The Sun and The Rainbow

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU AND MODERN INDIA

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, passed away on May 27, 1964 in his seventy-fourth year. What India has lost may best be suggested by asking a question he would himself have loved to hear: "Was he seventy-four years old or seventy-four years young?" Nehru never outgrew the happy audacity that was his in the days of his youth. I Ie was at one time the living symbol of young India, and years did not change that aspect of him. This Prime Minister of ours was the country's sole Minister who was always in his prime. For, he represented India in her modernity. It is because modern India flamed in his being that, even when his hair was sparse and white and his face had a drawn expression, we still felt youth to be incarnate in him. Nehru had a face with the light of the future on it. The great new ideas that have been springing up in our day and whose fulfilment is yet to come glowed in his eyes — and what else ever is it to be young?

But we must emphasise that Nehru, no matter how westernised by his education at Harrow and Cambridge, was an Indian; and his having been seventy-four years young was a realisation, in his own individuality's terms, of the Indian way of youth. The happy audacity we have spoken of is not essentially an exuberance of the life-force, an overflowing physical energy, but the elan of high ideals, idealism endeavouring to mould and govern physical and vital existence by means of principles sought within some eternal order of things, so that a radiant smile of something imperishable and immortal, something Godlike that never ages, begins to work in the world's affairs and dynamise the world's nature: this is how the true Indian is happily audacious and does not grow old.

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And it is to be noted that the taste of idealism's elixir vitae is not of a conservative fixity of principles. To oppose the permanent to the changing is similar to setting up the One in antagonism to the Many — facile faults into which thinkers, Indians not excepted, frequently stumble. But genuine Indian culture is free from them. India has not really sat navel-gazing, entranced in a superhuman infinite Unity and Immutability, oblivious of the multicoloured million-mooded play of space and time. She was in her most typical periods never anti-life And Nehru himself was well aware of this. His own words are there in The Discovery of India:

"The basic background of Indian culture was not one of other-worldness or world-worthlessness. In India we find, during every period when her civilization bloomed an intense joy in life 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-worldiness or world-worthless-ness 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 philosophies did so: it seems to have done so, much less than Christianity."

Yes, the Indian way of being young does not cast a pallor on life's changing face. Although never giving priority to the life-force as such and always taking its stand in the deep awareness of supreme ideals that cannot be corrupted for passing or personal ends, it is keenly conscious of the onward pressure of the world-movement, it is full of the sense of man's adven ture through the years, it is ever on the qui-vive for the new and the undreamt-of. The future is its passion no less than the past, evolution is its delight no less than the unchange able Atman, modernism is its inspiration no less than the

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"beauty of ancient days". Nehru, more than any other Indian on his own level and within his own sphere, combined the spirit of experiment and discovery and the eager look ahead with the idealistic spirit that cannot be bought or bartered or made subservient to selfish interests: that is why he stood out among his colleagues as the representative of the youth that is Indian, the youth that all should cultivate.

Two points, however, are to be observed when we look back at Nehru with pleasure and pride. They spring from the paradox that he was even more young in his sixties and seventies than he had been in his twenties and thirties: in other words, laterty his idealistic modernity, shedding some early biases, was brighter, wider, deeper, and he was living out more and more the Indian youthfulness afire in him. Nehru grew up side by side with the Soviet Union: his adult life synchronised with the development of Leninism and Stalinism, and it was very much coloured by the Marxist doctrine as embodied in contemporary Russia. He was for years impressed by the Stalinist regime because he identified it with the opposite of things he most condemned: capitalism, racialism, imperialism. Later he was no less an enemy of these things. But it is significant that in 1949, on the eve of his sixtieth birthday, he went on a mission of goodwill to the U.S.A., a country whose whole economy ran counter to the Marxist collectivism of the Soviet Union. The mission could never have come about if he had not realised, as he had scarcely done some years before, that countries which were not unstained by a history of capitalist, racialist and imperialist evils could still be, on account of some radical outbalancing virtue, leaders of progress and contribute immensely to the flowering of all that India has considered the finest in man.

Nehru did not stop keeping in his mind a shining picture of Marxism. Yet he came to feel acutely that a country which called itself Marxist and had, to a surface-view, abolished economic exploitation, established racial equality and denounced all attempts at turning Asia into Europe's colonial empire, need

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not be more productive of essential life-values than countries which formed a bloc against it. Seeing the flaws which could not be slurred over in those countries, he refused to let India be hustled into any bloc, and stuck to a neutrality waiting on future events; but his awakened sense of the greater good on the whole in the western bloc was evident. "It is our aim," he said in America, "to keep friendly contacts with everybody." He, however, added: "Naturally we are bound to be closer to some nations than others. For example, we consult with the nations of the Commonwealth." Although this consulting was declared, in the very next clause, to diminish by no jot the independence of India's foreign policy, the willingness to be bound closer to Commonwealth nations which were quite antagonistic in feeling to Marxist Russia was a fact characteristic of Nehru approaching sixty and unthinkable of Nehru reaching forty. Still more characteristic and so far unthinkable was his pronouncement: "There is the growing tendency to centralization and regimentation which is a danger to individual freedom. Soviet Russia is the extreme example of centralization. I would not like to limit freedom for any nation." Here we had in the clearest terms the recognition by Nehru that what glittered was not always what he took to be the gold of Marxism and also that far more precious than anything else in a nation's life was individual freedom and that those countries where individual freedom was not lost were, in spite of all their faults, more worthy of consultation and friendly relation than one which claimed to have got rid of capitalism, racialism and imperialism and yet had reduced the individual human being to a robot.

In brief, while Nehru had not outgrown his rose-spectacled hope for a perfect society through Marxism, he no longer could be tempted to equate the distinction he drew between Marxism and Capitalism with the distinction between Stalin's Russia and Truman's America, much less between Stalin's Russia and Attlee's Britain. This breaking of an old association and throwing of the value of individual freedom into relief

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was of first-rate importance, and made Nehru face the future with an idealistic modernity all the younger from the Indian angle of vision.

We may add that subsequent world-events showed the same increased youthfulness. Terrible for Nehru was the time when Mao Tse-tung took violent possession of Tibet. The act appeared to contradict all that his representatives had erroneously pictured to him of the new mentality abroad in China. Still believing in this picture he found himself sorely taxed with the problem of adopting the correct attitude. It was impossible not to protest. But what he felt — mistakenly, in most eyes — to be more crucial questions of international relationship prevented the full condemnation that was due. All the same, the true Indian in Nehru came to the fore when in spite of Mao's fury he threw India wide open to the Dalai Lama and his fellow-refugees. The political asylum offered to them was never withdrawn and the principle of it never abjured. Mao did not forgive Nehru this assertion of the right of individuals to maintain their freedom of mind and to keep intact in the hospitable arms of India the vision of their deepest heart.

Significant too is the clear pronouncement on Russia under Khrushchev in comparison with the state of things during Stalin's rule. Nehru declared that now there was some welcome relaxation of monolithic control. Stalinism was thus criticised once more and condemned in retrospect. Finally, there was the spontaneous turn mainly towards Britain and America for military aid when the Red Chinese struck across India's Himalayan borders and shattered for good whatever illusions had lingered in Nehru about Communism being inevitably non-imperialist.

The second point to be observed about his increase in youthful Indianism relates to issues beyond the political. It was principally in connection with them that he could hope to deserve fully to be reckoned as what, to his extreme pleasure, he had been widely called by America in one phrase

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or another during his 1949 tour: quintessential India of the twentieth century. Idealism, holding that there is a sense of the "ought" in our consciousness, a sense as of some supreme Law which is not born of mere expediency and is more than a mere generalisation from facts of Nature — idealism with its high ethical sense must look for a sanction to right conduct in nothing short of what India has termed the spark of divinity in man. A common tendency of our time is to make ethics a branch of Freudian psychology or Marxist sociology. But these are reachings after empirical science, attempts at description of mental happenings or social relationships. They cannot imply any norm, standard or ideal. As a reviewer of Amber Blanco White's Ethics for Unbelievers has aptly reaffirmed, ethics is rooted in "values", not in a charting out of the way things occur. To give a description, Freudian or Marxist, of "what is" can never yield those key terms of ethics, right, duty, obligation, good, ought. An empirical study of behaviour and a list of inductions from observed facts are utterly impotent to explain or justify the normative character of idealism. Idealism such as Nehru felt and advocated cannot admit of a purely natural explanation: it must seek both its motive force and its sanction in a Divine Being and can act only by virtue of this Divine's Being's representative scintilla in the depths of our humanity — a soul that functions with an instinct of divinity and that, even in letting itself be driven by considerations which it knows to be undivine, recognises the "ought" from which it deviates. Not that the human consciousness can always in its idealistic operation claim possession of the infallible divine rule; but the feeling that there is a supreme Reality faultlessly guided by its own Truth-light and that we are ethical inasmuch as we strain to express this Reality, must be present if idealism is to have any meaning. In other words, genuine idealism implies, however inexplicitly, a world-view whose utter consummation would be the mystical experience, the direct God-vision and God-realisation such as, in historical India, have been most powerfully recorded in the Vedas,

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the Upanishads and the Gita. It was high time Nehru saw this — not only because he had arrived at an age which historical India had regarded as eminently suitable for filling oneself with the sense of the Divine but also because if there was any Indian with a disposition of the best "sattwic" and Brahmin type, precisely made, as it were, for turning to supreme spiritual truths in the twentieth century it was our Prime Minister for all his lack of concern with what is popularly labelled as religion. In fact, this very lack of concern would distinguish, on the negative side, the spiritual aspiration of our modern age that had come out into the light by discarding the fears and fanaticisms and ascetic refusals of the old religions. And, on the positive side, could any contemporary political figure surpass Nehru in innate refinement and spontaneous nobility, in a humanistic, international and forward-looking attitude profoundly in tune with a secret oneness underlying the divided world?

Even in the early days when the stamp of Marxism was sharp upon his intellect, signs were present that pointed towards the final mark of the idealistic modernity which would be true Indianism today. There could not be a keener contrast in both temperament and habit than between Nehru the complex and free-thinking Marxist and Gandhi the simpli-cist, the primitivist, the religionist, the extreme Tolstoyan. And yet what drew Nehru to Gandhi was a stupendous unknown quantity, something uncharted by Marx and unanalysed by science and inadequately covered by merely moral principles. He compared Gandhi's influence to that of Socrates, and thereby confessed his own intuition of the metaphysical and "daemonic" touch. Even apart from his sense of a mighty X behind Gandhi, he has not omitted to report en passant his own unfathomable yearnings. In The Discovery of India, published in 1946, he has written 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 has

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added significantly: "It was not a difference between mind and matter but rather of something that lay beyond mind."

There was 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 asked himself if this tranquillity could be reconciled with action, and said: "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 vast and quiet impulsion from beyond the mind was what Nehru seemed to aspire after when the surface of him was not too insistent. And how genuine the aspiration was could be guessed from the photograph which was printed in every newspaper when, not long after India's independence, he went all the way to Calcutta to receive the relics of the Buddha's disciples Moggalana and Sariputta. However opposed to formal religion, he stood with his palms joined and held in front of his bowed head. No Marxist has stood thus even before the embalmed body of Lenin in Moscow's Red Square,

It was also a sense of more than natural presences that was aroused in Nehru by the loveliness and grandeur of Nature as well as the perfection of art and poetry. And most of all the spiritual unknown was at the back of the intense hunger he mentioned in his Autobiography (1936) 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," wrote Nehru, "when 1 shall wander about the Himalayas and cross them to reach that lake and mountain of my desire." The words were as of a Pilgrim of Eternity who had lost himself in Time.

No doubt, prior to 1946 his Marxist penchant made him turn down the experiences of the ancient Indian mystics as probably phantasms of the self-deluded imagination; he chose to admire only the passion connected with them for truth and

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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 kept 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." (The Discovery of India)

Clearly, here is a strong pressure of the spiritual inner on the pragmatic outer. And that it is no passing phase but part of a continuous process is shown by the Will Nehru wrote on June 21, 1954, when holidaying on the hill-station of Simla. The publication of this Will after his death has revealed the real Nehru perhaps more than anything else from his pen. While staunchly refusing to have the ceremonies of conventional religion performed over his body, he has left about the disposal of his ashes instructions which make a most lyrical and visionary document.

There are two blending voices in this poetry of the idealist Nehru and each has again two movements. The major portion of his ashes, he says, should "be carried high up into the air in an aeroplane and scattered from that height over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they may mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India". We are faced with a profound humility coupled with a passionate love of the country's masses, a noble self-

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effacing gesture towards the wide stretch of earth that is visible Mother India, But along with this patriotic worship there is the upward aspiration symbolised by the aeroplane-flight of the ashes. Ultimately the aim is earth's own service, but after attainment of the far freedom of the sky. Nehru, we may observe, has the word "high" and makes a specific point of its meaning by following up with "that height" without needing to do so: he could have just said "and then scattered..." The sense of the altitude to be reached above the earthly has distinctly shot through the inspiration of the imagined death-hour.

Even more spiritually significant are the two movements of the second voice in the request about the ashes: "a small handful... should be thrown into the Ganga." Although a mere handful and not the major portion is now involved, the portion of the Will dealing with this handful is the major one. It is the great burning core of Nehru's self-disclosure, non-religious on the one hand and undeniably packed with spiritual suggestions on the other:

"My desire to have a handful of my ashes thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad has no religious significance, so far as I am concerned. I have no religious sentiment in the matter. I have been attached to the Ganga and the Jamuna rivers in Allahabad ever since my childhood and, as I have grown older, this attachment has also grown. I have watched their varying moods as the seasons changed, and have often thought of the history and myth and tradition and song and story that have become attached to them through the long ages and become part of their flowing waters. The Ganga especially is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India's agelong culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing and yet ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the snow-covered peaks and the deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains

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below, where my life and work have been cast.

"Smiling and dancing in the morning sunlight, and dark and gloomy and full of mystery as the evening shadows fall: a narrow, slow and graceful stream in winter, and a vast roaring thing during the monsoon, broad-bosomed almost as the sea, and with something of the sea's power to destroy, the Ganga has been to me a symbol and a memory of the past of India running into the present, and flowing on to that great ocean of the future. Though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain her and divide her people, and suppress vast numbers of them, and prevent the free development of the body, though I seek all this, yet 1 do not wish to cut myself off from the past completely. I am proud of the great inheritance that has been and is ours, and I am concious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India. That chain I would not break, for I treasure it and seek inspiration from it, and as witness of this desire of mine and as my last homage to India's cultural inheritance, I am making this request that a handful of my ashes be thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad to be carried to the great ocean that washes India's shores."

What have we in this sustained moving eloquence? First, a personal and private attachment to the Ganga and then an attachment of the Nehru who is one link in the agelong uninterrupted chain of Indian history. First, a repudiation of the "religious sentiment" which, to his mind, has caused shackles, constrainments, divisions, suppressions and proved an obstacle in the way of the body's free development — and then a wholehearted affirmation of "India's cultural inheritance" which is well known to be predominantly spiritual. And the personality which has discarded "much of the past tradition and custom" is merged in the self which is "proud of the great inheritance" and, cherishing it, draws motive-force from it. As a vibrant sign of this merging is Nehru's setting of the Ganga

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at the very centre of his Indianism. Together with Lake Mana-sarovar and Mount Kailas, Ganga — the river mythologised as the Grace brought down from heaven by the Yogic meditation of Bhagiratha — stands for India's basic God-awareness. And it is worth marking, as an instinctive pointer to the merging, that Nehru uses for his own association with the Ganga the same word as he employs with a slight shift in the nuance, for the association with it of India's history and myth and tradition and song and story through the long ages. Just as he speaks of his own "attachment" he speaks of all these spiritually-charged things of the past having become "attached" to the Ganga and the Jamuna, especially the former. We may also emphasise his statement that this river, "a symbol of India's agelong culture and civilization", is through all her changing and flowing "ever the same Ganga". Are not these words a recognition of the ancient spiritual India that never dies and a recognition too that Nehru is portion and parcel of her? That he should fasten his heart on this sacred symbol and dedicate himself in death to it at such length of poetic enthusiasm is once more indicative of a strong pressure of the spiritual inner on the pragmatic outer.

The pragmatic outer was indeed too firm-moulded in Nehru by early influences to undergo complete alteration; yet the vague approach akin to the Vedanta's which had an appeal for him, appeared to be acquiring a kind of concreteness when during the last decade or so he began to take sympathetic interest in the directly spiritual figures of this ancient land of the Rishis. Although Gandhi, by his intimate relation with Nehru and by his political leadership of the India of Nehru's generation, remained in Nehru's explicit affirmations his "Master", here was a turn exceeding the feel of the "Socratic" which he had known through Gandhi's ethico-religious make-up. That such a turn had long been preparing may be best inferred from a fact that was disclosed only a fortnight after his death. Nehru, we were told, had read the Gita in the early morning each day from as far back as his daughter

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Indira could remember. Whenever he went abroad, the Gita went with him in his pocket, and with the Gita a picture of Buddha. Is it any wonder that the spiritual inner should at last effect a breakthrough of some sort and a sympathetic interest in modern saints and seers kindle up? The most notable instance of this novel orientation was his look of admiration and reverence at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the International Centre of Education associated with it. Ever since his first visit to these institutions on January 16,1955, he had come to see there a most original venture which he wished would find its true fulfilment instead of declining into an ordinary cultural movement. The new culture which is at work under the light of an earth-embracing Integral Yoga, full of constructive physical and mental vigour no less than creative spiritual vision, went home to Nehru's ever-young heart. Time and again he expressed in private his sense of the preciousness of the Aurobindonian experiment constantly developed in all directions by the Mother even after the passing of the Master. Deeply happy he seemed each time he was in her presence and in front of the positive progress of the institutions under her both in the outward life and in the inner, so that it is no exaggeration to say that in Nehru these institutions enjoyed the greatest possible goodwill of the Indian Government.

on September 27, 1955, he was in the Ashram a second time. Actually, it was his daughter who was on a visit. But Nehru unexpectedly dropped in, the same evening, by turning aside from his chalked-out itinerary. On the third and last occasion he was in Pondicherry — June 13,1963, — he broke through the packed official programme and made special time for a Sports display by the Ashram children. Still more fraught with meaning was the meeting he had with the Mother as the very first event of his stay. After a silent session she gave him a white rose which in the Ashram language of flowers signifies Peace. Peace was indeed what his whole being appeared to cry for — peace not only because China's treacherous attack on India in spite of his unceasing attempt at friendship with

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her had given a rude shock to his dream of Asian solidarity no less than of a world without war — peace also because "something that lay beyond mind" and its restless dreams was distantly calling to him more and more and here from the Mother's eyes he could receive its touch. Her blessings went with him, working to bring closer to him the depths of that mighty "Soul of India" with whom his soul had always been in love, depths hinted by the Mother's phrase that India's Soul lives for Eternity. To live for Eternity is not only to exist forever but also to exist for the Everlasting. One with this inmost super-life of the nation. Nehru's soul will march into the future illustrious with the history of his beloved land's achievement of political freedom as well as with the promise of achieving a greater liberation that has always beckoned the heart of this land and that may most comprehensively be summed up in the words of Sri Aurobindo:

Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,

Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,

An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,

Force one with unimaginable rest.

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