In Nehru’s Shadow: Between India and Politics
By MANASH BHATTACHARJEE

In the winter of 1997 I had met Professor Sudipta Kaviraj and talked to him about my M.Phil dissertation on Nehru. As the fruitful discussion—which partly hovered around Nehru’s The Discovery of India—was drawing to a close, Kaviraj suddenly remarked, ‘I think we should all discover our own India.’

I was quite struck by a political theorist invoking the need for such an inventive mode to narrate and investigate the relationship between the self and the nation. In fact, this is precisely what Nehru had previously done in The Discovery of India. Almost forty years before Benedict Anderson gave us the description of the nation as ‘an imagined political community,’ (1) Nehru had constructed a nationalist history through which he wanted to ‘discover’ India.

This attempt to discover India broadly meant two kinds of questions for Nehru. The first kind was: ‘What is this India...? What did she represent in the past...? Does she represent anything vital now...? How does she fit into the modern world?’(2) Here, India appears to be empty of content except historical time, almost waiting for Nehru’s re-presentation to give it a shape and dress it up for modernity. The other kind of question for Nehru was: ‘Did I know India?’(3) Here the self is seized by a self-doubt which only the knowledge about India can erase. Both the first and objective part of Nehru’s desire to discover India as well as the second and subjective part involves a similar problem: that of re-presentation. India has to be re-presented by meanings which would bring it into a being which the self can relate to (in Nehru’s case, also rule!). The question of re-presentation itself hinged upon Nehru’s overall desire to make India put on ‘the garb of modernity’.(4)

Let us further read how Nehru engages with the idea of the Indian nation in The Discovery of India to place certain moments of the text in the overall perspective. We propose to show that Nehru does not strictly define or re-present India in nationalist terms. The aim here is also to show that, just as Stuart Hall has pointed out how the notion of ‘The West’ is also ‘an idea, a concept,’(5) Nehru’s concept of ‘India’ is also a representational mode which seeks an independent classification, and not the borrowed generality of being an ‘Orient’. But unlike the voyages of discovery of the globe and its subsequent domination by Europe, which brought forth the entire discourse of Orientalism, Nehru’s is an inward voyage. It was also a voyage which, unlike the dominant sociological attitude of Western civilization, is based upon a historical self-seeking discourse of meaning. Hence, Nehru’s discovery bears the crucial marks of resistance and self-evolution against this sociologi-cal (and not the philosophical) West, which created the representational narrative of the East and the West.

The Mexican poet-critic Octavio Paz described Nehru as one who ‘belonged to a double anti-tradition.’(6) Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Nehru developed close links with European culture and, as Paz points out, ‘drew inspiration from the rebellious and heterodox thought of the West.’(7) On the other hand, Nehru’s other lineage is traced by Paz back to his ancestors who ‘had frequented the Mogul court and had absorbed Persian and Arabic heritage,’ and to his family tradition from which he had inherited ‘a vein of heterodoxy vis-à-vis Hindu traditionalism.’(8) Though, by his own admission, India was in Nehru’s ‘blood’, he ‘approached her like an alien critic,’ and ‘(t)o some extent... came to her via the West.’(9) This unique predicament of a cultural identity, which is part insider and part outsider, undergoes a partial sense of apology. It is also inflicted upon them by so-called ‘culturally rooted’ people, who force them, in the words of Bauman, ‘to prove the legality of their presence.’(10) The demand for such legality is cultural in nature, and throws open a debate about the relationship between culture, history and ethics. Colonialism further intervenes in this debate in a complicated manner.

Interestingly, the first issue Nehru takes up with regard to the colonial issue is the writing of history:

History is almost always written by the victors and conquerors and gives their viewpoint; or, at any rate, the victors’ version is given prominence and holds the field. Very probably, all the early records we have of the Aryans in India, their epics and traditions, glorify the Aryans and are unfair to the people of the country whom they subdued. No individual can wholly rid himself of his racial outlook and cultural limitations and, when there is conflict between races and countries, even an attempt at impartiality is considered a betrayal of one’s people.... The overpowering need of the moment is to justify one’s own actions and condemn and blacken those of the enemy.(11)

So Nehru accounts for the inherent biases behind colonial history. What about nationalist historiography?
‘Indians’, he wrote, ‘are peculiarly liable to accept tradition and report as history, uncritically and without sufficient examination.’(12) But ‘the impact of science and the modern world have brought a greater appreciation of facts, a more critical faculty, a weighing of evidence, a refusal to accept tradition merely because it is tradition.’(13) However, Nehru is quick to point out that many ‘competent historians... err on the other side and their work is more a meticulous chronicle of facts than living history.’(14) He does not explain what this living history would be, but elsewhere he speaks of the need for a ‘living philosophy’ which should not remain ‘unconnected with the day-to-day problems of life and the needs of men and women.’(15) We can read it as an understanding of history which takes into account present-day issues and how these issues re-orient our need to re-examine the past and come out with new perspectives. This is precisely what Nehru himself undertakes to do in The Discovery of India, which is unique in its attempt to look at the past in the light of present-day concerns. In this way, we find Nehru trying to grasp how ‘nationalist’ historiography might come to address what Benedict Anderson calls the ‘philosophical poverty’ of nationalism.(16) In an Indian writing of history, Nehru would definitely not be in favour of a right-wing glorification of the past. He would also steer away from the Orientalist notions about India’s cultural attributes and, for that very reason, would not hesitate to call India both ‘metaphysical’ and ‘religious’, as well as highlighting the traditions of reason in the philosophies of the past.