‘Nehru and the Spirit of India’ by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee: In Nehru’s criticism and defence

Madhavan K Palat

Nehru held that India is blessed with a culture and a spirit which have, in some mysterious way, bound Indians together over the centuries, and Manash Bhattacharjee has pursued this theme with free-ranging commentaries on the Nehruvian themes of Indian modernity, secularity, cultural synthesis and history. He has avoided the economy, socialism and nationalism, perhaps because he does not locate them in the spirit of India; but Nehru did, and, to judge from the nature of the text, the author is likely to be passionately engaged with the problem of nationalism at least.

His first discussion is on how Nehru saw India coping with modernity. It is not always clear whether he is presenting his own views or commenting on Nehru’s. He suggests that modernity was coerced, that it is incomplete, shallow, ambivalent, and immured in historical prejudices. This is a well-worn critique, both on the left and the right; but like the others, he has not told us what the complete version of modernity would look like when freed of contradictions, ambiguity, and the weight of history. Had he reflected on the histories of other countries which consider themselves finished products of the modern, he would have found that they have the same problems as India.

There is an entire body of historical scholarship on the subject of the incomplete revolution in Britain, along with a parallel one on Germany. The Russians have been complaining since the early 19th century that they cannot place Russia anywhere, neither in the East nor the West; in short, they suffer from a stunted modernity, as does India. Perhaps only America is modern because of its unchallengeable power. Its slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and the mass incarceration of the African-Americans are all part of modernity; in which case our caste atrocities, European anti-Semitism, and the antics of the British royal family all fit in comfortably. The problem has not been adequately explored and it is frustrating to witness another round of breast-beating.

Secularity comes next. He charges Nehru with “secular majoritarianism” because he frowned upon the political expression of minority identities. But then Nehru disapproved of it for the Hindu majority community also. The author asserts that Nehru’s secular idea of state discourages community although not religion; but again, Dalits have been constitutionally recognised as a community. He is mesmerised by the Hindus and Muslims as majority and minority communities, he inveighs against the idea of oneness, and offers us the formula of “oneness is premised upon twoness”. Such glibness is to skate perilously close to Jinnah’s two nations; but more importantly, India is home to so many communities, religious, linguistic, caste, and tribal; and the colonial thesis that India consists of only communities and not individuals continues to pursue us. In which case, oneness is many a partial paraphrase of the Nehruvian slogan “unity in diversity”.

The third chapter, on culture, is less a critique and more of a gallop through Nehru’s themes of India’s capacity for cultural absorption and syncretism. The author defends Nehru against a possible charge of essentialising Indian culture, but he does not make good his claim. Instead, he loses his way in a series of random comments on Ghalib, Panini, Al-Biruni, the Zoroastrians, Xuanzang, Ibrahim Adil Shah and a host of others. Kabir, on whom historians have foisted the full burden of the thesis of syncretism in Indian culture, is missing. There is a sense of his never pursuing a point, always of skimming lightly over the surface, and leaving the reader somewhat bewildered.

The last chapter is on history, but it is not quite clear what he is arguing. Perhaps he is not quite comfortable with history; but Nehru did write a lot of history, not merely of India, but also of Classical Antiquity, the Caliphates, Europe, Iran, China, and especially South East Asia.

This is an eminently readable book, fluently written, but highly allusive, touching lightly on many themes, approaching the main door but not entering the edifice as it were, both critiquing and defending Nehru from a position that may be described broadly as the centre-left.