The Discovery of India
Jawaharlal Nehru (3rd Edition; 1947)
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| © FG |
There must be some messages lost in translation today as we see leaders entangled in the 1MDB fiasco also try to appear heady and statesman-like under the scrutiny of the press and the glaring flash of the journalist-photographers.
We also were told that Nehru wrote his book whilst in prison. Amma was so fascinated with Gandhi and Nehru that she displayed a clay figurine of them in our living room so as to as remind her children to be useful citizens.
Then we grew up...
Mixing with people who grew up in India and now with the access to information overload, the squeaky clean image of Gandhi, Nehru and Nehru's dynasty has lost its lustre. There is no shortage of gossips about Nehru's private life, his alleged affairs and even tertiary syphilis being the cause of his death, not cardiac arrest. Even his ancestry is questioned. The conspiracy theorists assert he is a closet Muslim and grew up in the slums of Allahabad. In real life, he was a Kashmiri Brahmin and a son of a lawyer.
In the post-truth era, another set of accusations are being hurled at him; that he was a Fabian. The Fabian movement portrays the image of being a socialist movement that tries to bring socialistic changes gradually through democracy without resorting to revolutionary overthrows. The conspiracy theorists do not buy that. Their real intention, they allege, as depicted in its coat of arms, says it all. It is an emblem representing a wolf in sheep's clothing. They are now accused of being part of the Cabal movement that tries to send the civilised as we know into one that of anarchy!
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| The Fabian Society
Wolf in Sheep's Clothing,
the original coat of arms.
(Wiki Commons)
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A nonagenarian, 94 to be exact, loaned this book to me. The book, complete with watermarks and all the battle wounds of time had been in his collection for a long time. Being born in Quetta, in the state of Baluchistan when Pakistan did not exist, Partition is a distant but a harrowing memory for him. Even though he was safe under the tropical skies of Malaya then, he lost many of his family members during the 1947 bloodshed. Many of his them bear witness to India's own holocaust. Interestingly, he still reads his Hindu devotional hymns in the Urdu script.
I cannot believe that Nehru's opus magnum was written in prison. At a time when information was scarce, especially in prison when access was limited, his knowledge on the history, religious text and the philosophy of India was phenomenal. This book was his look on the origin of a piece of land called India, how she evolved to reach great heights and her subsequent tumble to the mighty brutal forces of the Northern Muslim invaders and later the British.
When I announced that I was reading the book, somebody remarked, "Ah, a confused book written by a man whose administration was equally confused!" To be fair, this book was written by a politician, not a scholar. His outlook had to be fair in keeping with the changing of the times then. At a time when racial tensions were running high, and the support of the whole of the country was vital, he needed to appear bipartisan.
It is unfathomable that a civilisation so advanced could be brought to its knees. Members of such a race should be enslaved and be outclassed by others who were barbaric by comparison. If Ibn Khaldun's words are anything else to go by, this is precisely what he was trying to say - that a primitive tribe would yearn to be like the civilised, work to be like them, soon to be decadent like the masters and soon to be outclassed by another. Critics had a field day condemning Nehru's stance of the Afghan and Moghul invaders who, despite their conquests, decide to stay in India. This is in sharp contrast to the English who looted and basically relocated India's wealth. The detractors assert that the Muslim invaders were never awed by Indian's civilisation but instead were mesmerised with wisdom elsewhere, Arabic world, for instance. The British did try to bring modernity to India which by that time had slumbered off while the rest of the world was changing, technologically and economically. They too, for the first time, did unite the subcontinent under a single banner to stir their emotions to dig deep into their psyche to reassess their own culture.
The book is the reflection of Nehru's discovery of his motherland and an avenue for us as readers to discover a bit of his biography - his imprisonment, the death of his wife and his sincere desire for his country to turn up big and mighty like some of the big nations around the world (e.g. like Russia and China) which arose majestically from ashes of destruction.
I enjoyed the book indeed. The poetic yet straightforward descriptions of simple and sometimes painful things in life linger on the mind like an ear-worm.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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