Last week I read the book, NEHRU, by Shashi Tharoor. Nehru himself called his own notes regarding the country and its history a discovery (The Discovery of India), while Tharoor calls his book - the invention of India. Nehru, a romantic who believed in India's legacy and its unity among diversity through its long history, did not think that he created India when he raised the Indian national flag on the Red Fort on 14th August 1947. Tharoor probably prefers to say that India was invented on that day and the book analyzes the impact of the personality of Nehru in the county's creation and evolution. The author says that the book is not a scholarly work but a reinterpretation of the life of Nehru and the inheritance left by that great personality for us modern Indians. It is an immensely readable book.
The book starts by tracing Nehru's unremarkable childhood, education and early political career when he was influenced by the Mahatma. Greatness was slowly thrust upon him and he became a personality that was later to become completely indistinguishable from his country. Nehru became India for the rest of the world. The book is not a biography of Nehru but tries to see how his beliefs shaped and how those affected India. It goes to the credit of the author that he has not tried to indulge too much into the personal controversies regarding Nehru's life like his relation with Edwina. The book is full of interesting quotes from Nehru's contemporaries and his biographers and it also forces the reader to compare his/her opinions and beliefs with the arguments presented in the book. Maybe these are not completely original inferences from the author but it is nice to see such inferences together in one place and re-evaluate our own beliefs after reading them.
One of the things that really interested me after reading the book is the author's analysis of the four pillars of Nehru's (and India's) system - democratic institution building, secularism, social economics and the policy of non-alignment. Nehru built and nurtured the democracy in India as we know it today. In the initial fragile decades after the birth of the nation, he ensured that India did not break apart. We are still holding on to secularism. Nehru believed that caste and religion will fade away in the modern India he was building. He lived in a time were people removed caste references from their names. In the modern India, we are back to the divide and rule politics where caste and religion are deciding the fate of governments.
Tharoor makes some interesting points regarding the Nehru economics. After centuries of rule by people who primarily came to the country to do business; the independent India and its leader Nehru did not trust opening the market to outsiders. Self sufficiency and self reliance came into prominence and resulted in the country's progress in science and education. Nehru was also enamored by the socialist ways of the Soviet Union and China and believed in central control and planning. The author remarks that this resulted in a society with extreme political freedom but limited entrepreneurial freedom due to a system of licenses, permits and quotas. This prepared a fertile ground to corruption and inefficiency. Quoting Tharoor - 'For most of the first five decades since independence, India pursued an economic policy of subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation and distributing poverty. Nehru called this socialism.'
Nehru also gave shape to the core of India's foreign policy - the non-alignment, a policy that gave India a definite identity among the developing countries in the post-colonial decades. But in the present unipolar world, this policy has become almost obsolete. Hence in total, to quote Tharoor - 'Nearly four decades after Nehru's death, the consensus he constructed has frayed: democracy endures, secularism is besieged, non-alignment is all but forgotten and socialism barely clings on'.
I would like to quote the words of Winston Churchill as mentioned by Tharoor in the book - 'India is not a country or a nation .... It is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.' But the British administration, of which Churchill was a part, certainly made India a country and Nehru glued it and created 'Indians'. He was an extraordinary personality and and the modern Indian society owes a lot to him. Let me conclude by quoting Tharoor one last time- 'If we succeed, we must acknowledge that he laid the foundation for such a success; if we fail, we will find in Nehru many of the seeds of our failure'.
Title of the Book: NEHRU - The Invention of India
Author: Shashi Tharoor
Publisher: Penguin Books
The book starts by tracing Nehru's unremarkable childhood, education and early political career when he was influenced by the Mahatma. Greatness was slowly thrust upon him and he became a personality that was later to become completely indistinguishable from his country. Nehru became India for the rest of the world. The book is not a biography of Nehru but tries to see how his beliefs shaped and how those affected India. It goes to the credit of the author that he has not tried to indulge too much into the personal controversies regarding Nehru's life like his relation with Edwina. The book is full of interesting quotes from Nehru's contemporaries and his biographers and it also forces the reader to compare his/her opinions and beliefs with the arguments presented in the book. Maybe these are not completely original inferences from the author but it is nice to see such inferences together in one place and re-evaluate our own beliefs after reading them.
One of the things that really interested me after reading the book is the author's analysis of the four pillars of Nehru's (and India's) system - democratic institution building, secularism, social economics and the policy of non-alignment. Nehru built and nurtured the democracy in India as we know it today. In the initial fragile decades after the birth of the nation, he ensured that India did not break apart. We are still holding on to secularism. Nehru believed that caste and religion will fade away in the modern India he was building. He lived in a time were people removed caste references from their names. In the modern India, we are back to the divide and rule politics where caste and religion are deciding the fate of governments.
Tharoor makes some interesting points regarding the Nehru economics. After centuries of rule by people who primarily came to the country to do business; the independent India and its leader Nehru did not trust opening the market to outsiders. Self sufficiency and self reliance came into prominence and resulted in the country's progress in science and education. Nehru was also enamored by the socialist ways of the Soviet Union and China and believed in central control and planning. The author remarks that this resulted in a society with extreme political freedom but limited entrepreneurial freedom due to a system of licenses, permits and quotas. This prepared a fertile ground to corruption and inefficiency. Quoting Tharoor - 'For most of the first five decades since independence, India pursued an economic policy of subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation and distributing poverty. Nehru called this socialism.'
Nehru also gave shape to the core of India's foreign policy - the non-alignment, a policy that gave India a definite identity among the developing countries in the post-colonial decades. But in the present unipolar world, this policy has become almost obsolete. Hence in total, to quote Tharoor - 'Nearly four decades after Nehru's death, the consensus he constructed has frayed: democracy endures, secularism is besieged, non-alignment is all but forgotten and socialism barely clings on'.
I would like to quote the words of Winston Churchill as mentioned by Tharoor in the book - 'India is not a country or a nation .... It is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.' But the British administration, of which Churchill was a part, certainly made India a country and Nehru glued it and created 'Indians'. He was an extraordinary personality and and the modern Indian society owes a lot to him. Let me conclude by quoting Tharoor one last time- 'If we succeed, we must acknowledge that he laid the foundation for such a success; if we fail, we will find in Nehru many of the seeds of our failure'.
Title of the Book: NEHRU - The Invention of India
Author: Shashi Tharoor
Publisher: Penguin Books
1 comment:
Interesting to know.
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