Jawaharlal Nehru was a prolific writer. His books were vast and rambling tomes written during long periods of imprisonment in the final decades of the Raj. History—“world history” in particular—was his chosen form of intellectual exposition, with both Glimpses of World History (1934) and The Discovery of India (1946) taking history as the principle terrain upon which Nehru sought to convey a world view and establish his political outlook. Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (1936) similarly explored the relationship between self and nation through the medium of history. While scholars commonly cite these texts as evidentiary sources, the relationship between Nehru the historian and Nehru the political practitioner has largely been left unexplored.Footnote 1 The emerging field of global intellectual history, as Shruti Kapila observes, has confronted the methodological problem that, unlike in the West, many of the important ideological innovators in the colonial and postcolonial world were more often than not also political practitioners concerned with changing the world rather than merely interpreting it.Footnote 2 As India's first prime minister from 1947 until his death in 1964, Nehru was extraordinarily influential in crafting a normative and institutional framework for postcolonial India's political life. How, then, should we approach the relationship, along with its inherent tensions and inconsistencies, between the two “cognitive perspectives” of Nehru the historian and Nehru the self-aware agent of historical change?Footnote 3
This article examines the role that history and historicism played in Nehru's political thought. I hope to offer novel perspectives on a familiar figure for South Asianists and world historians, but also to contribute more generally to renewed discussions of time and temporality, history and historicity that have animated recent historical scholarship.Footnote 4 Just as Koselleck argued that a disjuncture between past and future was constitutive of European modernity, I argue that a mid-century conjuncture led to important shifts in Nehru's political thought due to a perceived transformation in temporal experience. This conjuncture operated in multiple interconnected registers. This article highlights the impact of the Second World War, a perceived crisis of Western “civilization” along with its notion of “progress,” and the advent of atomic weaponry. Other dimensions were particular to India: the bloody Partition and independence of 1947, and the transformation of the national movement into a project of state sovereignty and economic development. These were all events that Nehru in some capacity was involved with and had to take into account at both practical and theoretical levels as his role shifted from oft-imprisoned dissident leader to a prime minister who consolidated his preeminent position in both government and the ruling Indian National Congress Party. These shifting circumstances corresponded to shifts within Nehru's political thought, and complicated the ways in which he perceived relations between past, present and future.
Rather than perform a systematic ideological reconstruction, my aim is to demonstrate how historicism was a common thread throughout the “historically contingent amalgam of ideological fragments” that C. A. Bayly, borrowing from Raymond Guess, used to describe what has become known as the “Nehruvian.”Footnote 5 The arguments put forth in favor of the canonical features of the Nehruvian—secularism, centralized economic planning, nonalignment, statist socialism—share a concern with the problem of enacting historical change while mediating between past, present and future. Nehru's étatisme—much like his writing of history—was animated by a desire to order time and to produce what François Hartog has called a “regime of historicity” that linked together the past, present and future of the Indian nation.Footnote 6 His published writings, as Javed Majeed has argued, are “tales about time” in which the very experience of time itself is at stake.Footnote 7 Nehru was a classical modern as defined by Jameson in that he “was obsessed with the secret of time.”Footnote 8
He perceived political action to take place within an unstable and indeterminate present, a space of competing temporalities on which the past exerted influence and the future exerted demands. His historicism was marked by his insistence that history formed the sovereign horizon of politics. History could not be transcended but was a sort of phenomenal plane of existence that operated on a global scale.Footnote 9 This tendency existed alongside—and often in tension with—a notion that the past provided a series of civilizational inheritances or cultural repertoires that equipped India with a capacity, lacking in the West, for a more advanced and stable modernity. Nehru's historiographical forays—his “discovery” of India as a historical object through the millennia—aimed to demonstrate that certain characteristics required for India's realization as a modern nation (secularism, rationality, democracy, plurality, among others) were immanent within Indian civilization and culture. Other characteristics needed to be cultivated through modern institutions, economic development and, perhaps most importantly, political leadership that demonstrated an awareness towards the present as a historical moment in a longer “chain of happening.”Footnote 10
It was balancing these two tasks—of realizing India's immanent potential while simultaneously transforming it—that Nehru considered his principle task as both a historian and a political practitioner.Footnote 11 Critiques of Nehru can, in many ways, be divided into those who thought that that he did not go far enough in altering the normative fabric of India (i.e. he did not seek a radical enough transformation of caste or class hierarchies) and those who think he went too far in his attempts to transform the “traditional” (read Hindu) into the “modern.” With the persistence of casteism and grinding poverty in India today, it is indeed hard to deny the flaws and limitations of the Nehruvian project as an emancipatory or radically transformative one. Indeed, Nehru's historicism influenced his crafting of ideological and institutional frameworks for the practice of both politics (“democracy”) and economics (“development”) that sought to transcend rather than directly engage or challenge caste and class as dimensions of power.
It is the state and its attendant norms, rather than his texts, that are Nehru's most significant legacies and with which his reputation as a historical personality is inextricably bound. That being said, in order to focus our concerns I refer to a number of sources, including The Discovery of India, but return frequently to a 1958 essay entitled “The Basic Approach,” which appeared in the All India Congress Committee's Economic Review, a forum for technocrats and politicians of the ruling party.Footnote 12 I have chosen to work through this essay not because it is exceptional in any particular regard, but instead because it offers a concise distillation of some of the major concerns of Nehru's political thought. It addresses themes that permeated his published works, public rhetoric and official correspondence from at least the 1940s. As its title indicates, “The Basic Approach” was primarily intended as a set of guiding principles or a conception of procedural morality for an Indian nation-state project that had, after more than a decade of independence, both recognized the limits of incrementalism and was reconciled to a retreat from more radical visions of the postcolonial. It also provides a succinct snapshot of an older Nehru as a secure leader occupying the commanding heights of the nation-state, conceptualizing a national policy agenda within a world-historical framework.
This article is organized into four sections. The first explores Nehru's understanding of technological modernity in what he called the “Atomic and Sputnik Age,” and the impact this had on his political thought and his historicism in particular. The second suggests a constitutive relationship between Nehru's historicism and his étatisme. The third section explores Nehru's ethical socialism that privileged means over ends. I argue that his shifting attitude towards Marxist theories of historical development was an important dimension of his altered perception of temporality in this mid-century conjuncture. The final section examines the relationship between the individual and history in Nehru's thought. The article throughout addresses some of the core concerns of Nehru's political life: man as an agent of history, the historical role of the state in India, the indeterminate character of the postwar period, Marxism and revolution, democracy and “the masses,” and the very nature of individual political action. The aim is not to provide comprehensive analyses of each of these issues, but to demonstrate how they exhibited a shared concern with linking together the past, present and future.
THE ATOMIC AND SPUTNIK AGE
Although he had abandoned his earlier radicalism, Nehru remained profoundly shaped by the interwar and wartime experience, which for him both culminated and ended with the advent of atomic weaponry in 1945 and the bloodbath and freedom of 1947. The ideological innovations and contestations of the interwar period, moreover, were to have a lasting impact on political life in postcolonial India, setting into motion trajectories still being played out today. Nehru's formulation of an ethical étatisme was developed within this context of violence—state repression, satyagraha and “communal” violence domestically, and the global context of violent contestation of the first half of the twentieth century. For Nehru, the horrors of the two world wars and the new historical epoch heralded by 1945/7 demanded a new understanding of history, historical time and historical change that required a fundamental rethinking of the nature of politics and global humanity.Footnote 13 It was this new relationship with history that impacted and conditioned the nature of political action, that complicated and yet gave increased importance to the position of the individual political actor, and, crucially, that was central to his insistence on the primacy of the state.
In his classic deconstruction of Nehru's étatisme, Partha Chatterjee argued that Nehru was an uncritical devotee of post-Enlightenment rationality and techno-scientific progress.Footnote 14 I think, however, that Nehru's faith in the beneficence of scientific progress and technological modernity was substantially qualified. The post-1945/7 Nehru would have rejected the stark dichotomy he laid down in 1934: “Our politics must either be those of magic or of science.”Footnote 15 Further, his understanding of both the emancipatory and the destructive potential of science and technology deeply conditioned his understanding of political action, as well as the state project he implemented and normalized. This duality was integral to what he referred to in “The Basic Approach” as the “tragic paradox of this Atomic and Sputnik Age.”Footnote 16 This ambivalence also helps give us an alternative perspective on Nehru's simultaneous commitments to technocracy and democracy, which he viewed as mutually interdependent in order to create an equilibrium through which political life—the life of the nation as such—could be institutionalized and reproduced over time.
I think, however, this “paradox” had a deeper meaning beyond the relationship between science and politics, and points to the heart of what can be seen as the Nehruvian dilemma. In his writings of the 1930s and even into the 1940s, he saw mankind's potential for action as circumscribed, in large measure, by the natural environment and governed by certain laws of historical development, in the understanding of which he considered Marxism “the only reasonable and scientific explanation of history.”Footnote 17 In 1958, however, he began “The Basic Approach” with the observation that science and technology had led to man's “conquest of external conditions” and unlocked the potential to subordinate the natural world and put it in service of mankind as never before. This was not necessarily an entirely new way of thinking for Nehru. In Glimpses of World History he connected the industrializing West's ability in the nineteenth century to exercise “some control over the forces of Nature” to their brutal subordination of African and Asian peoples. Such behavior illustrated what he identified as the West's loss of self-control that accompanied this newfound power.Footnote 18 Yet the technological and scientific developments of the twentieth century—atomic weaponry above all—took this domination of nature and other humans to a new level and signaled the onset of a new period in history. Nehru argued that this technological capacity freed man from the constraints of the natural world and thus from laws of historical development that had guided previous epochs. Unshackled and unmoored from these previous patterns and limits, man had now become a radically empowered agent of historical change. This situation was laden with great emancipatory potential—thus the “Sputnik” side of the paradox—and Nehru, in a global consensus with that first generation of postcolonial state-builders from Nkrumah to Nasser, sought to foster scientific research and development, and to discipline India's natural environment in service of the national project. As in Ghana and Egypt, the dam became emblematic of this way of thinking, what Nehru (in)famously referred to as the “temples” of a “resurgent India.”Footnote 19
Deploying Gandhian terms, Nehru laments in “The Basic Approach” that this radical empowerment of man was not accompanied by any substantial alteration in world views or an ethical revaluation of the conduct of politics: “Conquering the physical world, he fails to conquer himself.”Footnote 20 Like other mid-century thinkers, he saw Hiroshima and Auschwitz (and the Second World War more generally) as evidence of a civilizational crisis of the West—indeed, of the moral vacuity of Western civilization as such, or what he called the “mental exhaustion of civilization itself.”Footnote 21 This loss of Europe's normative dominance was common among colonial intellectuals, particularly from the time of the Great War and its extraordinary devaluation of human life. The truly planetary scale of the Second World War, the sophistication of the means of violence, and the universal willingness to kill only further intensified this sentiment. It also confirmed yet again for Nehru that the promises of Western liberalism would always be suborned to the interests of a dangerous and instrumental Western imperialism, and thus needed to be selectively wrested away from the West and given new life in India and elsewhere in the colonial world. It was only with decolonization and the postcolonial nation-state, then, that Western universalisms could become truly universal. The mid-century “crisis” of Western civilization was arguably more important outside Europe, coming as it did at the precise moment when decolonizing peoples negotiated the meaning and substance of the postcolonial.Footnote 22
For Nehru, the Second World War produced little reflection by both Western powers and the Soviet bloc—as evidenced by the violent attempts to reestablish colonial rule in Asia after the war, the demand that decolonizing peoples take sides in the global conflict of the Cold War, and the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, among other things. This indicated a moral crisis that made man's technological capacity potentially cataclysmic. That is, the West (including the USSR) refused to recognize that the postwar order—born out of global war—owed its very existence to the immanent (and seemingly imminent) potential of global destruction. This was, for Nehru, part of the “tragic” spirit of the “Atomic Age” that had parallel articulations within India itself. Ten years after independence, he lamented the dominance of instrumentality over ideals: “The larger vision that inspired us and gave us strength seems to fade away and we spend our energies in petty controversies and conflicts. Not even the internal and external crises, not even the atomic and hydrogen bombs . . . seem to shake us up and pull us out of this rather parochial outlook and complacency.”Footnote 23
Like other interpreters of the mid-century moment, Nehru too recognized the need for a reconceptualization of politics, writing in 1945 that “[i]n the modern context of the world, with the vast and terrible potentialities of the new atomic bomb, all of us have to think in new terms and discard many old and cherished notions.”Footnote 24 Nehru was concerned, moreover, that man was incapable of absorbing all the knowledge made possible by science, and this partial absorption of scientific knowledge had simultaneously empowered man and rendered him irrationally dangerous: “Science is advancing far beyond the comprehension of a very great part of the human race, and posing problems which most of us are incapable of understanding, much less solving.”Footnote 25 Such concerns led to his emphasis on political responsibility as an individual disposition, and to his reliance on institutions as the principal means of harnessing and (ideally) rendering nonviolent this newfound human empowerment and technological capacity. Politics needed to govern science, and to determine the terms of the relationship between scientific knowledge and human life. Nehru's commitment to nonalignment and internationalism illustrated similar concerns; without shared political responsibility and responsible international institutions, he thought the world would be prone to commit “suicide.”Footnote 26
What further complicated the nature of political action in the “Atomic and Sputnik Age” was that traditional political concepts had been evacuated of meaning and spirit—what Arendt referred to as “empty shells.”Footnote 27 In “The Basic Approach,” Nehru labels both “Western” (i.e. liberal) and “Marxist” economics “out of date,” leading him to conclude, “We have thus to do our own thinking.” Here too is an argument for the third path enunciated at Bandung that declared the Third World as an alternative global project. But we also see how this new “Age” was radically different from its predecessors and, as such, the past no longer served as a reliable guide for making informed political decisions: “there are new problems for which we have not got parallels or historical precedents elsewhere. What has happened in the past in the industrially advanced countries has little bearing on us today.”Footnote 28 Here we see a tension, or even the incommensurability, between Nehru's cognitive perspectives as a historian and as a political practitioner: the former is committed to an understanding of the world that emphasizes deep connections and continuities dating back millennia while the latter experiences the present as radical newness and discontinuity.
While he continued to see history as a resource and a dimension of meaning and being, Nehru increasingly saw little value in history as a guide.Footnote 29 This apparently discontinuous nature of the present epoch and the difficulty of discerning rational patterns of historical development, among other things, rendered Nehru cautious and even conservative when faced with the question of giving shape and substance to 1947 and the concept of freedom associated with it. That 1947 was subsumed under the sign of sovereignty rather than some form of radical and immediate emancipation can, further, be read in light of Nehru's rejection of an emancipatory telos and his insistence on the impossibility of transcending history or of a revolutionary consummation of time.Footnote 30 Nehru's “tragic paradox,” then, was not that technological modernity had simply empowered man for better and worse, but that it was precisely this empowerment that threatened to deprive man of authorship of the future, that limited the scope for political action, and that encouraged both fatalism and arrogance about man's ability to shape history. The very conditions that had made man an agent of history threatened in equal measure to render him a mere subject of history.
HISTORICISM AND THE STATE IN INDIA
While scholars continue to debate the origins of Indian historicism, what is clear is that history in the Western mode became an, if not the, authoritative form of knowledge during the colonial period.Footnote 31 From the mid-nineteenth century, as Bayly observed, history provided “the foundations for an emerging political sensibility” among Indian public men.Footnote 32 Nehru, with his superfluous Edwardian prose, was arguably the arch-practitioner of this medium. He lamented in The Discovery of India, “Unlike the Greeks, and unlike the Chinese and the Arabs, Indians in the past were not historians.” This “ignoring of history had evil consequences which we pursue still. It produced a vagueness of outlook, a divorce from life as it is, a credulity, a woolliness of the mind where fact was concerned.”Footnote 33 As for other nationalists, furnishing a history for India was an essential component of India's transition to modernity and of the nation-building project, which for Nehru required imagining and then making real a single nation comprising individuals and groups who were seen to inhabit different temporalities. He agreed with Hegel, Marx and Mill that India had fallen into a “stagnatory and vegetative life” (Marx) and had lost its historical dynamism: “Indian life becomes a sluggish stream, living in the past, moving slowly through the accumulations of dead centuries.”Footnote 34 The goal of the nationalist movement was to “revitalize India,” to “re-charge the battery of India's spirit and waken her from her long slumber.”Footnote 35 India's loss of dynamism resulted not from a lack of history, but instead from a combination of internal and external dynamics: the stultifying effects of Indian society and culture (defined above all by caste) on the one hand, and the retarding effects of British domination on the other. Indeed, Nehru's statism—his privileging of the historical role of the state in India—was informed not only by his belief that power in India had traditionally been invested in society (rather than the state) with deleterious consequences, but also by the assumptions of Western historicism that, since at least Hegel, privileged the state as the locus and signifying agent of history. Although he remained deeply concerned about individual liberty, the demands of modern mass politics led Nehru to the conclusion that, as Sudipta Kaviraj has argued, “to be modern was to live through the state.”Footnote 36
In “The Basic Approach,” as in his published historical writings, Nehru's concern with the “spirit” of any given age betrays a Hegelian influence on his approach to history. The Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History demonstrate that the West's role as primary driver of world history was a historically contingent and relatively brief phenomenon—an “unhappy interlude”—rather than revealing of some fundamental truth of historical development or intrinsic civilizational superiority. Like Hegel, Nehru traced how the Spirit moved from its origins in the East to the West. However, Nehru saw the crisis of Western civilization and the onset of decolonization as an opportunity for the East to reclaim the Spirit and Asia's central place in world history. For Nehru the problem was not—unlike for many African, Caribbean or Native American thinkers—that India had no history proper, but rather that it had too much history.Footnote 37 The problem instead was how to make the old new, how to inject vitality and youth into an ancient civilization. What further complicated matters for Nehru was that the “spirit” of the “Atomic and Sputnik Age” was, contra Hegel, irrational, or at least experienced as such.Footnote 38 The question of freedom too was up for grabs at this mid-twentieth-century moment, as man's mastery over nature had at once opened unprecedented avenues for both the realization and the absolute negation of freedom.
In what other ways can we connect Nehru's historicism to his étatisme? To begin with, I think Nehru's historicist understanding of the self and of individual political action can be directly connected to the role he attributed to the state in India after 1947. As a historian he could attribute significance to past events, but as a political actor he was well aware that the outcomes and significance of his actions remained fundamentally unknowable. That is, history for Nehru was a phenomenon of existence as well as an epistemology, and the subject was inextricably a historicist one, conditioned by the past and caught between the past and the future. “The past,” he wrote in The Discovery of India, “becomes something that leads up to the present, the moment of action, the future something that flows from it; and all three are inextricably intertwined and interrelated.”Footnote 39 The present, in other words, could only be conceived and could only have meaning both as an inheritance of the past and as the origin of the future. Moreover, he posited political action, and even life itself, as a dynamic act of mediation between the past, present and future.
While the Nehru of The Discovery of India recognized the difficulties of such an act of mediation, the Nehru of “The Basic Approach” was clearly grasping for stable ground upon which the present—“the moment of action”—could be conceived and instrumentalized within a global context in which history had been stripped of its instructive potential. Historical change was no longer a rational process governed by discernible laws, but seemingly based on contingency and, indeed, a fundamental irrationality. This rendered the task of mediation between past and future vastly more challenging, if not altogether impossible. Nehru's historicism was, then, characterized by his insistence that the past must necessarily have a relationship with the future, but, importantly, by a recognition that this relationship was inherently uncertain, unstable and even incomprehensible. Nehru's judgment, as Sunil Khilnani has observed, demonstrated a deep sensitivity to the ways in which causalities move across generations, that political action in the present inaugurated a fundamentally unknowable set of consequences.Footnote 40 Yet rather than abandon the idea of progress altogether, the more illusory or out of reach progress seemed, the more Nehru doubled down on it, precisely because he recognized that the future as the “horizon of expectation” gave meaning to the present as a “space of experience.”
The pathological obsession that Nehru bestowed on India regarding the stability and durability of the nation as an idea, a political project and an institutional apparatus emerged, at least in part, from the recognition that the nation-state needed not just to survive over time, but to structure historical time itself. Scholars have examined how the governmentalization of the state worked to produce India as a national space.Footnote 41 But the nation-state needed to organize time just as it needed to command space, and to integrate the future as the horizon of this structuring of time. It did this through five-year plans, regularly scheduled elections, and the everyday workings of the developmental state, not to mention the processes of primitive accumulation of capital. Measuring “progress” through statistics similarly imposed a temporal framework for the life of the nation, and sought to reinstitute a determinate chronology of historical time in an age perceived to be marked by accelerated indeterminacy and limitless potentialities. The state, then, was supposed to give not only direction but a tempo, vitality and purpose to the nation's movement through history.
Nehru's enthusiasm for centralized economic planning and his investing of the Planning Commission with significant authority over state policy has conventionally been interpreted as a sign of his confidence in the ability of human action to master the future, a trait he was seen to share with more doctrinaire Marxists. While this may have been true in the 1930s, in the context of the “Atomic and Sputnik Age” in which nuclear apocalypse—what he referred to as the “Sword of Damocles”—threatened to erase the future entirely, planning was a means of reinstituting the future as a “horizon of expectation,” a far more modest goal than mastering the future entirely.Footnote 42 This insistence on futurity in the face of the potential erasure of the future was also evident in the Le Corbusier-designed Chandigarh, Nehru's hyper-modern city that sought to materialize the potential of science and planning in the aftermath of the traumas of Partition.Footnote 43 As Shruti Kapila observes, Chandigarh made zero concessions to the vernacular or the classical, the local or the historical.Footnote 44 It was radically and unapologetically new, an intrusion of the future into the present. As indicated by his anxious warnings and hectoring rebukes of his colleagues and the general public alike to resist being “pursued by the past,” Nehru feared that the disappearance of the future as a “horizon of expectation” would lead to India being overwhelmed by the past. This fear of the power of the past can, I think, be read into the refusal to officially memorialize the countless victims of Partition's violence.
Planning, moreover, did not just signify the insistence on a certain future, but also allowed for greater judgment in the present, the “moment of action.” It thus had an ontological or phenomenological dimension as well, providing the historically situated actor with a framework for thinking and action: “A national plan has thus both a short-term objective and a long-term one. The long-term objective gives a true perspective. Without it short-term planning is of little avail and will lead us into blind alleys.”Footnote 45 Even if future outcomes always remained unknowable, without such a framework action in the present was entirely contingent and thus necessarily shortsighted, inherently interest-driven, and wasteful of scarce resources. This was particularly important in light of Nehru's understanding of the open-ended nature of historical causality. Thus Nehru's penchant for planning and for writing history served similar functions in his attempts both to make sense of an individual's being in the world, and to mediate between past, present and future. Both gave narrative order, and thus meaning and legibility, to change over time.Footnote 46
Chakrabarty has highlighted the role of historicism in the development—and in our understandings—of political modernity in non-Western societies. He notes a tension between the temporal horizon of “now” intrinsic to anticolonial demands for sovereignty and the persistence of the historicist logic of “not yet” that was a central legitimating principle of both European colonialism and subsequent nation-state projects.Footnote 47 This tension is readily discernible in India's postcolonial experiments in sovereignty and democracy, and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in Nehru's often muddled ideological maneuvers. An insistence on genuine sovereignty internationally and universal adult franchise domestically, for example, were clear significations of the “now.” In the wake of the ruptures of 1947, moreover, this tension informed Nehru's statist temporal framework for the postcolonial. Nehru was, at once, a theorist of both the “now” and the “not yet.” The waiting room of history, to borrow Chakrabarty's evocative phrase, was never abandoned but remade and retrofitted with new promises and expectations, the door forced open but the threshold never fully crossed.
Earlier in his political career (and even as late as The Discovery of India), Nehru expressed a desire for some sort of “mass event” like a civil war or invasion that would create a rupture, inject vitality into a stagnant society, and precipitate historical change by unshackling India from its burdensome past and stupefied present alike.Footnote 48 This was a common line of thinking among anticolonial thinkers, taken to its extreme by Mao, who sought a complete rupture with the past through the violent unleashing of the political and the event. Nehru, for example, wrote to his sister during his wartime imprisonment at Ahmednagar Fort that India could benefit from the “cataclysm” and “mass experience” of war and revolution experienced in China, a country and civilization he considered India's closest historical analogue and counterpart in the twentieth-century redemption of Asia. Even at this point, however, such a break was more an aspiration than a reality for Nehru, as he resigned himself to the idea of “building up slowly but surely a new nation.”Footnote 49 The post-1945/7 Nehru fully abandoned any such belief in a permanent break with historical time, rejecting Maoist notions of the ceaseless iteration of the new in favor of an insistence on a regime of historicity that connected past, present and future: “A complete break means break with the past, with your past culture, with everything. Well, essentially, a country does not do that. Even after a revolution it comes back to its past.”Footnote 50 History could not be transcended or escaped.
After 1945, and certainly after the upheavals of Partition, Nehru became acutely aware, as Khilnani has argued, of the “destructive potentialities of politics, and therefore the need to use power with great circumspection.”Footnote 51 If Gandhi famously asked the British in 1942 to leave India to “God or Anarchy,” for Nehru there was no God, only Anarchy.Footnote 52 The one time he did take a dramatic plunge (in 1947), millions died and millions more were victimized and displaced. Although he recognized—and criticized those who failed to recognize—that Partition constituted an irreversible rupture that both foreclosed and opened up possibilities, after 1947 Nehru explicitly rejected the productive potential of the event, understood in terms of both violent upheavals and mass satyagraha alike. The experience of Partition for Nehru was one of being overwhelmed by the historical structural logic of the event, when he and Indian society more broadly were rendered mere subjects of history rather than its agents.
What was important, then, was not revolutionary transformation but a much more modest fostering of a sense of historical directionality. As Nehru told the journalist Tibor Mende in 1955, “My own impression is that once the people realize that you are going in a certain direction, they are optimistic. They are prepared to put up with delay, a little delay, because they know that they are going toward something. It is only when they feel that they are not going any way that they become angry.”Footnote 53 It was the responsibility of political leadership to invest meaning in the immediate, to provide the people with a particular temporal orientation, and to give meaning to new forms of deferral. Nehru was keenly attuned to the power of affective registers in driving historical change and, more specifically, conditioning political life. His historical writings and public rhetoric were laden with psychological and emotional terminology, illustrative of what Chakrabarty has identified as a deep vitalist impulse.Footnote 54 Of course, Nehru's symbolic efforts at fostering a sense of historical directionality included projects with considerable instrumental value as well, such as dams and a steel industry conjured from scratch, not to mention the Indian Institutes of Technology, national laboratories, and the vast array of other modernizing and scientific institutions that were important signifiers of the Nehruvian state. This was the Sputnik dimension of technological modernity that Nehru deployed to urge Indians to find their bearings—to orient them temporally and invest their lives with a sense of historical purpose—in the indeterminate present.
VIOLENCE AND POLITICS: SOCIALISM AS PROCESS, SOCIALISM AS PROSPECTIVE
What are the implications of such an argument for understanding Nehru's socialism? From the late 1930s or early 1940s, he became increasingly disenchanted with Marxism, and confronted its analytical limitations as a theory of historical development that could interpret the past but also illuminate the future. This was a crucial dimension of his sense of disjuncture between the past and the future and of an altered sense of temporal experience produced by this mid-century conjuncture of war, partition, independence and technological innovation. “A study of Marx and Lenin,” he wrote of his younger self in The Discovery of India, “produced a powerful effect on my mind and helped me to see history and current affairs in a new light. The long chain of history and of social development appeared to have some meaning, some sequence, and the future lost some of its obscurity.”Footnote 55 Yet “the rise of fascism and Nazism and all that lay behind them” as well as the “very rapid growth of technology and the practical application of vast developments in scientific knowledge are now changing the world picture with amazing rapidity, leading to new problems.” The future regained its obscurity.
In “The Basic Approach,” Nehru maintains this connection between technological modernity and communism. Even at this late date (1958) and given his central role in establishing an unwieldy and ambiguous form of state capitalism, Nehru concurred with the basic Marxist tenet that “the capitalist structure of society [is] based on violence and class conflict.”Footnote 56 He continued, moreover, to insist that the Marxist–Leninist critique of capitalism and imperialism remained necessary to any discussion of world-historical change, and of decolonization and national liberation in particular. In the development of Nehru's overarching political ideology, then, Marxism remained a principal referent, even long after the end of his public flirtation with communism in the 1930s. In other words, Nehru often read himself and his own political–historical position through and against Marxism, and this tendency is clearly discernible in his historical writings, public rhetoric and official correspondence alike. The themes that Nehru takes up in “The Basic Approach”—the opposition between economic determinism and an ethical socialism, between economism and the primacy of politics, and between the scientific and ideological aspects of Marxism—are, as Ernesto Laclau has noted, “the very issues that have made possible a history of Marxism.”Footnote 57
His rejection of violent revolution and the potential of the event confronted Nehru with the question of how exactly to get rid of class conflict and “have a classless society with opportunity for all.”Footnote 58 His major problem with communism was not intellectual (i.e. not with the “scientific” nature of Marxism), but that as a theory of political action it replaced religious absolutisms with secular ones in a similar manner to fascism. This hindered the ability of the historically situated political actor to engage with the present in a creative and dynamic manner: “In a changing world, living should be a continuous adjustment to these changes and happenings. It is the lack of this adjustment that creates conflicts.”Footnote 59 Moreover, this secular absolutism fostered “rational” arguments that privileged ends over means: “For both of them [communism and fascism] there are no shades, there is only black and white. That is the old approach of the bigoted aspects of some religions.”Footnote 60 That is, they were secular and rational justifications for violence as a means for achieving political ends. Nehru sought to reject this logic, which was one of the dominant themes of the twentieth century (again, most clearly articulated by Mao), that, in the words of Alain Badiou, “Bad violence must be followed by good violence, which is legitimated by the former. What is proposed is a bellicose foundation for peace; the good war will put an end to the bad war.”Footnote 61 From at least 1947, Nehru, unlike many of his generation's theorists of emancipatory violence (and nonviolence), approached violence as entirely instrumental. Violent revolution was transformative only in a temporary and negative sense and, for Nehru, could neither produce consensus nor serve as the basis for democracy: “we have arrived at a stage in the modern world when an attempt at forcible imposition of ideas on any large section of people is bound ultimately to fail. In present circumstances this will lead to war and tremendous destruction. There will be no victory, only defeat for everyone.”Footnote 62
If violence and class conflict constituted the current order and violent revolution was unavailable as a means of transformation, Nehru's problem, then, was to make an argument for the nonviolent transition to socialism. This required a few moves. First, he needed to make a rational counterargument to the instrumentality of violence. Here again he returned to the question of science and technology. In previous historical epochs, war and violence were rational (and even ethical) means of producing definitive political outcomes. Yet at this point in history, which Nehru viewed essentially as a threshold between a destructive and violent past and an uncertain future, the technological means of destruction had grown so great that they now rendered violence obsolete as a political strategy: “Violence cannot possibly lead today to a solution of any major problem because violence has become much too terrible and destructive. The moral approach to this problem has now been powerfully reinforced by the practical aspect.”Footnote 63 That is, the end was in danger of being overwhelmed by the means which it justifies and which are needed to reach it.Footnote 64 The “Atomic and Sputnik Age” had rendered revolution anachronistic.
One lesson that Nehru learned from the interwar period (and the reinvigorated right-wing assertiveness in the wake of Partition) was that revolutionary violence led to an expansion of the political domain that was likely to lead to fascism more than anything else. This was at the heart of his critique of Indian communists: “It is absurd to imagine that out of conflict the social progressive forces are bound to win.”Footnote 65 This logic of state legitimation continues to have significant currency in India today, as liberals regularly take recourse to state action against a resurgent Hindu right or social forces perceived to be anachronistic, such as tribal Maoist revolutionaries. Moreover, Nehru inherited a legacy of anticolonial politics that spent decades subverting the authority of the state and articulating an understanding of the political that exceeded the state. He thus assigned primacy to the task of containing the political within the state.Footnote 66
He expressed, for example, solidarity with the aspirations of the armed revolutionary peasantry of Telangana, where “the people” emerged as an uninstitutionalized political actor and historical force at the very moment of independence.Footnote 67 Yet despite his recognition of the essential validity of the claims of “the people” in Telangana, and their claims to redistributed land in particular, he nevertheless insisted on a ruthless counterinsurgency. Revolutionary insurgency was not, for Nehru, a form of politics that could be reproduced and sustained over time. It was unviable precisely because it privileged an imperative of the immediate. The people and their claims, then, needed to be broken down into their constituent interests and governmentalized as disparate classes, castes, and tribes to be managed by the legal–developmental apparatus of the state. Nor could the primacy of class struggle be conceded. It was, rather, only one aspect of the project of national liberation rather than its dominant imperative.
Despite his professed commitment to socialism, Nehru had for decades promoted the Congress strategy of subordinating radical labor and agrarian struggles to the requisites of the national project. After 1947, rather than encourage agrarian mobilizations, he promoted instead a top-down agenda of change through planned economic development and social reform through law and legislation. However, as Chakrabarty has noted, this fear of popular politics was “qualified by its opposite, a political faith in the masses.”Footnote 68 For Nehru, the “people” as the “masses” were the drivers of historical change in India, but also a force that needed to have its energies harnessed and channeled. Even in his earlier and more radical days it was only through institutions that the masses could enact their will.Footnote 69 Institutional, constitutional and legislative change in the 1940s and into the 1950s was indeed driven by pressures from below, as the Congress sought to coopt and temper the radicalism of subaltern politics.Footnote 70
The constituent potential of the violent upheavals of 1947 had, moreover, largely exhausted itself in fratricidal violence or fed into processes of state formation, closing down (or at least limiting) the potential of “the people” as a revolutionary force across the whole of India.Footnote 71 Subsequently, the Indian Constitution of 1950 created what Uday Mehta has called a form of political absolutism, empowering a state with “no outside” to its directive purview. Mehta argues that the urgencies of solving what Arendt called the “social question” rendered freedom as “a future prospect, as the distant culmination of a plan,” and translated colonial forms of governmentality into an expansive and interventionist postcolonial developmental state.Footnote 72 Nehru's historicist emphasis on politics as a process unfolding over time can, I think, be linked to this state project in which a continually prospective future is incorporated as a horizon of meaning and linked to the redressal of historical injury (whether of caste or class) through institutional means.
Nehru's second maneuver required for a peaceful transition to socialism was to argue that the state was, on balance, a mechanism of nonviolence. This was a dramatic change from the 1930s, when he wrote in his Autobiography that “the State is really the coercive apparatus meant to enforce the will of a group that controls the government.”Footnote 73 In “The Basic Approach,” however, he observed that India had an “inherent disruptive character” and that there were “too many fissiparous tendencies for us to take risks” that any revolution would entail.Footnote 74 Most scholars have interpreted Nehru's anxiety about disruption and “fissiparous tendencies” as a sign of his elitism and a fear of mass politics inherited from colonial officials. There is, of course, truth to this, but it was also a congenital feature of any nationalism that sought to incorporate into a single national body a population marked by differences of caste, ethnicity, religion, language, region and class. It required a conceptualization of political community that would at once recognize difference and convert it into peaceful democratic competition. Nehru was convinced that democracy in such a context could succeed only by establishing a political life that was reproducible over time, routinized, and largely institutionalized.
Yet he had considerable doubts about the efficacy of the peaceful transition to socialism to which he had committed hundreds of millions of Indians. In “The Basic Approach” he put forth a Gandhian argument (or alibi) emphasizing means over ends: “Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself.” Here we can see clearly Nehru's understanding of politics as process, again perhaps a Gandhian influence, although of a deeply historicist sort.Footnote 75 His relative success in establishing an institutional political life was accompanied by failure to fashion a socialistic national economy. He hoped, though he was by no means convinced, that robust democratic institutions would temper but not necessarily eliminate the violence and inequality of capitalism: “Democracy allied to Capitalism has undoubtedly toned down many of its evils and in fact is different now from what it was a generation or two ago.”Footnote 76 This was the model of the “Welfare State” akin to FDR's New Deal or Keynesian postwar Western Europe that he sought to emulate.Footnote 77 He approached this problem essentially as one of navigating historical change, and thus any strategy must be concerned with means rather than ends and, moreover, remain temporally aware: “It is only through a planned approach on socialistic lines that steady progress can be attained though even that will take time. As this process continues, the texture of our life and thinking gradually changes.”Footnote 78 This incrementalism is, I think, directly related to Nehru's historicism.
Nehru saw electoral and procedural democracy as a means to temper state planning as well as the market. He aspired to achieve equilibrium between these dimensions of power. Planning was relatively modest in comparison to the USSR, China, Taiwan or Korea.Footnote 79 This was not an authoritarian state-directed radical overhaul of Indian society, but rather a belief that procedural democracy allied with a state “utilizing the new sources of power which science has put at our disposal” was a means to achieve stability in a world of both revolutionary and reactionary assertion.Footnote 80 In a discussion of Soviet planning, Nehru was asked by Tibor Mendes in 1955 if the “institutions interposed between you and the masses do not slow action down.” He responded, “They do . . . but I know that it is essential to have some institutions. Otherwise it's just chaos.”Footnote 81 The task, then, was to create a symbiotic and productive relationship between scientific planning and a notion of democratic accountability and political responsibility over human affairs. Moreover, this “slow[ing] action down” was, for Nehru, at once a source of endless frustration and a necessary form of “counterdemocracy” that could put the brakes on the potential development of democratic authoritarianism, majoritarianism or tyranny of the social.Footnote 82
“THE INDIVIDUAL SHOULD NOT BE SO SACRIFICED”
While Nehru often used the language of world history and global trends of change, he was at the same time referring to the dilemmas of individual decision-making and the very nature of political action itself.Footnote 83 In his writings, Nehru frequently merged scalar registers and positioned himself in relation to the global. The global, as briefly discussed above, functioned for Nehru less as a spatial category and more as a temporal one—a sort of universal zeitgeist. He struggled with the extent to which individuals were symptoms of the zeitgeist or autonomous agents of history. In his younger and more radical days of the 1920s and 1930s, Nehru often pointed to the role of global forces, structures, and systems in directing historical change: “Individuals, however eminent, play but a minor role when the world is on the move. They may divert the main current here and there to some slight extent; they may not and cannot stop the rushing torrent. And therefore the only peace that can endure is with circumstances, not merely with men.”Footnote 84 As we have seen, Nehru the state-builder continued to emphasize the primacy of creating the “circumstances” for political life, and turned to institutions as a means of doing so. Yet it is also clear that his valuation of the individual changed over time. I think this shift was related to, or at least illustrative of, his perception of the altered global landscape (and its Indian iteration) of the “Atomic and Sputnik Age” discussed above. While the previous section sought to unpack some features of Nehru's socialism, by attending to the question of the individual, this section offers some observations on Nehru's liberalism.
If we recall, Nehru began “The Basic Approach” with the lament that mankind had failed to “conquer himself.” Self-mastery was ultimately required not to understand some fundamental truth about the world and then seek to enact a utopia based on such truth, but rather to equip the political actor with the capacity to adjust to the contingencies of the present while remaining temporally oriented toward the future.Footnote 85 Nehru's ideal modern subject was thus equipped with a particular disposition toward the vagaries of historical change. The duty of political leaders in particular required a certain level of detachment that would allow them to resist being “pursued by the past” or, equally, succumbing to what he called the “domination of the present” or the “passion and prejudice of the moment.”Footnote 86 Particularly in the years after 1947, Nehru saw “communalism” as an inability amongst Hindu politicians to overcome the conflicts and bitterness of the past, and thus indicative of a backwards orientation in history—of being held captive by the past—that compromised India's ability to imagine a more harmonious future. In order to forge a common future, the past needed to be recognized as irrevocable, but, crucially, this recognition needed to take the form of forgiveness rather than forgetting. “All of us,” he wrote while confronting his own government's confiscation of Muslim properties after Partition, “seem to be getting infected with the refugee mentality or worse still, the R.S.S. mentality.”Footnote 87 The “domination of the present” or the “passion and prejudice of the moment” indicated of a lack of awareness of the present as the point of mediation between the past and the future; that is, of an ahistorical outlook that privileged instrumentality in the immediate, rendering historical progress a victim of the present.
Nehru's emphasis on the role of the state did not mean that he did not share the concern about reconstructing the self that Shruti Kapila has argued was the preeminent concern of Indian political thought from the late nineteenth century.Footnote 88 This problem was, in many ways, not particular to India. From state projects such as the USSR and fascist Germany to Gandhi's practices of self-fortification and the revolutionary action of Che or Mao, the “new man” of the twentieth century was, in Badiou's words, sought to be “either restored or produced.”Footnote 89 Nehru was aware that coercive efforts to create a socialist man who acted without any self-interest threatened to turn humanity into “mass man”: “We talk of the good of society. Is this something apart from and transcending the good of the individuals composing it? If the individual is ignored and sacrificed for what is considered the good of the society, is that the right objective to have?”Footnote 90 This problem has a considerably long genealogy in the history of liberal thought. Nehru insisted that the “individual should not be so sacrificed” and that “real social progress will come only when opportunity is given to the individual to develop.”Footnote 91 This position resembled that taken by a number of Indian thinkers, including Nehru's trusted emissary, the philosopher Radhakrishnan, who argued in favor of Marxism as an instrument for social change and public policy, yet for its inadequacy as a philosophy of life due to its disregard for the individual.Footnote 92 For Nehru, the cultivation of the individual—rather than the Soviet-style rigid regimentation of state and society—was seen as a prerequisite for the success of socialism: “The touchstone, therefore, should be how far any political or social theory enables the individual to rise above his petty self and thus think in terms of the good of all.”Footnote 93 This liberal valuation of the subject in India had a genealogy dating back to at least Rammohan Roy, and was linked to notions of sharing, generosity and compassion sourced from Vedanta and the Bhagavad Gita, most prominently, among the Indian classics.Footnote 94 It was also a preoccupation of Indian socialists, with Ashoka Mehta, Rammanohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan (all Nehru's rivals) demonstrating an acute awareness of the dangers of “mass-man” and the debasement of human personality that they saw as integral to Soviet communism and European fascism alike. The task of mass politics in technological modernity was, then, to develop ways in which the machine could be mastered in the interest of man without man being turned into a machine in the interest of the state, capital or other organized instrumentalities.
Considering that he spent much of his life as a disciple of the Übermensch “Mahatma” Gandhi, it is no surprise that Nehru accepted the potential of individuals to enact historical change in the face of powerful structural forces. Taking up another classical Indian theme popularized by the Mahatma, Nehru observed in “The Basic Approach” that for his ideal subject, the “emphasis will be on duties, not rights; the rights will follow the performance of duties.”Footnote 95 Nehru concludes the essay with a plea to his fellow Congressmen to “keep in view the old Vedantic ideal of the life force which is the inner base of everything that exists.”Footnote 96 Nehru's turn to Vedanta in conceptualizing the novel unity of the “Atomic and Sputnik Age” is highly suggestive. It is likely, moreover, that Vedanta shaped Nehru's idea of a “living philosophy” and his search for a form of rational reasoning that maintained “the old pagan approach of tolerance, apart from its religious aspects.”Footnote 97 This linking of Vedanta and the modern subject, moreover, is an example of the ways in which Nehru considered the potential for modernity as internal to Indian culture.
That India's arch-secularist, commonly referred to as Panditji, should evoke Vedanta at the end of a programmatic statement of his political outlook should perhaps come as no surprise. In many ways, Nehru can be seen as carrying on the legacy of the Hindu reform movements of the nineteenth century from Rammohan to Swami Vivekananda and the Arya Samaj, all of whom emphasized the rationality of Hindu philosophy and of individual agency as a means of combating Hinduism's social inequality and ritual irrationality. The insistence that Hinduism's philosophical traditions could be separated from its social institutions was a common concern in Nehru's writings, where he held up the former as valuable tools in the creation of a unique Indian modernity while holding the latter (i.e. caste) responsible for India's backwardness, loss of social and economic dynamism, and historical weakness against the predations of outsiders. It was precisely this maneuver—most (in)famously articulated in Gandhi's insistence that “caste has nothing to do with religion”—that the Dalit leader, intellectual and constitutionalist B.R. Ambedkar sought to counter.Footnote 98 While Nehru facilitated Ambedkar's appointment as the chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, brought him into the Cabinet as law minister, and collaborated closely with him on the Hindu Code Bill, it was Nehru's failure to stand up to the Hindu chauvinists within his own Congress Party that hastened Ambedkar's departure from institutional political life and precipitated his conversion to Buddhism shortly thereafter. Indians continue to obsess over the Gandhi–Amedkar feud, but it was not the Bania from Gujarat but the Brahmin from Allahabad who, in typical fashion, incorporated and then dispatched the troublesome Mahar.
However, by implying that Hinduism informed Nehru's conception of the modern subject, I am not arguing that his secularism was a mask for a secret casteist Hindu majoritarian agenda, although that was certainly the case for many in the Congress Party.Footnote 99 Here too there were contradictions. The “Congress System” developed after 1947 worked towards consolidating upper-caste authority, while the constitutional abolition of untouchability, the system of lower-caste reservation, and the promise of economic redistribution aimed at weakening the normative, institutional and economic power of the caste system.Footnote 100 Nehru thought, moreover, that the twin engines of electoral democracy and industrialization-led economic growth would gradually replace caste solidarities and hierarchies with those arranged around interest, principally of class and ideology. This was, obviously, a miscalculation. But developments of the Nehru period nevertheless set in motion the processes that would transform the nature of caste in India while maintaining older hierarchies and creating new ones. More relevant to our concern here is that Nehru hoped, however naively, that his modernizing agenda would replace ascriptive social identities with his autonomous and rational modern citizen–subject, pointing towards a liberal valuation of the individual.
Nehru's open antagonism towards the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had as much to do with their conspiratorial politics and violence towards Muslims as with what he perceived to be a battle over the future of Hinduism. For Nehru, Hindutva and its conception of an exclusive, homogeneous “Hindu” identity had no history in India and was essentially a derivative form of fascistic European nationalisms. Indeed, he often taunted his Hindutva adversaries, claiming to represent a more historically authentic Hindu tradition and using his “Pandit” title to buttress his charismatic authority: “I know more about Hindu culture and literature than the whole lot of them put together . . . They know nothing about any culture.”Footnote 101 By capturing the plurality that defined the subcontinent, the “Indian” rather than the Hindu was thus a more accurate historical and political category, and because of its foundation in this deep history, could legitimately serve as the basis for a lasting notion of nationhood. The India reconstructed by Nehru in his historical writings which would become a central organizing principle of the Nehruvian statist project was characterized by both unity and diversity, what Javed Majeed has referred to as the “paradoxical normalization of heterogeneity.”Footnote 102 Ultimately, the Nehruvian competition with Hindutva was not, and is not, about religious belief but about a deeply historical vision of society and politics. This transformation of political conflict into debates over history is one of the lasting legacies of the colonial and Nehruvian periods.
Gyan Prakash has observed that Nehru's forays into history, and especially The Discovery of India, were attempts to locate a historical or civilizational inheritance—a sort of “national ethos”—that could equip India to navigate the pitfalls of modernity that had plagued the West.Footnote 103 Nehru viewed his “writing of history” as “a process similar to that of psychoanalysis, but applied to a race or to humanity instead of to an individual.”Footnote 104 He sought to excavate or reconstruct components of Indian history that could buttress the political project of a secular and plural Indian nation and to ground the nation-state in a longer historical narrative, or what he called a “myth and an idea.”Footnote 105 Much like his sense of the individual as a temporally situated actor mediating between past, present and future, Nehru's “idea of India” constructed the nation as a space of multiple temporalities—a curious amalgam of the past and present that contains the immanent potential of the future. Nor did he ever insist on enacting a singular national temporality, however much the colonial inheritance of Indian Standard Time may suggest otherwise.Footnote 106 Instead, he sought to internalize rather than eradicate the premodern from the modern nation, thus Chandigarh's insistence on futurity did not necessarily contradict his insistence that India's tribal people, as he put it in his famous panchscheel, “should develop along the line of their own genius.” The coexistence of the system of village-level governance known as panchayati raj alongside a high modernist state project, for example, illustrates the ways in which Nehru's deep historicism and concern with the intermingling of the past, present and future was brought to bear on his institutional vision of India.
To return to his conception of the subject, the primary reason why a “new man” was not so easily “produced” was precisely because both the individual and the culture (Nehru preferred the term “civilization”) of which he was a part were fundamentally historicist in nature:
The burden of the past pursues us, and yet it is both a burden and an inspiration, for it drags us down and at the same time pushes us on. Sometimes we feel vital and youthful and full of energy; at other times thousands of years weigh us down and we feel old and a little weary at this long and interminable pilgrimage. Both are part of us and make us what we are and out of that ceaseless and intermingling conflict something new is always arising. We, who are children of ancient civilizations with hundreds of passionate generations behind us with all their struggles and contentment, their dynamics and statics, feel this more than people of a later day who have not these complex pasts pursuing them. We have much that gives an equilibrium to the mind and spirit, a calm and unhurried outlook on life which refuses to get flurried and flustered at changing events. That essentially is the hallmark of ancient culture; it is that, that China has in abundant measure; it is this, I believe, that India also possesses. And because of this, it will be well with India.Footnote 107
As we have seen, Nehru thought this historical inheritance was at once a burden and an advantage, but was nevertheless something that constituted India and Indians as subjects and agents in the present, equipping them to navigate the vagaries of historical change. While India's oldness was considered an advantage in facing the twentieth-century experience of radical newness, it was, crucially for Nehru, also the principal problematic of both his historical writings and his political agenda: how to make the old new, transform the ancient into the modern, to reanimate and invigorate a stagnant society bearing the inherited weight of the millennia. Despite his rhetoric of “catching up,” then, Nehru did not seek to erase the different temporal orders that, through their interaction and mutual constitution, made up the single plane of “world history.” Rather, he thought that a modern India, and a nonaligned Third World more generally, could provide a “countertempo” to a West he identified as both dynamic and reckless.Footnote 108
In “The Basic Approach,” Nehru offers only vague suggestions—“education and health are of high importance”—regarding how the Indian state could cultivate “the quality of human beings.” It is, indeed, unclear how any state could foster such an ideal-type Nehruvian subject: autonomous yet selfless, rational and temporally oriented. This task of “human development” was, moreover, undercut by the disastrous inadequacy of expenditure outlays for primary education and health care in the first two five-year plans, which prioritized industrialization and agricultural production. This foundational neglect was due, at least in part, to Nehru's obsession with keeping pace with the “spirit of the age” and the industrialization it demanded, as well as the affective value he saw in large-scale highly visible projects of modernization.
CONCLUSION
In his reading of Glimpses of World History, Chris Bayly located Nehru as a key link between a pre-1914 “Idealist Age” and a complex interwar ideological brew marked by the competition and intermingling of socialism, communitarian liberalism, fascism and eugenics.Footnote 109 The interwar turn to “world history” was vey different to its post-1945 liberal manifestations or the later turn-of-the-century historiography that Bayly played a central role in reviving and popularizing. Nehru was intellectually promiscuous, and his thought was characterized by a diversity of influences and impulses, not all of which were consistent or commensurate. For example, the temporal structure of Indian history as a series of assimilations that Nehru presented in both Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India was characterized by both a Marxist dynamic and a Darwinian social evolutionism. Yet these were modified with an appeal to the role of individual conscience in history, amounting to what Bayly, borrowing from Gopal, calls “half-liberal, half-Marxist” history.Footnote 110 As a historian and politician, Nehru was acutely aware of the context, both material and psychological, in which he found himself operating. He recognized the ways in which—and continuously struggled to determine the extent to which—he was shaped by his context. Yet he equally devoted his energies to shaping the context around him, although, as argued above, he increasingly recognized the limitations of conscious human action to control history.Footnote 111 This paradoxical problematic has colored subsequent interpretations of Nehru's legacy: his defenders portray him as being undone by his context while his detractors attribute to him unhindered agency.
This article has explored Nehru's concern with change over time and the way in which his thought worked through notions of temporality and historicity. I have suggested that approaching Nehru the political practitioner via Nehru the historian offers a productive avenue for reconstructing Nehru as a political thinker and the Nehruvian as a set of normative organizing principles for political life. Precisely because the Nehruvian was so foundational to the trajectory of postcolonial India, it remains a principal reference point or perhaps even the general framework for political contestation today. The 2014 electoral triumph of Narendra Modi's BJP, for example, led to a flood of commentators declaring the long-delayed death of the Nehruvian consensus. But it remains unclear whether this signifies a genuine paradigm shift. Indeed, the question of foundations was one that animated Nehru as both a historian and a practitioner of power. An intellectual history of modern India should interrogate the question of foundations and endeavor to understand the ways in which ideological innovations on both sides of the colonial/postcolonial divide have inaugurated new historical sequences and continue to structure and animate political life.Footnote 112
What further complicates the writing of an intellectual history of a figure like Nehru is that, as Bayly observed, he subscribed to and modified “a whole host of sometimes contradictory doctrines.”Footnote 113 This article has not attempted a comprehensive ideological reconstruction, nor has it sought to reconcile the tensions and contradictions in Nehru's thought. Indeed, such tensions and contradictions were what characterized Nehru as a thinker; one of his primary maneuvers both intellectually and politically was to paper over or seek to transcend contradictions, as we have seen above in his attempt to develop socialism by ethical means and in his approach to caste. By bringing together Nehru the historian and Nehru the political actor—along with the incommensurability of these two cognitive perspectives—this article has revisited a wide range of issues. My aim was to understand the implications of his historicism for the state project he sought to implement, and to demonstrate how a concern with linking the past, present and future was a common feature of his thought.
