Evolving India

The significance of Jawaharlal Nehru

A Vision of his "Actual" and his "Potential"

PANDIT Jawaharlal Nehru rode on horseback to meet the Cabinet Mission. He had gone in the same way to confer with Lord Wavell a year or so earlier. Gandhi came in a rickshaw; so too did Maulana Abu! Kalam Azad. But Nehru was astride a dappled horse. When I saw him thus in the Indian News Parade I was struck with the significance of the act.

Here was something princely—an old-world nobility made its appearance. Here also was something warriorlike—an adventurous spirit fared forth. Here, again, was something romantic—a dreamer rose above humdrumness and trampled on the mechanically of common life. And here, finally, was man the mental being in full control of animal energy, making the latter's magnificent wildness serve the ends of a far-seeing and ordering urge.

Perhaps this last significance is the most complete. For, Jawaharlal Nehru is pre-eminently the mind-principle in its aspects of lucidity and refinement and idealism. Not that he is mind and nothing else: the vital strength and élan of which the horse is the

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symbol is prominent enough in him, but it is not the master: the master is thought. And this thought is not the dry and abstract speculation of the pure philosopher: it is a warm movement, a visioning activity, an ethical drive—it is the mind of humane civilisation and constructive culture.

You have just to glance at Nehru's face to have a sense of his disposition. The features are very handsome but with no fiashiness—there is nothing of the glamour-boy about him. They have a pensive power. The brow has no ruggedness nor any sudden slope; neither too narrow nor too broad, it is poised and shapely—not indeed easeful, yet showing balance and proportion in its mould of strength. The eyes are bright and mobile but they have a far-away look too, as if whatever dynamic decision he might take carried behind it a great deal of seeing ahead and a large and many-sided consideration, a weighing and piercing of things that are not on the surface nor caught within the passing moment.

A piquant humour is not wanting in the eyes and this is slightly accentuated by certain small irregular curves within the fine arch of the eyebrows, but the piquancy is not unmixed with gentleness and there is nothing sardonic. A touch of self-criticism is also in the gaze, a laughing at his own expense or else a desponding about the gap between desire and achievement. The nose is straight without being bleakly bony, it is the nose of a man of resolution and push as well as understanding penetrativeness_,

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a firm structure and a suave projection distinguish it. The delicately yet not narrowly chiselled sensitive nostrils speak the very opposite of ruthlessness: temporary irritation may be his—assertive rage never.

The mouth is not thin or weak: it is full and has some length, but it is quite free from any suggestion of sensuality or devouringness, though a capacity to appreciate the richness of life, the joyful savor of beautiful things, is clearly indicated—a noble and aristocratic paganism that is rightly guided, kept within graceful limits. The chin is well-formed and substantial, revealing reserves of power and an ability to endure a lot. It is, however, not an aggressive chin: it presents a man who can direct and sustain more than command and jostle.

Yes, the mind of humane civilisation and constructive culture is written all over the face. But there is also something to be read between the lines, so to say. A subtle light seems to play all over, not openly traced in this or that feature, yet forming a general atmosphere in which lives the ensemble of them all. I said "lives", but perhaps the more correct expression would be "exists". For, Nehru is not quite conscious of the subtle atmosphere and he does not explicitly draw upon it. What he does is to stand within its glow without making any effort to recognise and utilise it. He is like a man who feels the sun on his face but has his eyes shut. He cannot help having some sensation of the great

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luminary but he does not see the burning gold nor its far-flung skyey splendour. Between him and that splendour is a veil which, though not utterly opaque> is not accurately translucent either. The true intensity and immensity are never realised: the feel of light that invades him together with the heat is the small "red surmise" born of the luster coming through the skin-cover of the eyelids drawn across the gaze.

The simile of the huge golden sun, centre of the illuminated heavens, becoming that small "red surmise" in front of the head is especially apt in Nehru's case, for he is much governed by the phenomenon of Soviet Russia, the country of the Red Banner. The word "red" has become a mark of the Soviet ideology and this ideology suffuses Nehru's general thought. It strikes him as a glowing thing, a beacon before his eyes: only, he does not know that what he is enamoured of is the outcome of closed eyes and that the reality that lures him in this shape is something different and much greater. What he follows is just an appearance due to a limitation; whatever glory it has is a translation into restricted and diminished and even perverting terms of a magnitude and magnificence which he would behold beyond the Soviet ideology if only somehow the eyes of him broke open.

Nehru's eyes are indeed unopened—inwardly. And the wonder which he does not properly see but whose presence is about him and about his life, can be

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guessed if we go tracing the master-passion of his mind: Freedom. Freedom first came to him in the guise of an education outside his own country. Born in 1889, he spent hardly fourteen years in India before Harrow claimed him. Schooled there, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and got his M. A. and afterwards became Bar-at-Law of the Inner Temple.

He got steeped in Westernism, especially the scientific humanitarian spirit of the modern West. His manners are Western, his tastes are Western, his cast of mind is Western. He is perfectly at home in the air of modern European culture—the culture of individual emancipation, equal rights, daring experimental inquiry, the historical and economic sense, opposition to old customs and conventions, fearlessness towards both the known and the unknown, desire to stand up and fight for a brotherhood of rationalism and socialism. The culmination of the true spirit of this culture seems to him the Soviet Union.

Not that he is a thorough communist or that he fails to realise the various follies and savageries the Soviet Union has committed or the lack of political democracy it exhibits. Still, for its ideal of economic democracy, of concentration on concrete material benefit to each individual, of harnessing all the energies of our normal consciousness to promote a productive and harmonious earth-life delivered from misty escapism, the Soviet Union

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is counted by him the best collective endeavour today of the enlightened philanthropy and dynamic earth-fulfilling culture that are to him essential for Freedom and that he would make his own mind's substance and force.

Side by side with the figure of Freedom which he discerns in the Soviet Union is the figure of it he has followed in India's struggle for independence. In fact, the latter is his most active love. It has led him to serve nine terms of imprisonment—almost half his life! Thrice it has brought him Presidentship of the Congress—a unique honour and responsibility. Westernised though he may be, and also Soviet-coloured, India and India alone calls him with the most intimate, the most imperative voice.

His European education saves him from being narrowly and rigidly Indian: his horizon is wide as the world and he has an international bent. But India is to him the most precious part of the world. Nor is this so because he happens to be an Indian by birth. It is essentially so because he feels there is in India a potentiality, which no other country can equal, of living from the deep places of one's nature, a potentiality of the best Freedom—the freedom from evil. And both the sign and content of that feeling are in the relation he bears to Gandhi.

In accepting Gandhi, despite several differences of viewpoint, as his leader in the national struggle, he made not only a political choice. Gandhi

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stands in the main for five things that exceed politics: simplicity, honesty, non-violence, sexual abstinence and, most important of all, faith in God. Simplicity comes without the least effort to Nehru himself. Though bred in the lap of bounteous fortune, he' never had any lust for possessions; he wants very little for his own needs and it is this innate simplicity as well as the innate generosity of him that spurred him, when his father died without a will, to put his whole inherited wealth at the disposal of his mother and sisters, asking them to consider themselves the real owners of Anand Bhawan and all that Motilal had left and to think of him as only a trustee and adviser!

As for honesty, it has been an obstacle in the path of his politics: he can never stoop to the shifts and meannesses and trickeries that go mostly with them. He will never set a great cause below personal ambition and he is ready always to see his opponent's point of view. As Krishna Kripalani puts it: "He tolerates dissent and obliges enemies, virtues fatal to a politician." Non-violence is not altogether native to him: he has a quick temper and a fighting spirit and has often openly confessed that under certain circumstances he would fling ahimsa to the winds. But he has not at all any trace of brutishness or selfish aggression. His just and generous and refined intelligence turns away from them and induces profound sympathy with Gandhi's curb over animal anger and attack.

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Gandhi's obsession with the "sinfulness" of sex is foreign to him, but that is because he is singularly free from sexual urgencies. Gandhi was sex-ridden in early life; Nehru deems sex a healthy thing and assimilable into culture: it is for him no tyrant and his natural leaning is towards much rarer enjoyments and exhilarations. So Gandhi's chastity, in spite of its too ascetic note, is not out of tune with Nehru's disposition.

The religious cry, however, is found difficult by Nehru to adjust to his own mind: Gandhi's God is unacceptable to this Marxist—and yet what draws him so deeply to Gandhi is a stupendous unknown quantity, something uncharted by Marx and unanalyzed by science and inadequately covered by moral principles. He compares Gandhi's influence to that of Socrates, and thereby confesses his own intuition of the metaphysical and "daemonic" touch. That intuition, fundamentally, binds him to Gandhi for all the empirical mould his mind has acquired from Western education and Soviet influence.

That intuition is also not unnatural to him: the real source of his extreme fineness of being is nothing else than metaphysical and "daemonic". The cultured enlightened mind in command of the vital energy is in itself a beautiful force; yet the super-charm and super-elevation it achieves in Nehru derives from what the mystics know as the secret soul in contact with the Divine

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and it is this soul which gives the subtle light seeming to play on his face.

Nehru is a mystic whose surface is unconscious of his depths! Such a statement would probably startle him the most. But even apart from his sense of a stupendous X behind Gandhi, he has not omitted to record en passant his own unfathomable yearnings. In The Discovery of India, his latest book and a worthy rival to his Autobiography and Glimpses of World History, he writes that, though much in the Marxist philosophical outlook he would accept without demurring, almost unawares a vague idealist approach would creep in, "something rather akin to the Vedanta approach". And he adds significantly: "It was not a difference between mind and matter but rather of something that lay beyond mind."

There is another hint too: his response in the midst of the dust and strife of the world to the image of the Buddha seated on the lotus flower above mortal passion and desire. He asks himself if this tranquillity can be reconciled with action and says: "Behind those still unmoving features there is passion and an emotion, strange and more powerful than the passions and emotions we have known. His eyes are closed but some power of the spirit looks out of them and a vital energy fills the frame." Some peace and power from beyond the mind are what he aspires after when the surface of him is not too insistent.

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It is also a sense of more than natural presences that is aroused in him by the loveliness and grandeur of Nature as well as the perfection of art and poetry. And most of all the spiritual unknown is at the back of the intense hunger he mentions in his Autobiography to visit "Manasarovar, the wonder-lake of Tibet, and snow-covered Kailas nearby"—two of the holiest spots of Hinduism. "I dream of the day", writes Nehru, "when I shall wander about the Himalayas and cross them to reach that lake and mountain of my desire." The words are as of a Pilgrim of Eternity who has lost himself in Time.

It is a pity that a man gifted with a highly developed soul should fail to wake up to his own destiny. The result is an inexplicable sadness that is ever a shadow at Nehru's heels. All who have watched him in private have remarked, as his sister Krishna Hutheesing testifies in With No Regrets, a brooding disconsolate look stealing often into his face as if the dreamer in him who peered into the distance had an unearthly longing which nothing could satisfy.

In action he forgets his sadness and his alert intelligence banishes it with a vast variety of interests and much constructive thought. But he loses it most in the company of children. Not even Gandhi is so completely a child among them, romping about, playing and enjoying himself every bit as much as the children themselves. Perhaps in their company he gets somehow into contact

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with the "clouds of glory" which Wordsworth saw them "trailing" and which the soul in Nehru is calling so keenly and yet so futilely his outer intelligence to realise.

The secret sadness which is a sign of the disequilibrium between the inner and the outer is not due only to the scientific materialist philosophy Nehru's Western education has landed him in. No doubt, that philosophy inclines him to suspect mysticism of leading away from life here and now. His attitude, however, is not altogether biased. He has enough historical sense to see that ancient Indian culture was mystical and at the same time to admit: "The basic background of that culture was not one of other-worldliness or world-worthlessness. In India we find during every period when her civilisation bloomed, an intense joy in fife and nature, a pleasure in the act of living, the development of art and music and literature and song and dancing and painting and the theatre, and even a highly sophisticated inquiry into the sex relation. It is inconceivable that a culture or view of life based on other-worldliness or world-worthlessness could have produced all these manifestations of vigorous and varied life. Indeed it should be obvious that any culture that was basically other-worldly could not have carried on for thousands of years .... I should have thought that Indian culture, taken as a whole, never emphasized the negation of life though some of its

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philosophies did so: it seems to have done so much less than Christianity." (The Discovery of India, pp. 82-3.)

As for the existence of God, his Marxist penchant makes him turn down the experiences of the mystics as probably phantasms of the self-deluded imagination; he chooses to admire only the passion connected with them for truth and for practical endeavour: "What interests me is the approach, which was not authoritarian or dogmatic, but was an attempt to discover for oneself what lay behind the external aspects of life." Nevertheless, a veiled instinct within him keeps on saying: "Whether we believe in God or not, it is impossible not to believe in something, whether we call it a creative life-giving force or vital energy inherent in matter which gives it its capacity for self-movement and change and growth, or by some other name, something that is as real, though elusive, as life is real when contrasted with death. Whether we are conscious of it or not, most of us worship at the invisible altar of some unknown god and offer sacrifice to it—some ideal, personal, national or international: some distant objective that draws us on though reason itself may find little substance in it; some vague conception of the perfect man and a better world. Perfection may be impossible of attainment, but the daemon in us, some vital force, urges us on and we tread that path from generation to generation." (Ibid., p. 625.)

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Clearly here is a very strong pressure of the spiritual inner on the pragmatic outer. What is wanted is a knock of help that might break through the scientific materialist carapace. If the knock has never come, the fault must lie with whoever has most influenced Nehru. Paradoxically enough, the sadness in him of unfulfilment must be attributed equally to his Western education and to the leader he has accepted in India as the truest Indian— Gandhi!

Weighed in the ultimate spiritual balance, Gandhi is at once a promise and a disappointment. He has the obvious orientation of the great mystics, the mighty yogis, but their essential realisation is not his. None of the five main points of his gospel guarantees the mystical experience: they are no more than a preparation for it. He is profoundly moral and religious, yet he does not plunge with the absolute abandon necessary into the Eternal and the Infinite, he has not achieved union with the Cosmic Consciousness and the Transcendental Perfection. The Immortal In-dweller that the soul is and that leaps utterly towards the Divine does not stand naked in Gandhi for all his austerity.

It is somewhere behind him instead of in his midst. It acts with an indirect power. And that is why Nehru, moved though he is in his very foundations by the power Gandhi strives to transmit, is left unawakened on his surface. There is not that in Gandhi which could dissolve Marxist Materialism

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and Western Pragmatism at one burning blow. A Buddha, if Nehru could meet him in the flesh, might do it; so too might a Ramakrishna or a Viveka-nanda; and at this very moment Raman Maharshi can and, more than all of them, Sri Aurobindo. For, like Nehru himself, Sri Aurobindo was educated in the West and has assimilated all that Westernism can give, and so can reach most effectively the Westernised being of Nehru and yet reach it with the whole bulk of Indian spirituality plunging with a unique dynamic direction in it to break wide a gate for the soul to emerge and make life flower in full.

But Gandhi has not the Moksha, the soul's liberation into the limitless glory of God which the Rishis sang of—Moksha in one form or another, in its bearing on the Impersonal Absolute or the Personal Lord. To a man whose master-passion is Freedom, nothing short of this supreme freedom from mortality can utter the truth towards which he is groping. And without it the earthly paradise which he imagines he glimpses through the Soviet experiment will always have insidious snakes and can never bring him to his goal, for how can there be a perfect brotherhood of men unless what is divinely One in all flowers forth? Without it the independence of India which he has always craved can never bring a sense of fulfilment; for the hidden magnet to his deep self is the search by India of the soul's light above fetters and frailties and not merely of her body's Swaraj.

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So Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru falls short of his highest possibilities and lives with a certain self-ignorance and discontent. But his achievement is still splendid. And though the steed the Vedic Rishis spoke of in their hymns as marching towards a divine dawn has not openly been Nehru's mount, an unforgettable picture full of meaning he remains as he rides on horseback to his country's conferences. And to the symbolism we have read in the act, one more shade must be added. That horse is a Pegasus though without wings; for, if Nehru is no poet Hafting into fire and ether, he is surely a prose-writer with an inspired pace, ranging far and wide on terra firma, and his books have value as literature no less than as personal narratives, political studies, historical surveys and sociological discussions.

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