Colonial History of India

[acharya]

A Bunch of Old Letters — an introduction

Penguin India is republishing in May 2005 a remarkable collection of letters selected and edited by Jawaharlal Nehru and first published by Asia Publishing House in 1958. The title India's first Prime Minister gave the book wasA Bunch of Old Letters: Being Mostly Written to Jawaharlal Nehru and Some Written by Him. In this introduction to the new edition,Sunil Khilnani, political scientist and writer, makes a persuasive case for why these letters should continue to be of interest to readers today.

We see welling up again and again the peculiar tense mix that constituted Gandhi's long relationship with Nehru: intimate personal regard and concern, and profound political and temperamental differences.

— Photos: The Hindu Photo Library.

Nehru and Jinnah had fundamental political differences.

THIS COLLECTION of letters, selected and edited by Jawaharlal Nehru, and spanning three decades from the birth of his daughter Indira in 1917 to the achievement of India's Independence, was first published in November 1958. Nehru had for some years contemplated such a collection, and he set himself to work on it when, after more than a decade in the Prime Minister's office, he was feeling particularly disaffected with political life. In April 1958, he had announced to his parliamentary colleagues — as, periodically, he was wont to do — that he `felt rather tired and stale and would like a change'. As Prime Minister, his unceasing work gave him `little time for quiet thinking', he told them, and the moment had come to step down from office. He was dissuaded from this drastic step, as he had been on earlier occasions, and found himself instead planning a holiday in Manali, with Indira. Retreating to the hills, he took with him several bundles of old letters together with a stack of books. In between reading (and extensively annotating Gunnar Myrdal) he sifted through those letters, in a reflective mood, hoping both to renew contact with the impulses and atmosphere of the national movement, and to find some refuge from routine politics.

He longed for the real leisure needed to write a book. Instead, his authorial energies went into the making of this collection. Once selected, he instructed his private secretary, M.O. Mathai, to have the letters retyped (with spelling errors corrected, dates checked) and arranged chronologically; and he then went about preparing explanatory notes, to be inserted wherever he felt necessary. In preparing the edition, Nehru was hawk-eyed (in discussions with the publisher, even the thickness and quality of paper were specified). And yet, characteristically, Nehru chose to present the collection with knowing diffidence — reflected in a casual title that dismayed his publisher, who had hoped for a more weighty, prime ministerial label. He mused in his introduction as to whether the selection made was even worthwhile: the letters belonged to a period now remote, he protested.

Yet reading them today, almost half a century after their first publication, and even longer after most of them were first written, they still speak with significance and life. The letters encompass some of the most charged years both of Nehru's life and of India's twentieth century history — years of personal loss, of imprisonment, of political frustration, of the achievement of freedom tinged with the defeat of the hope of a united India.

We have tended to see and understand Nehru through his own words — through his books, and through the still-growing volumes of his Selected Works. He stands, with Gandhi and Tagore, as one of the great Indian letter writers of modern times. Yet this volume shows him from a different angle. Of the 368 letters that Nehru chose to publish in A Bunch of Old Letters, just 38 are written by Nehru himself. But the skill of the great letter-writer, as that of the conversationalist, is not only what they themselves write, but what they are able to get others to write to them. In these letters we get a sense of how Nehru appeared to colleagues as well as antagonists (and sometimes, as with Subhas Chandra Bose, we can see them changing from colleagues to antagonists).

Letters to a person can tell us even more about a person than sometimes their own letters can. Nehru was of course ever an artful arranger of himself, wishing always to produce his own version of how others saw him — and this too is what makes this collection revealing (it tells something about how he wished to be seen). There are a fair number of letters fulsome in their praise and outright flattery. But what is more remarkable is how many Nehru included that are sharply critical of him, often in very personal ways.

Rich as they are in their substance, these letters reveal as much by way of their form and method. They are a testament to one of the more striking facets of the national movement: how, at its best, it was a constant, many-stranded conversation — sometimes heated and piqued — in which the steady exchange of letters served often as a way of, as Nehru put it, `influencing one another'. From argument to counter-argument, letters were the medium through which ideas were exchanged, disagreements expressed, friendships or connections sustained — and sometimes broken (as was to happen between Nehru and Bose, and then Jinnah).

Nehru and Gandhi



Nehru always had a free and frank exchange of views with Mahatma Gandhi .

In Nehru's mind, the correspondence with Gandhi certainly formed the crux of the collection (Nehru had originally intended to publish just the Gandhi letters). The letters between the two observed, as Gandhi put it, a `clock-like regularity' (p.125). Gandhi appears here as an avuncular counsellor: worrying about Nehru's financial independence (`Shall I arrange for some money for you? ... Will you be correspondent for a newspaper? Or will you take up a professorship?' (p. 42.)); as a spiritual or moral guide (`... religion is after all a matter for each individual and then too a matter of the heart ... I do not mind reason being the sole test even though it often bewilders one and lands one in errors that border on superstition' (p. 44)); and as a political boss (`You are going too fast ... I mind your encouraging mischief-makers and hooligans ... In every struggle bands of men who would submit to discipline are needed. You seem to be overlooking this factor in being careless about your instruments' (p. 59).

Gandhi is present too as an intellectual antagonist, yet of a special kind. We see welling up again and again the peculiar tense mix that constituted his long relationship with Nehru: intimate personal regard and concern, and profound political and temperamental differences. While they never minimised these differences, and sometimes expressed them with scathing frankness, they never broke irrevocably with each another. In 1928, Gandhi writes to Nehru: `I see quite clearly that you must carry on open warfare against me and my views ... The differences between you and me appear to be so vast and radical that there seems to be no meeting ground between us'; yet Gandhi could also write in the same letter, `this dissolution of comradeship — if dissolution must come — in no way affects our personal intimacy. We have long become members of the same family ... ' (p. 61).

Ten years later, as Nehru asserted publicly his disaffection with the Congress, Gandhi wrote to him: `I can't tell you how positively lonely I feel to know that now-a-days I can't carry you with me. I know you would do much for affection. But in matters of state, there can be no surrender to affection, when the intellect rebels. My regard for you is deeper for your revolt. But that only intensifies the grief of loneliness' (p. 286). In 1945, they are still arguing over and airing their fundamental differences. Yet Gandhi, even while defending to the last his vision of India outlined in Hind Swaraj and rejecting Nehru's criticisms, was careful to once again affirm that `the bond that unites us is not only political work. It is immeasurably deeper and quite unbreakable' (p. 510).

Gandhi could be brutal in his efforts to get Nehru to appreciate how other Congress colleagues saw him. In July 1936, when relations between Nehru (then Congress President) and the Working Committee were at a particularly low point, Gandhi weighed against Nehru. The Working Committee had resigned en masse, in a gesture designed to warn Nehru away from what, in the Committee's collective resignation letter, was described as his `preaching and emphasising of socialism' (p 193), and to convey their displeasure at his haughty style of leadership. Nehru chose not to reply to the Working Committee or to Rajendra Prasad (who sent another letter along these lines), turning instead to Gandhi: `... I have found that meetings of the Working Committee exhaust me greatly; they have a devitalising effect on me' (p. 196), he wrote to his mentor, and went on to express the sense of hurt and rejection he felt from his colleagues.

Gandhi, though, was having none of it: `If they are guilty of intolerance', he replied to Nehru, `you have more than your share of it. The country should not be made to suffer your mutual intolerance' (p. 200). His Congress colleagues, Gandhi told Nehru, `have dreaded you, because of your irritability and impatience of them. They have chafed under your rebukes and magisterial manner and above all your arrogation of what has appeared to them your infallibility and superior knowledge. They feel you have treated them with scant courtesy... ' (p. 205). `Resume your humour at committee meetings', Gandhi advised, `That is your most usual role, not that of a care-worn, irritable man ready to burst on the slightest occasion' (p. 206).

Interactions with Bose

We see as well a fascinating and decisive exchange between Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose in 1938-39 — one where friendly regard did devolve into hostile rupture. Bose and Nehru were, on the face of it, allies, modernist in their inclinations, and ranged against the Gandhians: both were seen as on the left-wing of the national movement. In October 1938, Bose wrote to Nehru (then in Europe), `You cannot imagine how I have missed you all these months'. But rivalry between the two, in large part personal (or as Nehru preferred to put it, `psychological'), came to a head just a few months later, over the matter of the presidentship of the Congress. Bose had hoped that Nehru, as a `Leftist', would have supported his desire — against Gandhi's wishes — to become Congress President for a second term. Nehru in fact sided with Gandhi and the Congress Working Committee — though Nehru could not quite bring himself to join the latter in their resignations on Bose's re-election. Incensed by this equivocation and what he felt was Nehru's betrayal, Bose responded to Nehru in searingly personal terms. In his letter of 23 March, 1939, the longest included in this volume, Bose was unrestrained: `... Let me tell you that in the habit of interfering from the top, no Congress President can beat you' (p. 340). `To be brutally frank', Bose continued, `you sometimes behaved in the Working Committee as a spoilt child and often lost your temper ... You would generally hold forth for hours together and then succumb at the end. Sardar Patel and the others had a clever technique for dealing with you. They would let you talk and talk and they would ultimately finish by asking you to draft their resolution. Once you were allowed to draft the resolution, you would feel happy, no matter whose resolution it was' (p. 344).

Nehru's response was one less of anger than concession. `I talked too much and did not always behave as I should', he acknowledged. On the personal level, he was prepared to go still further: `I am an unsatisfactory human being who is dissatisfied with himself and the world, and whom the petty world he lives in does not particularly like' (p. 365-6). Yet over their differences on political principles and judgements, Nehru held his ground. He was disturbed by how easily Bose seemed to be seduced by power and office (as he put it to Bose: `One personal aspect I should like to mention also quite frankly. I felt all along that you were far too keen on re-election' (p. 360)). But he saw Bose's real weakness as his Leftist adventurism — an empty Leftism, which as the European experience had shown, could stray easily towards fascism. Nehru's unerring and instinctive ability to detect fascist inclinations is manifest here, and there was prescience in his warning to Bose in 1939: `The association of vague Leftist slogans with no clear Leftist ideology or principles has in recent years been much in evidence in Europe. It has led to Fascist development and a straying away of large sections of the public ... The fact that in international affairs you held different views from mine and did not wholly approve our condemnation of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy added to my discomfort ... I did not at all fancy the direction in which you apparently wanted us to go' (p. 360).

Exchanges with Jinnah



Regard gave way to differences between Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose.

The historically most consequential dispute captured in these pages is undoubtedly that between Jinnah and Nehru. In October 1939, Nehru wrote to Jinnah in a conciliatory manner, towards seeking a solution of the Hindu-Muslim problem: `I must confess ... that I have lost confidence in myself, though I am not usually given that way... But that does not come in the way of my trying my utmost to help to find a solution and I shall certainly do so. With your goodwill and commanding position in the Muslim League that should not be so difficult as people imagine... May I say how happy I was to meet you in Delhi ' (pp. 405-6).

Yet we see the distance between the two men being articulated, almost measurably, in the rhythm of letters exchanged between them. Here again, beyond the soon palpable mutual personal dislike, there is a disagreement of political conviction that is clearly stated — turning in this case on the fundamental issue of political representation. By December 1939, Nehru was writing to Jinnah that he now realised `that the gulf that separated us in our approach to public problems was very great' (p. 418). Nehru refused the logic of Jinnah's demand that the Congress treat the Muslim League as the authoritative and representative organisation of India's Muslims, a logic which placed immutable identities above changeable interests.

For Nehru, it was imperative that the Congress should be a movement without exclusive barriers to entry, and should be potentially open to all who subscribed to its principles. `You have rightly pointed out on many occasions that the Congress does not represent everybody in India', Nehru wrote: `Of course not. It does not represent those who disagree with it, whether they are Muslims or Hindus... So also the Muslim League, as any other organisation, represents its own members and sympathisers. But there is the vital difference that while the Congress by its constitution has its membership open to all who subscribe to its objective and method, the Muslim League is only open to Muslims' (p. 419).

Jinnah, perhaps recognising the force of Nehru's argument, in his reply merely evaded the issue of representation, resorting instead to exasperation: `If this resolution of Congress cannot be modified in any way and you say that personally you would be entirely opposed to any attempt at variation of it and as you make it clear that you are wholly unable to treat with the Muslim League as the authoritative and representative organisation of the Mussalmans of India, may I know in these circumstances what do you expect or wish me to do' (p. 421).

If the drama of the national movement animates many of the letters here, there are also many more that extend beyond this stage. The network of Nehru's correspondents was vast, and included intellectual and literary luminaries (George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Ernst Toller, Romain Rolland, Harold Laski), British political figures (Brailsford, Cripps, Ellen Wilkinson, Eleanor Rathbone, Hewlett Johnson, George Schuster, Lord Lothian, Roger Baldwin), as well as Annie Besant, Rabindranath Tagore, General and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Moustapha El-Nahas, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Claire Booth Luce, Essie Robeson. In his lengthy disputation with Lord Lothian over India's future direction, Nehru remarked: `Dogmas irritate me, whether they are religious or political or economic, and my mind is always searching for the path I should follow. I try not to close it. That makes me welcome all the more personal contacts' (p. 134). Indeed, personal exchanges, with people across the globe and in all walks of life, were essential to him — helping to articulate his thoughts, understand an issue, develop an argument.

The letters are not all weighted with politics and ideas. With some correspondents — Sarojini Naidu, Edward Thompson (father of the great historian, E.P. Thompson) — there is a refreshingly bantering and irreverent tone. Thompson's letters are a wonderful bombardment of insight and triviality: he takes Nehru to task for his `Napoleon-worship' in Nehru's Glimpses of World History, and assails him for his lack of generosity towards the British in that work, especially when compared with that `superbly magnanimous book, your autobiography' (p. 239). He urges Nehru to help educate public opinion against the destruction of wildlife; he warns Nehru that `Nothing can prevent your being increasingly surrounded by a circus such as besets Mahatmaji! It is your fate' — and he reminds him of Aurobindo: `Over a hundred asses are going to salaam profoundly... as they are ushered into the presence (and out of it) of a man who asserts that he is the soul reincarnate with "Mother"... How can you do anything with a land where such utter Mumbo Jumbo triumphs... Yet Aurobindo was once a brilliant intellect' (pp. 213-14).

And he thanks Nehru for a copy of Nehru's Autobiography, inscribed `to my friend Edward Thompson': `I know you are a man who carries reticence to an almost inhuman degree: and that what you say means everything that can be put into the words' (p. 293). Nehru, for his part, could find with Thompson a certain candour: writing to him in 1940, Nehru noted that `I always feel that I can be of more use to India outside India. The feeling that I do not quite fit in here, pursues me and depresses me' (p. 424).

There is also the tantalisingly curtailed correspondence between Nehru and the painter Amrita Sher-Gil. She tells him, after he visits her studio: ` I don't think you were interested in my painting really. You looked at my pictures without seeing them', and she thanks Nehru for sending her his autobiography: `As a rule I dislike biographies and autobiographies. They ring false. Pomposity or exhibitionism. But I think I will like yours. You are able to discard your halo occasionally. You are capable of saying "When I saw the sea for the first time" when others would say "When the sea saw me for the first time"' (p. 257). `I should like to have known you better', Sher-Gil wrote, `I am always attracted to people who are integral enough to be inconsistent without discordancy and who don't trail viscous threads of regret behind them'.

Nehru thought intently about the nature of letters. They were in many ways the metronome of his life, and for long periods — not least the altogether almost ten years he spent in prison — they were his only link to the world.

Letters, he once wrote to his 17-year-old daughter, are `bits of the personality of the writer, quivering shadows of the real self'. `They are also, or they at least endeavour to represent and to mirror', he continued, `something of the personality of the person written to, for the writer is full of the person he is writing to. Thus a real letter is a strange and revealing amalgam of the two — the one who writes and the one who receives'. Peering over Nehru's shoulder to read the letters collected here, we find again and again this mysterious, revelatory mix. — Copyright: Sunil Khilnani 2005

(Sunil Khilnani is Professor of Politics and Director, South Asian Studies, at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, in Washington D.C. His publications include The Idea of India, 1997 and Civil Society: History and Possibilities, 2001. He is writing a biography of Jawaharlal Nehru.)


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