Complete biography of Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru

PUNDIT JAWAHARLAL NEHRU has made any description of his own personality comparatively simple by publishing one of the most revealing books of modern times, which tells us the story of his own life. It is a natural temptation, therefore, for one who is writing about him to draw largely from the book itself. But while I shall not fail to make use of what he has himself written, I shall seek at the same time to add other features from my own recollections.

Yet, before doing so, I would wish to dwell for a moment on the Autobiography itself, which proved to be an amazing success. It was issued from the press in London in April, 1936, and by August of the same year the eighth impression had been printed off. These first sales were mainly in England, and it was there that its great reputation was made. The equally large sales in India came later. New editions are still being published, which shows that the book will continue to live when others are forgotten.

It was the entire frankness of what was written, together with the profound interest of the story he told that gained Jawaharlal his very large and important reading public. He had the great advantage of being able to speak to the intellectual classes-especially at the Universities-in the very phrases and terms which they themselves used. He wrote as one of themselves. He told

Englishmen exactly what they wanted to know about India in his own transparently clear style, and made them feel that India was not merely a land of saints and mystics but also of quite human and fallible people like himself, who were definitely lined up to fight against Hitler and Mussolini along with any freedom-loving Englishman, if only the latter would allow the same freedom to India that he demanded for himself.

“Here’s a man we can understand,” was the remark that a young civilian made on his first voyage out to India. “He’s one of ourselves after all, and talks to us in our own language.”

Probably more was accomplished in a few months by this one volume to swing round liberal opinion in the West than had been accomplished by the many years of political struggle that had gone before.

The remarkable photographs in the book proved to be a revelation to the ordinary reader. The frontispiece of Pundit Motilal Nehru, the father of the author, looking in his “toga”, like someone out of the ancient Roman Empire; the face of the author himself, showing the markedly strong and clear- cut character that lies behind it; above all, perhaps, the tender portraits of the mother, wife and daughter of the author, disclosing a perfect refinement mingled with true womanly courage-all these tell their own story. Every English reader, as he turned over the pages, became in
his heart of hearts ashamed that persons such as these had been obliged to go to prison in order to make their voices heard. Thus the portraits gave rise to some very painful thinking. They indicated that all was not right in India. This last factor had very deeply touched the women of England, who had recently gained, by a hard struggle, their own political rights. The women’s influence in England at that point in the time was no less important than that of the men, and their full weight was being thrown more and more on the side of Indian freedom.

One of Jawaharlal Nehru’s most bitter opponents in the United Provinces, a diehard and a reactionary, paid him a compliment, which is well worth quoting at this point. For it sums up a great deal.

“Whatever,” he said, “we may think of young Nehru’s socialistic doctrines and his Bolshevist ideas, the efficient way in which he handled the Allahabad Municipality, as Chairman, was beyond all praise.”

This practical efficiency in all he undertook and his clean contempt for shoddy work, won him esteem from those who disliked his politics. The same people had also admired the out­spokenness with which he had been ready at all times to acknowledge faults of character and weakness of purpose within himself and others. This feature in his character won him universal respect.

Among the multitudes of his own people, who loved him with a devotion second only to that of Mahatmaji himself, the same quality of supreme honesty spoke for very much. It endeared him to them. But along with this, the conviction that he has never hesitated for a moment to suffer with them, and on their behalf, speaks for even more. In the United Provinces there grew, year by year, a simple loyalty of devotion towards him among the villagers that was absolute in character.

With a certain amount of dry humour, he recounts the story of the way in which he tried to train the ignorant villagers of his own province in the pure doctrine of non-violence, which they persistently failed to understand.

“What would you do,” he asked a group of village leaders, “if you saw me taken prisoner before your very eyes and then handcuffed by the police?”

“We would rush in and rescue you,” they replied at once in chorus.

“No, no,” said Jawaharlal, “that’s just what you mustn’t do! You must keep perfectly calm and quiet. You mustn’t move a step.”

They stared at him with a singularly puzzled look and he patiently continued, telling them that even if they saw him beaten with lathis, they were not to use any violence in return. For these things were only to be expected.

“But we couldn’t bear it,” they shouted.

“You’ve got to bear it,” was the answer.

And so the lesson in Ahimsa would have to begin all over again until it was learnt by heart.

The greatest strain of all came, in the United Provinces, when his own aged mother was injured by the police. Jawaharlal himself was in prison at the time.

He frankly acknowledges, in his book, that if he had been on the spot, his Ahimsa might have been put to too severe a strain!

This deeply touching faith that the villagers reposed in him was demonstrated in many ways.

At the first, on his return from London and Cambridge, they had little chance of coming into very close contact with him; for he was incessantly occupied with various city engagements in Allahabad and also with his lawyer’s work at the Bar. But from the moment when he gave himself up, heart and soul, to the Non-Cooperation Movement and placed himself with absolute loyalty and devotion under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, this old life of his began to be changed. The villagers now were made more and more his chief concern.

He worked with them, lived with them, and thus learnt to understand their tragic struggle against overwhelming odds. He knew them now at close quarters. So he won their hearts and they won his.

The book that he wrote gives many touching indications of this, from which the following passage is being quoted: “There they were, these people, looking up with their shining eyes, full of affection, with generations of suffering and poverty behind them, and still pouring out their gratitude and love, and asking for little in return, except fellow- feeling and sympathy. It was impossible not to feel humbled and awed by this abundance of affection and devotion.”

Mainly on account of his personal leadership and that of his own devoted companions, the Kisan, or Peasant Movement, in the United Provinces become strongly organised and powerful. The only province that came near it was Bihar, where Rajendra Prasad had won a similar confidence among his own countrymen.

It is of the utmost importance to realise the radical change that came over the whole Congress Movement since the leadership was given into the hands of Mahatma Gandhi. Before that time even leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and his father thought in English, spoke in English, regarded the Congress itself as an organ of English opinion, which had to deal chiefly with what was called “Educated India” and its disabilities. But just at the crucial moment, when everything was at stake and a leader for all India was needed, Mahatma Gandhi came to the front in such a manner that he united all the progressive forces in a compact body and received the whole­hearted allegiance not only of Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, but also of men like C. R. Das, J. M. Sen Gupta, Dr. Ansari, Maulana Muhammad Ali, Madan Mohan Malaviya, and others, whose outlook hitherto had been confined for the most part to the rights of citizenship for the small educated minority to which they belonged. The ninety percent of village India had only come indirectly into their political horizon.

But Mahatma Gandhi, living himself the life of a poor peasant, soon changed all that and brought those who sought his political support face to face with realities. The village now became the centre of the picture: its needs were India’s needs; its language became India’s language.

Jawaharlal Nehru was among the very first to recognise this drastic change that was coming over the whole scene. He began to work out, with some compunction, what it would mean in detail to his own manner of living. Quite inevitably it would imply giving up many expensive habits and coming nearer to the level of those for whom he was now destined to work day and night.

It is easy to see from his autobiography how at first he half resisted some of these practical conclusions. But certain public experiences hastened the process, as did also the golden opportunity of seeing a great deal of Mahatma Gandhi during those days. No one could have been with him at that time, in his entire physical exhaustion combined with amazing spiritual strength, without searching himself through and through.

But there was an honest revolt also, which this book by Jawaharlal clearly indicates. There was in him no blind worship. For he did a “modern,” with no like whatever for the extreme ascetic practices of Mahatma Gandhi. Mere fasts and penances did not attract him. They only irritated him, when they took the strange forms that mediaeval saints practised. For they seemed to him to be irrational. Thus his twentieth century mind had prevented him hitherto from carrying out to the full many of the things, which seemed to appeal with irresistible force to Mahatma Gandhi.

And yet the massive simplicity of Gandhi drew Jawaharlal all the while nearer and nearer to his own standard. He quotes more than once that striking phrase where Gandhi describes his aim as “Complete identification with the poorest of mankind, longing to live no better than they.”

If a sheer record were taken of all that Jawaharlal suffered from the time the Non-Cooperation was started, it would be seen to come not far short of Gandhi’s own extreme privations which brought him so close to the hearts of the poor people.

No one, for instance, can fail to be struck by the way in which the moment Jawaharlal was set free from prison he was at once courting another arrest by some action which he could not avoid if he were be true to his own principles. To give an example, the Bihar earthquake happened soon after he was set free. So, after making a challenging speech in Calcutta directly after his release, he took the next train and was on the spot, toiling night and day among the terror stricken village people. Only then, when he has done all he possibly could, did he return home. “I got back,” he writes, “dead tired after my tour. Ten strenuous days had made me look ghastly and my people were surprised at my appearance. I tried to begin writing my report, but sleep overcame me. So I spent at least twelve out of the next is twenty-four hours in sleep. Next day, Kamala and I had just finished tea, when a car drove up and a police officer alighted. I knew immediately my time had come.”

It was a hard doctrine, this “complete identification with the poorest of mankind,” which Mahatmaji had laid down as the true “democratic test.” Yet who can doubt that those who come nearest to it in practice are able finally to win the loyalty and love of the masses of simple village people in India, who judge by deeds not words?

“Whether Gandhiji,” writes Jawaharlal, “is a democrat or not, he does represent the peasant masses of India; he is the quintessence of the conscious and subconscious will of those millions. It is perhaps something more than representation: for he is the idealised personification of those vast millions. Of course, he is not the average peasant. A man of the keenest intellect, of fine feeling and good taste, wide vision; very human, and yet essentially the ascetic, who has suppressed his passions and emotions, sublimated them and directed them in spiritual channels; a tremendous personality, drawing people to himself like a magnet, and calling out fierce loyalties and attachments-all this so utterly unlike and beyond a peasant. And yet withal he is the great peasant, with a peasant’s blindness to some aspects of life. But India is peasant India; and so he knows his India well and reacts to her lightest tremors, and gauges a situation accurately and almost instinctively, and has a knack of acting at the psychological moment.”

In every phrase of this remarkably accurate description of Mahatma Gandhi we can see how the author was attra­cted by the extraordinary appeal that Gandhi made to all the leading spirits in India who came within the close range of his personal influence and were ready to respond to its call.

“I have been,” writes Jawaharlal in another remarkable passage about himself, “a queer mixture of the East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere. Perhaps my thoughts and approach to life are more akin to what is called Western than Eastern, but India clings to me, as she does to all her children, in innumerable ways. I cannot get rid of that past inheritance of my recent acquisitions. They are both part of me, and, though they help me in both

the East and the West, they create in me a feeling of spiritual loneliness not only in public activities, but in life itself. I am a stranger and alien in the West. I cannot be of it. But in my own country also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.”

Yet out of all this inner conflict there came the power that made him the one great driving force in national India, second only to Mahatma Gandhi. His attitude towards the latter oscillated but always came back to the same centre. He was severely critical, yet at the same time won over to admiration and affection. He was continually repelled, and yet he realised that in the very things that jar upon him lay the secret of Gandhi’s power with the vast multitudes of simple village people.

On one salient point there was no difference between them. For them both realised that only by infinite sacrifice and suffering could India’s freedom be attained. And Jawaharlal knew absolutely that this one frail man, who so often put his own life at stake, had won his way to India’s heart as no one else had ever done, and that he alone could lead India forward to the final goal of Swaraj.

This increasing consciousness of the fate of the multitudes, in India, of poverty stricken people had also drawn Jawaharlal Nehru irresistibly towards what he calls “Socialism.” But in using this general word he was no doctrinaire, and had nothing but contempt for “arm­chair” economists, who sought to gain a cheap notoriety by using catch phrases. He knew intimately the difference between Indian conditions and those of the West. What changes had to be made in India had to be made from the standpoint of Indian economy, not that of Europe.

Yet, while he recognised these practical differences, he was desperately in earnest about the immediate need in India of revolution in the prevailing economic and social system. Whether it was in the petty Indian States, or in the large landlord areas, or in the mill centers, the concentration of arbitrary power in the hands of a single person, who for all practical purposes had powers of life and death over thousands of helpless people, became intolerable to him just in the same way that the imperialism of foreign rule had become intolerable also. He had seen this vision of the suffering peasant in India and other lands, and in a socialist co-operative endeavour, whereby the land and the instruments of production are placed at the service of the community, he saw the way out of this inveterate evil.

He quotes the moving lines of the American poet, E. Markham, from “The Man with the Hoe”:

“Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,

The emptiness of ages on his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.

“Through this dread shape tile suffering ages look.

Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop,

Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,

Plundered, profaned and disinherited,

Cries protest to the powers that made the world,

A protest that is also prophecy.”

Strangely enough, at this very point, Jawaharlal, having gone thus far with Mahatma Gandhi, and having half accepted his hard doctrine of “complete identification with the poorest of mankind,” parted company with him as to the methods to be employed for bringing the evils to an end.

Mahatmaji, on his side, was willing to allow the rajah and the money­lender, and the Zamindar and the mill-owner to go on with their personal rule over those who were economically in their power provi­ded the one religious quality of divine charity (which he would call Ahimsa) could be introduced into their despotic sway and thus cause it to be­come, a “Rama Rajya” – a Kingdom of God upon earth. But Jawaharlal, on the other side, could see no lasting remedy in such a personal change in the heart of a single rajah, or Zamindar or mill-owner. He regarded the whole system of despotic power, whether brought about by capitalism or imperialism, as an evil in itself. He believed that some form of co-operative ownership of land and of tile instruments of production must in the end lead to more equitable and stable results.

Thus the soul of Jawaharlal was vexed within him when he saw Mahatma Gandhi holding out the hand of cordial friendship and even partnership to those whose very function in society he believed to be destructive of elementary justice. Gandhiji, on the other hand, had his eyes fixed on the inner convers­ion of the rajah and the landlord and the money­lender and the capitalist which would lead them to a voluntary surrender of their power.

Later of course, he went on to become the first Prime Minister of independent India, delivering the famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech at midnight, on August 15, 1947. Widely regarded as the architect of modern India, Jawaharlal Nehru died in May, 1964.

Looking back over what I have now written, I can see that I have attempted an impossible task in trying to compress into one brief article the life story of one of the greatest personalities of the modern age. Nevertheless, if I have left a vivid picture of the inner struggle of the man, I shall be content.