NEHRU AS A HISTORIAN

DR. D. ANJANEYULU

Jawaharlal Nehru was not a professional historian. Nor did he have the formal, academic training to prepare himself as a historian. But, if academic training is to be the sole or even the main criterion, honoured figures like Julius Caesar, Edward Gibbon, Lord Macaulay and Winston Churchill would have to be denied the title.

It is well-known that Nehru studied for the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge, before being called to the Bar in England. But an interest in the study of History, Biography and Politics had already been inculcated in him by his Irish tutor at his residence, Ananda Bhavan, in Allahabad. In addition to this tutor, who was a Theosophist, young Jawaharlal was also influenced by his admiration for Mrs. Annie Besant, the leader of the Theosophists.

If there was one thing, more than another, by which he made a mark as a student at Harrow, it was not by his academic achievements, but by his lively interest in world affairs. It is worth recalling that on one occasion (around 1905 or so) when the class-master asked the boys about the British Cabinet of the day, Nehru was the only one who was able to reel out the names of all the members of the new ministry of Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, the Liberal leader. He was also much excited by the victory of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War.

It was again during his stay at Harrow that Nehru received a prize in the shape of books, The Garibaldi Trilogy, by the eminent Cambridge historian, Prof. George Macaulay Trevelyan (who was, incidentally, a great-nephew of Lord Macaulay). He read this book with keen interest because of his attraction towards the nature of freedom no less than the heroic figure of Garibaldi. After which, he needed nobody’s goading or even guidance to read the classics of world History, especially these with a bearing on the phenomenon of political freedom, and also on the concept of liberation, in a philosophic sense.

Before going into the question of Nehru’s philosophy of history or style of historiography, it might be useful to mention his main works that could be broadly classified as history. The first of them is the Glimpses of World History originally written in the form of letters to his daughter, during the years 1930-33, when Indira Priyadarshini was in her teens. They were, in fact, first published as Letters from a Father to his Daughter. Another was the Discovery of India, published in 1945, which was written while he was in jail at the Ahmednagar Fort. These could be considered as the primary items on the basis of which he could be discussed as a historian. There are also a few secondary items, like Soviet Russia, a collection of articles incorporating the impressions of his visit to the Soviet Union (published in 1929), and World Crisis, a collection of his speeches and writings in the ’Thirties, mostly political, but not altogether devoid of historical interest.

To take the earliest title first, Glimpses of World History was obviously inspired by the example of H.G. Wells’ Outline of History. It is, however more personal and intimate in its tone, which is understandable because it was meant to be read, initially at least, by the author’s school-going daughter. It is also less scholarly and precise in the assimilation of facts, which is equally understandable, for the simple reason that Nehru was no scholar or scientist, in the way in which Wells was acknowledged to be.

Nehru’s Glimpses, however, astonishes the reader by its grand sweep and marvellous range, lit by an intensely personal vision of the past and the future, allied to a vivid and constant awareness of the present. Written in the enforced leisure of a British jail (Nainital, in U.P. in this case), like almost all his other works, with no access to reference books and libraries, it could not escape the criticism of being vague in some places and slapdash in others. It has the artist’s personal frame of reference, which was one of the main sources of its beauty.

Free from religious and other traditional, affinities of the linguistic or parechial sort, so glaring in some historians of the past and of the present, the whole panorama of the past and of the present, the whole panorama of the past comes under a new focus here. The living past is often separated from the dead by the author in his effort to underline its relevance to the present.

The Discovery of India, which can be seen as a kind of sequel to the Glimpses and the Autobiography, is admittedly a more mature work than the first. It is described by Sardar K.M. Panikkar, a rare type of historian himself, as “something of a pilgrim’s progress in history”. An apt and happy expression, that has an inspired quality about it. He adds: “Its great value lies not so much in its ordered narrative, or the literary beauty of many of its passages, or even in the reactions of a modern mind with a rationalist Marxian background to the uneven development of India’s social and political life, but in the perspective which it gives to the chaotic accumulation of facts, which goes by the name of Indian history.”

Facts are, no doubt, very important in history, but they are not enough. In the words of that perceptive historian, the late Prof. E.H. Carr, “The historian without his facts is rootless; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless”. Which underscores the need for interpretation and re-interpretation of the facts of history by different historians from time to time. Nehru’s excursions in the held of history are neither rootless nor meaningless.

That there might be, and are, quite a few factual inaccuracies in the Glimpses and The Discovery is easily granted. But errors resulting from and untenable interpretation of those facts are fewer. Nehru, the intellectual, is freer from provincial, parochial and other kinds of prejudice than most others. The British journalist and author, Tony Wintringham, compares Nehru to the French Prim Minister, Guizet and Thiers, who had also tried their hand at history in their time and finds them wanting, because of their in-built prejudices, in addition to their innumerable accuracies.

In a comparison of Nehru with Churchill as students and writers of history, Wintringham prefers Nehru on all counts. While Churchill was a rhetorician and little- Englander, aggressive and emphatic, Nehru was the closest approximation to a citizen of the world, gentle and restrained, a poet in prose. Nehru thought and wrote not as a champion of this empire or that, but of “the future kingdom of Man”.

Wintringham adds, for good measure, his personal view that Nehru wrote not only better history, but better English. There might be other opinions on this, but his opinion can’t be easily ignored.

Nehru the historian and contemplative man of affairs bears a more meaningful comparison with Arnold J. Toynbee, the philosopher of history. There is a fairly close similarity between them in the range of their interest in and approach to the subject of civilizations of the world – modern and ancient. Neither of them was quite satisfied with many of the existing social, religious and other institutions, like the church and the traditional authoritarian state. Both were humanists, struggling to find a way of assuring freedom and dignity to man, for the full development of his personality.

Both Nehru and Toynbee were dissatisfied with expressions of nationalism as they found them. Himself a nationalist, Nehru’s impatience with narrow, resurgent nationalism was only slightly less than his indignation against “imperialism and racialism”. “Nationalism is good in its place”, he said in his Discovery of India, “but it is an unreliable friend and an unsafe historian”. Toynbee studied all the past attempts at establishing a world state and a world church (the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church) and traced their failure to hubris or pride, the racial arrogance with which the Europeans treated the Asians and the Africans. Retribution could be avoided only by a total change of attitude, a genuine humility and a sense of brotherhood with all mankind.

At the outset of his historical writing, Toynbee regarded religions as myths to be explained in terms of civilisations; he ended up by explaining civilizations in terms of religion. In an agonising re-appraisal, he pleaded for a change of heart, based on the Buddhist view of “Karuna”. No wonder, he became a practising Buddhist.

Nehru, the agnostic, had also thought deeply about the human predicament. He believed in the “spirit of man’ which to him was unconquerable, despite all the adversities. Toynbee stressed the “freedom of choice”, peculiar to man. Neither of them believed in the philosophic, fatalistic, determinism of Oswald Spengler or the economic determinism of Karl Marx as a valid explanation of all social, political and cultural phenomena.

The question still remains: How is the modern civilization (be it Western or Eastern) to be saved? And how far do Toynbee and Nehru as historians agree on the way out of the crisis facing it?

If Nehru had some kind of theory it is derived from a study of Indian history and expressed in terms of continuity of Indian culture, based on the principle of “Unity in diversity” and peaceful, if not friendly, co-existence;

“In politics”, said Toynbee, “establish a constitutional, cooperative system of world government”. Nehru .was close to this in avoiding a clash between the Power Blocs. In economics, they both favoured working compromises between free enterprise and socialism. Both believed in putting the secular superstructure on to religious foundations. It makes the state equidistant to all religious denominations, and does not prevent the reinforcement of spiritual foundations. The philosophy of history has found in one (i.e. Toynbee) a deep exponent and in the other (Nehru’s) a dynamic exemplar.

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