how India is already starting to fall behind the West. In a great section titled "The Contrast between Asia and Europe in Mechanical Advance and Creative Energy", he looks at what developments were not happening in India vis-a-vis the West. The Mughals did not invest in a navy, did not develop inhouse military expertise and did not take to the technology of the printing press. "This lack of mechanical bent is remarkable, especially as there were very fine craftsmen and artisans in India". Nehru concludes there is a "paralysis of creative energy and inventive faculty". Whether this withstands scholarly scrutiny I do not know, but is at least a good example of his style of thinking and what deficits he saw in India. From much earlier in the book, "[India] fell behind in the march of technique, and Europe, which had long been backward in many matters, took the lead in technical progress. Behind this technical progress was the spirit of science and a bubbing life and spirit which displayed itself in many activities and in adventurous voyages of discovery. New techniques gave military strength to the countries of western Europe, and it was easy for them to spread out and dominate the East. That is the story not only of India, but of almost the whole of Asia". These cumulative advantages of centuries allowed the British to triumph militarily, as he reiterates again in the section, "The Backwardness of India and the Superiority of the English in Organization and Technique".

How was British rule different from the earlier foreigners like the Afghans or Turks and how damaging was it? This is among the most searing parts of the book, and of course the raison d'etre of India's freedom struggle. The section titles tell the tale: "The Plunder of Bengal Helps the Industrial Revolution in England", "The Destruction of India’s Industry and the Decay of Her Agriculture", "India Becomes for the First Time a Political and Economic Appendage of Another Country", "The Great Revolt of 1857. Racialism". He notes that, "those parts of India which have been longest under British rule are the poorest today. Indeed some kind of chart might be drawn up to indicate the close connection between length of British rule and progressive growth of poverty". And, "Nearly all our major problems today have grown up during British rule and as a direct result of British policy: the princes; the minority problem; various vested interests, foreign and Indian; the lack of industry and the neglect of agriculture; the extreme backwardness in the social services; and, above all, the tragic poverty of the people". Of course no political leader back then could have missed the racist undertones of Empire: "Imperialism and the domination of one people over another is bad, and so is racialism. But imperialism plus racialism can only lead to horror and ultimately to the degradation of all concerned with them".

These latter parts of the book are heavy on political theory and ideological musings. Since his previous book ("An Autobiography" - my review: https://www.librarything.com/work/10659683/reviews/261410392) recounts in detail the events of the first three decades of the 20th Century (mainly the Gandhian activities but also briefly the revolutionary attempts, the expansion of Congress and all the sparring with the British), Nehru revisits them only in terms of their theoretical background, consequences and broad trends. Detailed treatment is reserved for newer developments like the rise of the Muslim League, the Cripps Mission and the Quit India movement. There is a fascinating section ("The Question of Minorities") about the stalemate with the Muslim League and his opinion of Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

The British were keen on propping up the Muslim League, and as per Nehru, the League used "nazi methods of propaganda" to paint the Congress as anti-Muslim (somewhat similar to today’s horrible Whatsapp forwards and industrialist-controlled TV channels)! He wonders if Jinnah intentionally wants things to not change and keep drifting, due to personal limitations: "If conditions were different and he had to face real problems, political and economic, it is difficult to say how far his ability would carry him. Perhaps he is himself doubtful of this, although he has no small opinion of himself. This may be an explanation for that subconscious urge in him against change, to keep things going as they are … ".

The politics of solutions
It is not for whining about British rule that Nehru is famous. Many of the concrete steps the Congress took were based on sound reasoning, and so was their analysis of what kept the British regime going. His "The Techniques of British Rule: Balance and Counterpoise" goes into how the British played different social and economic factions against each other. The princes and landlords were co-opted into British rule. Farmers and landlords were kept opposed to each other, and so were people of different castes and religions. Educated Indians entering government service were also beholden to them. Given that Indian nationalism was still a nascent thing, it's not hard to imagine you could seed doubts about the intentions of other Indians in distant regions.

But such a political structure is not without weaknesses. Nehru notes the "inherent contradiction" in British rule: "Having brought about the political unification of the country and thus let loose new dynamic forces which thought not only in terms of that unity, but aimed at the freedom of India, the British Government tried to disrupt that very unity it had helped to create". By day the British sought to impose their uniform footprint all over the country and exploit it efficiently through railways and telecommunication, by night they would turn around and thwart Indians from unifying, proclaiming there is no country here! In an earlier section ("Contradictions of British Rule in India"), Nehru notes how sharply this last phase differed from the 18th Century, when the British had arrived as a dynamic force that upstaged a staid India: "The British became dominant in India, and the foremost power in the world, because they were the heralds of the new big-machine industrial civilization. They represented a new historic force which was going to change the world, and were thus, unknown to themselves, the forerunners and representatives of change and revolution; and yet they deliberately tried to prevent change, except in so far as this was necessary to consolidate their position and help them in exploiting the country and its people". And somewhere later, "The very thing India lacked, the modern West possessed, and possessed to excess. It had the dynamic outlook… It was active, aggressive, acquisitive, seeking power and domination, living in the present and ignoring the future consequences of its actions". As time went by the quality of the British ruling class had degraded: "The most obvious fact is the sterility of British rule in India and the thwarting of Indian life by it. Alien rule is inevitably cut off from the creative energies of the people it dominates".

In contrast to sterile British rule stood the open, dynamic and truth-based activities of the Congress. From "The Congress becomes a dynamic organization": "Realizing that the main props of British rule were fear, prestige, the co-operation, willing or unwilling, of the people, and certain classes whose vested interests were centred in British rule, Gandhi attacked these foundations". The down-to-earth nature of Congress leaders made the pomp and pageantry of the British officials and princes look embarrassing, and their oppression more stark. They embraced and modelled the future: "The Congress organization is certainly one of the most democratic organizations that I know of anywhere in the world, both in theory and practice. Through its tens of thousands of local committees spread out all over the country, it had trained the people in democratic ways and achieved striking success in this". "Every reform that he [Gandhi] suggests, every advice that he gives to others, he straightaway applies to himself. He is always beginning with himself and his words and actions fit into each other like a glove on the hand".

The ruling classes shrank from the masses, the Congress plunged into them. "[Gandhi] sent us to the villages, and the countryside hummed with the activity of innumerable messengers of the new gospel of action", "We learnt our Indian economics more from these visits than from books and learned discourses", "... the peasants rolled in and, in its new garb, it [Congress] began to assume the look of a vast agrarian organization with a strong sprinkling of the middle classes". They came up with "constructive" programs even though they were not in power: "... organizing and developing cottage industries, in raising the depressed classes, and later in the spread of basic education".

The goal was a psychological transformation of the masses: "our main purpose was to raise the whole level of the Indian people, psychologically and spiritually and also, of course, politically and economically. It was the building up of that real inner strength of the people that we were after, knowing that the rest would inevitably follow. We had to wipe out some generations of shameful subservience and timid submission to an arrogant alien authority".

Independence and democracy became linked in people's minds to the eradication of poverty and improved standards of living. From "The National Planning Committee": "we could not consider any problem, much less plan, without some definite aim and social objective. That aim was declared to be to ensure an adequate standard of living for the masses, in other words, to get rid of the appalling poverty of the people". If everyone were given the right to vote, in no sensible world would the masses choose the colonizers and their cabal of princes and landlords: "election evils most prevalent where the electorate was small", "I was prepared to trust that wide electorate far more than a restricted one, based on a property qualification or even an educational test".

Sporadic observations on caste
Caste doesn't feature much in this book, although it is listed among the "principal planks" of the Congress. He postulates some theories when discussing the Aryans ("Synthesis and Adjustment. The Beginnings of the Caste System"). But the most detailed treatment is probably in the section "The Theory and Practice of Caste". There he acknowledges that "the ultimate weaknesses and failing of the caste system and the Indian social structure were that they degraded a mass of human beings and gave them no opportunities to get out of that condition". And much earlier ("Buddha and Mahavira: Caste"): "slowly, imperceptibly, … caste has grown and spread and seized every aspect of Indian life in its strangling grip".

Still, he problematizes it narrowly and tries to evaluate it against conditions prevailing in India and worldwide: "The organization of society being, generally speaking, noncompetitive and non-acquisitive, these divisions into castes did not make as much difference as they might otherwise have done". And a little later, "The contrasts between this social structure and those existing elsewhere in the past were not great, but with the changes that have taken place all over the world during the past few generations they have become far more pronounced. In the context of society today, the caste system and much that goes with it are wholly incompatible, reactionary, restrictive, and barriers to progress". He sees caste as one pillar of the group-ish nature of Indian society, in "The Indian Social Structure. Importance of the Group".

Throughout the book he comments on one oddity: In India there was enormous freedom of thought for individuals and all types of new philosophies were proposed, but the social structure stayed rigid and bounded by caste! He doesn't quite cross over into cynicism and suggest that the former always worked to perpetuate the latter.

Capitalism and socialism
Nehru's socialist leaning shows itself only at the end. As mentioned earlier, for much of the book he praises exploration, adventure, trade and so on. In the long arc of history, he probably sees modern capitalism as just one more enabler of a basic human instinct? He is of course against colonial extraction and the impoverishment of people. He doesn't even see the profit motive as having a big role in Indians' lives. From "The Importance of the National Idea. Changes Necessary in India": "It would be absurd to say that the profit motive does not appeal to the average Indian, but it is nevertheless true that there is no such admiration for it in India as there is in the West". To him, our modern notions of private property were coeval with colonialism, and hence don't attract much admiration either. From "Village Self-Government. The Shukra Nitisara": "in India there was no landlord system, as known in the west, nor was the individual peasant the full owner of his patch of land. Both these concepts were introduced much later by the British with disastrous results". But he calls for a "democratic collectivism" that would have public ownership of critical industrial sectors, and for "an upsetting of the present-day acquisitive society based primarily on the profit motive".

He cribs bitterly about Indian industry being throttled by the British and favourable treatment for British firms operating in India. From "Growth of Industry: Provincial Differences": "Nothing, perhaps, reveals the police-state policy of the Government of India more than the fact that they had no department of agriculture and no department of commerce and industry till the twentieth century". From "Heavy Industry Begins": "In 1911 Jamshedji Tata laid the foundations of heavy industry in India by starting steel and iron works in what came to be known as Jamshedpur. Government looked with disfavour on this and other attempts to start industries and in no way encouraged them". His anger turns acute during the Second World War. Britain could have benefited from utilizing India's resources and manpower for wartime manufacturing, but their reluctance to do this ended up hurting everyone. Here we find him at his technocratic best, quoting statistics, economists and journals: "The apparent stability of the index of India’s industrial activity during war-time indicates that no fundamental advance has been made". After going through this I think I know why big Indian businessmen threw their weight behind the freedom struggle. Usually, capitalists are inclined to support those in power, but in that moment the opposition promised them more opportunities and a level playing field!

Centuries long stagnation of Indian industry and the predominance of politics made it inevitable that the new political leaders would go on to occupy the commanding heights of the economy. This impulse reveals itself in the chapter "The National Planning Committee" (and its subsequent ones): "the urge for rapid progress, and the conviction that only thus could we solve our problems of poverty and unemployment, were so great that all of us were forced out of our grooves and compelled to think on new lines". The Planning Committee sought "fundamental changes in the social and economic structure". "The more we thought of this planning business, the vaster it grew in its sweep and range till it seemed to embrace almost every activity"! Their starting point is dire poverty (an annual average income of 65 rupees!). They set targets for nutrition, clothing, housing etc. There is a suspicion of the major economic powers due to their imperialist tendencies: "The first charge on the country’s produce should be to meet the domestic needs of food, raw materials, and manufactured goods". I think this and the next couple of chapters are a fascinating snapshot of the conditions and motivations that were to play a major role in India's future. "The three fundamental requirements of India, if she is to develop industrially and otherwise, are a heavy engineering and machine-making industry, scientific research institutes, and electric power. These must be the foundations of all planning, and the national planning committee laid the greatest emphasis on them". Planning provided much needed creative satisfaction for Nehru: "To me the spirit of cooperation of the members of the Planning Committee was peculiarly soothing and gratifying, for I found it a pleasant contrast to the squabbles and conflicts of politics".

It is ironic that the same stranglehold that British rule had over Indian commercial life went on to be replicated by all these good intentions. And Nehru writes about Jinnah: "Of economics, which overshadow the world to-day, he appeared to be entirely ignorant"!

The new Nation and State
Nehru's definition of nationalism is simple and flexible, although hard to operationalize. From "The Importance of the National Idea": "Nationalism is essentially a group memory of past achievements, traditions, and experiences". Perhaps karma has a role in seeding this group? "... past Karma is a powerful factor in shaping the individual and the nation, and nationalism itself is a shadow of it with all its good and bad memories of the past". There was no dearth of pre-existing groups and factions in Nehru’s India, and hence his nationalist appeals are framed explicitly to transcend those: "The people of India are very real to me in their great variety and, in spite of their vast numbers, I try to think of them as individuals rather than as vague groups". He believes fiercely in the existence of the category of "Indians" and desires to access their minds: "My eyes held those thousands of eyes: we looked at each other, not as strangers meeting for the first time, but with recognition, though of what this was none could say".

A modern and aggressive new State is promised that aims to catch up with the rest of the world. From "India's Growth Arrested": “When the British came to India, though technologically somewhat backward, she was still among the advanced commercial nations of the world”, "Most of our problems today are due to this arrested growth and the prevention by British authority of normal adjustments taking place". "We have arrived in India at a stage when no half measures can solve our problems, no advance on one sector is enough. There has to be a big jump and advance all along the line, or the alternative may be overwhelming catastrophe".

Nehru has been reaching out to millions of Indians as individuals, narrating past achievements, and what a new government will do. But what about all those people? What traditions and experiences should they build upon and take forward?

Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Freedom
First, he calls for not allowing the past to dominate the present. “Our lives are encumbered with the dead wood of this past; all that is dead and has served its purpose has to go. But that does not mean a break with, or a forgetting of, the vital and life-giving in that past. We can never forget the ideals that have moved our race, the dreams of the Indian people through the ages, the wisdom of the ancients, the buoyant energy and love of life and nature of our forefathers, their spirit of curiosity and mental adventure, the daring of their thought, their splendid achievements in literature, art and culture …”

Here it’s worth recalling again Nehru’s sentiment described earlier to not be sectarian when reading history. And also his observation about one practicality: "Greatly attached as I am to India, I have long felt that something more than national attachment is necessary for us in order to understand and solve even our own problems, and much more so those of the world as a whole”.

Next Nehru invokes what he'd earlier called "the philosophical ideal of Indian culture - the integration of man and the stress on goodness, beauty and truth [note: in other words Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram] rather than acquisitiveness", but now he brings in freedom: "We have to revive the passion for truth and beauty and freedom which gives meaning to life".

Then follows a series of extraordinary reflections on the nature of truth, religion, philosophy and science. If truth be infinite, it stands to reason that it's only apprehended partially at any one point in time, and if it is eternal, it has "ever to be sought and renewed". Gradually he leads up to: "It is therefore with the temper and approach of science, allied to philosophy, and with reverence for all that lies beyond, that we must face life". The spirit of the age demands equality, and hence the caste system needs to be discarded. Similarly, "We have to get rid of that narrowing religious outlook, that obsession with the supernatural and metaphysical speculations".

Again, you can dismiss all this as a politician massaging ideas to suit predefined ends, a part of that "continuous adaptation of old ideas to a changing environment, of old patterns to new". Or if you find his ends noble enough, cut some slack? "In spite of all the mistakes that we may have made, we have saved ourselves from triviality and an inner shame and cowardice. That, for our individual selves, has been some achievement".

Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Freedom - these are what Nehru seems to want in India and its life. And what you’ll find echoing throughout this book. show less

I really enjoyed this book. With his great writing style and interesting observations on a wide range of things about India, Nehru can keep you hooked even today with his experiences and thoughts. I read this book through a cynical lens as well, since after all it was written by an active politician, even if from within a prison cell (1934-1935)! It doesn't suffer too much despite that. For the most part, Nehru makes intellectually honest arguments about the topics he takes up. The only show more thing you could accuse him of is some errors of omission. Even though the book is all about serious issues and harsh events, Nehru somehow packages them up in genteel, elegant prose. It can transport you to a different time and mental realm each time you pick it up, and is quite unputdownable for long stretches!

At the end of this review/summary I've listed chapters in the book that I found very worthwhile, so they can be appreciated without having to read all 600 pages.

A chronicle of ideas
---------------------------
An example may illustrate better the nature of this book. Writing in Chapter 44 (Prison Humours) when being taken by car from one prison to another, Nehru says, "During that long midnight drive I mused over the relations of Englishmen and Indians… ". He describes how these two nations encounter each other only in adverse situations ("of ruler and ruled, of official and non-official, of those in authority and those who have to obey") leading to mutual distrust, dislike and ignorance. He admits that British officials couldn't help but be a bit partial to him: ".. .the fact that I had received my education in England… brought me nearer to them. They could not help consider me as more or less civilized after their own pattern". A little further along is this nugget: "As soon as one begins to think of the other side as a mass or crowd, the human link seems to go". Elsewhere in the chapter he describes the day-to-day routines that he uses to cope with prison life, while also comparing prison policies in India with those of contemporary USA!

I felt that this continuous mingling of personal experiences with social, political currents is a hallmark of this book and gives it much of its flavour. Treating it as plain chronology would be to miss its essence (and Nehru would probably die of boredom in any attempt to write such an account). Because literally in every other page there is some reflection on larger questions: about practical politics and moral positions, about historical trends and the impact of different personalities, about aspects unique to India and things common to all of humanity. True there is a dizzying array of events where you are likely to get lost (Congress sessions, resolutions, agitations, multiple jail terms, separation and sadness, health issues and death, travels and holidays). But the meat of the plot is really Nehru's restless musings over such questions, during his quest to break the British stranglehold over power and define a way forward for India.

An unbreakable spirit
---------------------------
Through the decades of ups and downs described in the book, I couldn't sense a single moment of giving up. No doubt there are periods of severe doubt regarding the future, and despair at the turn events and people are taking, but I felt like they were being viewed as temporary setbacks only. Some kind of subconscious re-assessment is instantly afoot, where the permanent reference point is an independent India, and the present moment can only be explained - or experienced even - in terms of how much it deviates (either in time or degree) from that inevitable destiny.

In Chapter 61 (Desolation), he is crushed when Gandhi withdraws the Civil Disobedience Movement, "With a stab of pain I felt that the chords of allegiance that had bound me to him for many years had snapped". A few pages later, he is already thinking of the future: "Of the many hard lessons that I had learnt, the hardest and the most painful now faced me: that it is not possible in any vital matter to rely on anyone. One must journey through life alone". But perhaps the high point is Chapter 54 (The record of British rule). From within their prison cell he begins a long intellectual take down of their system of administration, and then starts planning how a new set of technocrats will replace the Imperial Civil Service! "Whenever India becomes free, and in a position to build her new life as she wants to, she will necessarily require the best of her sons and daughters for this purpose.. We shall want the help of many foreign experts in many departments of public activity, particularly in those which require special technical and scientific knowledge… it seems to me quite essential that the ICS and similar services must disappear completely, as such, before we can start real work on a new order".

This is not the optimism that arises from data or opinion polls, or of the knowledge of political strategies and their outcomes. It felt more temperamental, like someone who has a bias for intense action at all times, and this urge for action overwhelms reason and inspires a belief that a better world is bound to come. Humour and detachment seem to be just other manifestations of this bias during times when no other outlet for action exists. He writes in Chapter 4 (Harrow and Cambridge) that "risk and adventure" fascinated him, and he liked to gamble in things where stakes were high.

His bias for intense action also shows up in his disdain for the ideas of the Liberal Party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Liberal_Party) in Chapter 51 (The Liberal Outlook). He complains that they seem to be preoccupied by trivial questions like who got appointed where, how will the colonial government react to some agitation of the Congress, and so on. "They do not act, for fear of acting. They do not move, for fear of falling". Incidentally, this chapter demonstrates his ability to spring sarcasm and satire on you when you're least expecting it! I was laughing out loud at some of its parts.

The main stream of the freedom struggle
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Nehru's analytical skills regarding people, political movements and their motivations shine through repeatedly. So much so that in hindsight you realize that it's not an accident that in the preface he states that "this account is wholly one-sided, and inevitably, egotistical; many important happenings have been completely ignored and many important persons, who shaped events, have hardly been mentioned". If you notice large gaps when reading it, you're inclined to excuse him due to this disclaimer. But wait a minute! Did he choose the autobiographical format precisely because it gave him a chance to use his formidable literary and analytical skills to cement his political position at a crucial time - without appearing too self-promotional?? Still, he wrote this book entirely in prison, and may not have been in a position to write a more objective version of events…

To approach the life of one of the freedom movement's central leaders through a purely cynical lens would be to miss the wood for the trees. After all, Nehru managed to stay in the thick of things, ultimately gained power and presided over a new political structure for many years. He was part of a movement that built a nation. A nation that many people still believe is a great idea and defend intensely. And a movement that is still studied by historians and political scientists - not as a cautionary tale but one worth admiring and learning from. That's not to say the movement didn't have other strands and currents - any large national movement is bound to have diversity. They show up in this autobiography too at various places.

For example, in Chapter 35 ("Karachi Congress"), Nehru writes how a young man known for being a violent revolutionary (Chandrashekhar Azad) showed up at his house in Allahabad one day and complained he was in a fix because he was finding it increasingly hard to evade the British police. Sadly, Azad was to meet his end a few weeks later, in a police shoot-out in that same city. In another chapter (21: In Europe), Nehru writes about meeting former revolutionaries who were then living in exile in Europe. Quite a few were part of the "Berlin Committee" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Committee) group that had formed during the First World War. They represented an era and phase of the freedom struggle before the mass based, non-violent approach got proposed by Gandhi and starting showing signs of success. Nehru’s accounts of his interactions with these people and their short character sketches are laced with remorse, and, surprisingly, dry humor (and I have already mentioned one of his takes on the Liberal Party).

He attitude towards religion-centered politics is harshly critical. For the most part, he clubs communal politics with the feudal landlord class when analyzing it.Strangely there's very little in this book on caste-based issues, including the Gandhi-Ambedkar Poona pact of 1932.

Despite all the internal disagreements that made up the Congress, Nehru remains ever worried about the opportunity costs of what he regards as ill-timed or foolhardy political actions, and does not spare even Gandhi (for example when he embarks on his fast unto death before the Poona pact). Chapter 48 (The Dual Policy of British Government) provides a hint about the level of his concern: "the real reason why the Congress and other non-official organisations cannot do much for social reform goes deeper. We suffer from the disease of nationalism, and that absorbs our attention and it will continue to do so till we get political freedom. As Bernard Shaw has said: A conquered nation is like a man with cancer; he can think of nothing else"

India and Swaraj
-----------------------
It may be necessary to pause and consider what India meant to the leaders and people of that generation. It is likely the word "India" did not bring to mind a firm political entity and the attendant aspirations or disappointments that it does today. "India" would have been a nebulous entity of the future - some amalgamation of this large population spread across a large landscape that consisted of hundreds of small and large kingdoms and every type of social diversity. In Chapter 53 (India: Old and New), Nehru refers to one popular conception: "Mother India, a beautiful lady, very old but every youthful in appearance, sad-eyed and forlorn, cruelly treated by aliens and outsiders, and calling upon her children to protect her. Some such picture rouses the emotion of hundreds of thousands and drives them to action and sacrifice. And yet India is in the main the peasant and the worker, not beautiful to look at, for poverty is not beautiful". To Nehru, India is inseparable from its current pitiable state.

"India" will necessarily have to be understood along with another word swirling around amorphously at the time, i.e., "Swaraj", which was all about the future. In Chapter 11 (1921 and the First Imprisonment) he writes, "Each one of us probably interpreted the word in his or her own way. To most of the younger men it meant political independence, or something like it, and a democratic form of government, and we said so in our public utterances. Many of us also thought that inevitably this would result in a lessening of the burdens that crushed the workers and the peasantry. But it was obvious that to most of our leaders Swaraj meant something much less than independence. Gandhi was delightfully vague on the subject...".

A yearning for political freedom
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Unlike leaders of earlier generations (say Gopalakrishna Gokhale or Surendranath Banerjee) Nehru has no patience with British rule and rarely in doubt as to whether India is a country. Growing up, he would hear his family discuss the racially discriminatory practices (both small and large) followed by the British and he was "filled with resentment against the alien rulers of my country". This would have rankled since his father lived alongside British officials in Allahabad's Civil Lines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Lines,_Prayagraj) area, and in earlier generations his family had worked in the court of Mughal kings. His subsequent education in Harrow and Cambridge meant he could see through their claims of racial superiority and their so-called civilizing misson.

While his attitude towards India's political future doesn't change much, there is a sea change in his commitment towards making it happen. Here is the imprisoned man in his forties writing about his youth (Chapter 4: Harrow and Cambridge): "My general attitude to life at the time was a vague kind of cyrenaicism, partly natural to youth, partly the influence of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater. It is easy and gratifying to give a long Greek name to the desire for a soft life and pleasant experiences... Work and games and amusements filled my life and the only thing that disturbed me sometimes was the political struggle in India".

In contrast, we read how his father Motilal modifies his opinion about British rule in slow, incremental steps, until eventually he throws in his lot with Gandhi and starts going to jail. Writing about a time before 1919, Nehru says of his father: "Each step forward meant for him a hard and bitter struggle in his mind. And when that step was taken after a struggle with a part of himself, there was no going back" (Chapter 5: Back home and War time politics in India). In Chapter 7 (The coming of Gandhiji) Nehru points out that the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre had a "profound effect" on changing Motilal's attitude towards the British.

One big change we do learn about is after his visit to the villages of UP in 1920 (Chapter 8: I am externed and Chapter 9: Wanderings among the kisans) when he sees from up close the pathetic state of India's farmers. "I was totally ignorant of labour conditions in factories or fields, and my political outlook was entirely bourgeois". I was surprised that even hundred years back, people from elite backgrounds like Nehru's were already out of touch with rural India!

Beyond traditional nationalism
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Your ability to empathize with Nehru's causes hinges, in part, on an identification of a new country and a specific conception of it. In Chapter 53 (India: Old and new), he gives a brief overview of the history of Indian nationalism (with some comparisons to Italy), and insists that there exists an element of cultural unity across this land even though political unity was only sporadic. With respect to the present and the future, he says India will have to adopt many elements of the capitalist West, because "the West brings science, and science brings food for the hungry millions". But from the West we should also learn socialism, co-operation and service to community.

In Chapter 54 (The record of British rule), he positions India as part of a larger whole: ".. the changes that have taken place in India during the last century have been world changes common to most countries in the East and West". He argues that the British "prevented our industrial growth, and thus delayed our political growth, and preserved all the out-of-date feudal and other relics they could find in the country".

Chapter 19 (Communalism Rampant) gives a flavour of the communal tensions in the 1920's, who benefits from them and the British policy of divide and rule. Chapter 56 (Communalism and reaction) is a masterclass in socio-political analysis. He describes the very different attitudes towards the British administration between the Hindu and Muslim intelligentsia after the 1857 revolt, how Syed Ahmad Khan sought to change the standoffish nature of Muslims towards the British, and later how their elite struggled to stick to the Congress' nationalist path and repeatedly got co-opted by the British. He believes - or at least, writes - that communal politics coincides with the interests of landlords and the upper middle class. The landlords generally go along with the British as long as they don't lose their wealth, and between them and the upper middle class try to garner all the electoral seats and government jobs. The average worker and peasant had nothing in common with these sorts of folks beyond his religion, and kept getting deceived into their schemes.

Looking at how the 1940’s played out, one wonders whether Nehru had a blind spot here. Did he miss noticing the primacy of religion for many of these people, and trample all over their refusal to sign up to be part of some grand, unchartered political project? In the 1920’s, a politically united India with its benefits of "Swaraj" was nowhere on the horizon. So did the "feudal princes", "feudal landlords", "political reactionaries", "reactionary communal bodies", "vested interests" (all among the labels he uses for these political opponents), have a common cause with the Liberal Party in wanting to take things slow or avoid change altogether? History tells us that Nehru's political camp had their way, but this autobiography is probably not the place to find an accurate representation of his opponents’ concerns.

Coming back to Chapter 54 (The record of British rule), he compares India to what's happening in contemporary Arabia, Russia, Italy, Turkey, and goes on to demolish any claims of efficiency, competence etc of the British Imperial Civil Service. In his opinion, their orientation itself was wrong. They existed in "service of the Empire, and India came a bad second".

In another great chapter (62: Paradoxes), he uses his criticism of some of Gandhi's views to explain why their worldviews are so different: "To try to understand the complex problems of the modern world by an application of ancient methods and formulae when these problems did not exist, to use out-of-date phrases in regard to them, is to produce confusion and to invite failure. The very idea of private property, which seems to some people one of the fundamental notions of the world, has been an ever-changing one…". Later in the chapter he proposes socialism as a solution to the problems of India (I guess we all know how well that turned out). In all these parts, he connects abstract political ideas beautifully to concrete events (both in India and abroad). While the private property bit is an obvious nod to Marx, he is careful to reject violent overthrow of existing structures, suppression of civil liberties, or a deterministic worldview that frames politics as a pre-determined struggle between classes (the latter would have been laughable to these people who knew the worth of individual personalities and contingent events).

I’ve listed many (gratuitous?) details in these last few paras to justify my impression of Nehru’s nationalism: with the promises of freedom and democracy, with his desire to bring the benefits of modern science and "its offspring" (as he calls it) to India, with his advocacy of socialism, and apprehension of what was going on in the Indian geographical area as part of larger worldwide trends, I think Nehru represents the culmination of a successful transition from old fashioned ethnic or territorial nationalism to "modernity" (which in his times would have meant largely adopting ideas from the West). As history tells us, the territorial boundaries of the eventual Indian nation turned out to be influenced by chance and contingent events, but the ideology that was used to bind these inhabitants together during the freedom struggle remains as the glue. Unities across caste, region and language had to be consciously forged across a large and diverse landscape. And the one place where it just wouldn't take shape, left behind the wreckage of Partition.

Second fiddle to Gandhi
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For all his convictions, zeal and high-sounding proclamations, Nehru (and it seems much of the Congress leadership) is openly subservient to Gandhi when it comes to any kind of mass political agitation. He is in awe of Gandhi and has great personal respect for him, despite many ideological differences. It’s hard to say whether Nehru’s admiration of Gandhi is because he met Gandhi when he was fairly young (27), or because Gandhi chose him as a protege and encouraged his political career. Writing about Gandhi's intimate connect with the Indian masses (Chapter 27: Thunder in the air), ".. he has repeatedly toured India and got to know every bit of the vast country .. I do not think any other human being has ever travelled about India as much", and ".. in this way he gathered his unique knowledge of India and her people, and in this way also scores of millions got to see him and came into personal touch with him". This position of subordination to Gandhi continues through to the negotiations after the Salt March, both in London and Delhi (Chapter 34: Delhi Pact and Chapter 38: Round Table Conference), where he admits that they often let him bear the burden of making the big decisions.

Non-violence and violence
-----------------------------------
The decade of 1920s all the way to the Dandi March in 1930 is quite eventful (this roughly coincides with Nehru's 30's). Nehru gets to witness Gandhi's famous Satyagraha techniques from up close: from the aborted Non-Cooperation Movement of 1921 to the high point that was the Dandi March. In 1921, he is just happy to have an effective method of resistance, with a bonus that it made them feel more ethical and self-righteous than anyone who would oppose them. But the optimism lasted only a short while, as the Chauri Chaura violence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauri_Chaura_incident) put an end to that movement. In Chapter 12 (Non-violence and the doctrine of the sword), Nehru expresses his disappointment about the effectiveness of this approach. His own experience of getting whacked by the colonial police is described during the visit of the Simon Commission of 1930 (Chapter 25: Experience of Lathi charges): "a feeling of exhilaration that I was physically strong enough to face and bear lathi blows. And a thing that surprised me was that right through the incident, even when I was being beaten, my mind was quite clear and I was consciously analyzing me feelings". Followed the next day by another whacking from a "long lines of cavalry.. galloping down towards us". "Long training and discipline help and I did not raise a hand, except to protect my face from a blow". While Nehru survived spectacularly to tell his tale, the same wouldn't have been true for many Indians of his time.

In Chapter 63 (Conversion or Compulsion), he goes in for an intense interrogation of Gandhi's methods. He admits that it has so far not freed India from British imperialism, and has not been used to remove any social evils, but to India's millions it has given "character, strength and self-reliance - precious gifts without which any progress, political or social, is difficult to achive or retain". He is critical of efforts to equate non-violence with truth and goodness itself. "Violence itself, though bad, cannot be considered intrinsically immoral. There are shades and grades of it…". From there, Nehru gets to the heart of a contradiction that can't have failed to have impressed itself upon people like him: "Violence is the very life-blood of the modern State and social system. Without the coercive apparatus of the State taxes would not be realized, landlords would not get their rents, and private property would disappear". The irony of advocating non-violence to gain control over the monopoly holder of violence - that too a blatantly immoral State - is not lost on Nehru. In this chapter he discusses the need for a coercive state, why power might have to be countered with power, why relations between groups are qualitatively different from relations between individual humans, and so on. This chapter feels timeless.

Through all this, nowhere does Nehru discuss taking up violence as a serious option for him personally. Given his father's lawyer background and his elite upbringing, it wouldn't have been a natural step for him. He mentions many times that his initial outlook to politics was based entirely on his class background ('bourgeoise' or the middle class). In Chapter 18 (My father and Gandhiji), he writes, "Those who believe in terroristic violence are completely out of court in the modern world and are considered ineffective and out of date." And later (Chapter 24: Return to India and plunge back into politics), he offers a bit more reasoning, since he is writing in the aftermath of the death of Bhagat Singh and the harsh British repression that preceded it. "Terrorism usually represents the infancy of a revolutionary urge in a country. That stage passes, and with it passes terrorism as an important phenomenon". He attributes Bhagat Singh's sudden and widespread popularity not to the violent aspect of his actions, but what those actions symbolized: a vindication of "the honour of Lala Lajpat Rai, and through him, of the nation".

Curious omissions
------------------------
It is also during the descriptions of these years that you feel like other popular names get short shrift: Vallabhbhai Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose and Ambedkar to pick some. Regarding Patel, Nehru writes in praise of the Bardoli sayagraha of 1928 (Chapter 24: Return to India and plunge back into politics), "... under the leadership of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. It was gallantly carried through to the admiration of the rest of India…Bardoli became a sign and symbol of hope and strength and victory to the Indian peasant". But beyond straightforward descriptions like this, there is no mention in this book of deeper interactions with any of these personalities. There is some mention of Bose towards the end of book, in the context of internal Congress rivalries and Bose leaving to form his "Forward Bloc". But that's about it. He is furious about Gandhi's fast unto death in 1932. He terms the issue of separate electorate for Backward Classes "a side issue… just a question of electorate"! His telegram to Gandhi during that time sums up his attitude: "... Freedom must be judged by freedom of lowest but feel danger of other issues obscuring only goal".

Religion
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Those last few bits are from Chapter 47 (What is religion?), where he takes on that thorny topic. It is a phenomenal essay both in content and context, in my opinion. Being never religious himself, he would have only encountered it undesirable and degraded forms within the politics of the freedom struggle. Early in his political career (Chapter 10: Non Co-operation), he is miffed at the prominence religious leaders are being given inside this movement: "Much that Moulvies and Maulanas and Swamis and the like said in their public addresses seemed to me most unfortunate. Their history and sociology and economics appeared to me all wrong, and the religious twist that was given to everything prevented all clear thinking"

So it is not surprising that in Chapter 47 (What is religion?), he rails against "organized religion" and in particular its failure to check large atrocities such as, unbelievably, Western Imperialism! He cites the problem of religion meaning different things to different people, provides his own definition of it, whether inner development precedes material wellbeing or vice-versa, whether religion provides a safe anchorage from doubt and mental conflict and so on. These outpourings are provoked by Gandhi's fasts and unusual methods of political mobilization, but Nehru uses them as a starting point to touch upon Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism and Taoism. Astonishingly, he again sidesteps the issue of caste altogether.

Perhaps the following excerpts can shine more light on Nehru's relationship with religion: "I am afraid it is impossible for me to seek harbourage in this way. I prefer the open sea, with all its storms and tempests. Nor am I greatly interested in the after life, in what happens after death. I find the problems of this life sufficiently absorbing to fill my mind". And in Chapter 28 (Independence and After), he is watching from his home in Allahabad the lakhs of people who come for the Kumbh Mela: "How amazingly powerful was that faith which had for thousands of years brought them and their forbears from every corner of India to bathe in the holy Ganga! Could they not divert some of this tremendous energy to political and economic action to better their own lot?" Is it any surprise then that, "India, to whom I had given my love and for whom I had laboured, seemed a strange and bewildering land to me. Was it my fault that I could not enter into the spirit and ways of thinking of my countrymen?" (Chapter 47: What is religion?)

Conclusion
---------------
Despite its length I feel that in this review I've only managed to scratch the surface of what this book could mean to a potential reader. In its central character, in its timespan and the events it encompasses it has the capacity to evoke a wide range of thoughts and feelings, especially among - but not just restricted to - Indians. Its elegant prose with its occasional drops of poetry feels like Nehru deliberately mocking us that there is an embarrassment of riches to be found here, in much the same way anyone invested in understanding India's nationalist movement is bound to discover about it, sooner or later.

Chapters worth reading
------------------------------
Chapter 4: Harrow and Cambridge
Chapter 7: The coming of Gandhiji
Chapter 8: I am externed
Chapter 9: Wanderings among the kisans
Chapter 10: Non Co-operation
Chapter 11: 1921 and the First Imprisonment
Chapter 12: Non-violence and the doctrine of the sword
Chapter 18: My father and Gandhiji
Chapter 19: Communalism Rampant
Chapter 21: In Europe
Chapter 24: Return to India and plunge back into politics
Chapter 25: Experience of Lathi charges
Chapter 27: Thunder in the air
Chapter 28: Independence and After
Chapter 35: Karachi Congress
Chapter 38: Round Table Conference
Chapter 44: Prison Humours
Chapter 45: Animals in Prison
Chapter 47: What is religion?
Chapter 48: The Dual Policy of British Government
Chapter 51: The Liberal Outlook
Chapter 53: India: Old and New
Chapter 54: The record of British rule
Chapter 56: Communalism and reaction
Chapter 61: Desolation
Chapter 62: Paradoxes
Chapter 63: Conversion or Compulsion show less

This is a very beautiful nationalistic treatise written by Jawaharlal Nehru while he was imprisoned in Ahmednagar fort. An impressionistic and romanticised work. The title “Discovery of India” reveals the orientalist nature of the work. Nehru approaches India’s past like an outsider. He wrote this book as his own attempt to “discover” India. What Nehru here was trying to do is to romanticise some part of the past as “the quintessential India”. To determine a cultural identity show more and identify himself with it. The search is for a timeless Indian culture. To rekindle the pride of a generation that suffered under the colonial yoke. The tone used in this book is to look at the Indian civilisation as something that has once been great but is now in degeneration.

I wouldn’t recommend this as a good text on history of India. This must rather be read as a work of literature that gives us interesting glimpses into the Indian past, as something that gives us a glimpse into the mind of a very learned man. show less

I wish I had known about the existence of this book during my school years. History was one of my favourite subjects and reading this simultaneously would have put so many things into perspective for me. While I understand that a sizeable part of the narrative is biased and comes from Nehru’s personal point of view, reading it was a spiffing experience. (Nehru’s enormous vocabulary inspired me to upgrade mine)

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, wrote ‘The Discover show more of India’ during 1942-1945 while incarcerated at Ahmednagar fort. He is a well-read man and it is obvious from the way he used his knowledge of the Vedas, Upanishads, and other available literature at the time of writing the book to bring a unique outlook to India’s freedom struggle. I have always admired our freedom fighters who selflessly dedicated their lives to our people. But I seldom had the opportunity to understand the struggle for freedom through their eyes.

He talks about everything starting from ancient India’s Indus Valley Civilization to the current (the 1940s) struggle for freedom. He goes into detail about religion, politics, art and culture. The most striking part of the book, apart from Nehru’s impeccable vocabulary, is how progressive his ideologies were. He was truly a man born ahead of his time.

I, as someone without any reservations, understand the mixed emotions that the author generates among the people. We blame him for the reservation system. We blame him for the inequalities. I read the book without any prejudice to the best of my ability.

Whether you are a history buff or not, this deserves a reading. It will surely leave an impact on you. If nothing, you will at least be left with knowledge about India’s freedom struggle. I do want to reiterate that this is a first-hand account of events by the author and may not be historically accurate. show less