THE PERSONALITY OF NEHRU

AS REVEALED IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

V. K. J. IYENGAR

Lecturer in English, S. N. D. T. College for Women, Poona

Who has not heard the name of O. Henry, one of the most famous short story writers in English? But many of us may not know that it was in prison, he began writing “the brilliant stories that were destined to make his name honoured and loved where ever the English language is spoken.” It is a very curious thing that many writers of repute like Sir Walter Raleigh, John Bunyan, Cervantes, Voltaire, and Oscar Wilde produced books while they were in prison, books which are still remembered today. We are told that more than a million copies of Hitler’s autobiography have been sold out and that Hitler wrote part of the book in gaol. All these men, Dale Carnegie writes, (in his Little-Known Facts About Well-known People) “went to gaol and it added to their greatness.” The latest addition to this list of great men is Nehru, for it is from behind the bars of the prison that his widely read Autobiography comes.

The writing of an autobiography is not an easy thing. The toughness of the task is perhaps best summed up in the words or Abraham Cowley: “It is a hard and nice subject for a man to write of himself. It grates his own heart to say anything of disparagement, and the reader’s ears to hear anything of praise for him.”

Though many may write their autobiographies, they somehow hesitate to publish them during their life time. But not so with Nehru. He very frankly reveals to us, his dreams and desires hopes and aspirations, doubts and conflicts, frustrations and triumphs. But the book does not exclusively trace the growth and development of the personality of its author. That is because, the book was not originally intended to be a full-fledged autobiography and its present title is only the contribution of an English publisher, and not Nehru’s own. As such there has been, in this book, “a fusion of the personal history of Nehru with our national history and we can watch the evolution of Nehru’s personality in the context of the drama of our national struggle.” Nehru’s task was indeed a hard one and as Dr. Srinivasa Iyengar puts it: “It was a razor’s edge that Jawaharlal trod upon; to expose one’s innermost feelings, to uncover one’s wounds as it were to the public, to judge one’s contemporaries, to measure a Mahatma, to assess one’s own father, to feel the pulse of one’s love to one’s mother. It was fatally easy to stumble, to slip, to fall. But Jawaharlal kept steady and seldom stumbled and never slipped or fell.” In his preface to his book, Nehru remarks–“My attempt was to trace as far as I could, my own mental development and not to write a survey of recent Indian history.” Though one is not very sure whether Nehru was fully successful in this attempt of his, one thing is definite. It is the personality of Nehru that grips our attention throughout this book.

The book opens with an account of the descent of the Nehrus from Kashmir, Jawaharlal’s somewhat solitary life during his childhood, his being for sometime brohght up under the care of English governesses and his admiration for the English language, the various festivals like the Holi, Divali and the Dussehra which always kept him in high spirits. We are next led to the precincts of Anand Bhavan and later to the swimming pool there. It is here that we get a sample of Nehru’s delight in pure fun. Referring to Dr. Sapru, a friend of his father, he tells us: “He knew no swimming and had no intention of learning it. He would sit on the first step in fifteen inches of water, refusing absolutely to go forward even to the second step, and shouting loudly if anyone tried to move him.” The impression we get of Dr. Sapru is that of a baby, nay, a big baby, that is scared of getting into the pool but delights in just splashing the water with its felt, squatting on the safe steps. But was Motilal in any way better than Sapru? “My father himself was no swimmer, but he could just manage to get the length of the pool with set teeth and violent and exhausting efforts.” There is nothing of malice or bitterness in these laughable pictures. There is just pure fun. Some of the personalities that Nehru met on his tour of Europe are so fascinating that they serve as typical examples of Nehru’s delight in poking fun at others. The picture of Mahendra Pratap, a robust optimist clad in a curious mixture of all types of dresses, which might have been suitable in the highlands of Tibet or in the Siberian plains, but also, completely out of place, in Switzerland, seen with his high Russian boots and an innumerable number of bulging pockets, inciting the curiosity of the passers by, is very hard to forget. He reminds us, as Nehru tells us, of some character out of a medieval romance, a Don Quixote who has strayed into the Twentieth Century. As a fine foil to the portrait of the delightful optimist in Mahendra Pratap, Nehru presents before us the picture of that veritable miser–Shyamaji Krishna Varma, claiming a casual kinship “With Pratap, only in so far as his bulging pockets were concerned. Incidentally it may be of interest to note that the flat in which Varma lived with his ailing wife, enveloped in dust and dirt, the whole atmosphere being shrouded by the shadow of death, reminds us of the chaotic chamber of Miss Havisham, a skeleton in the faded glory of the rich dress of a bride, in Dickens’ Great Expectations, the chamber where all signs of life are stifled and all growth and movement arrested, including the clock which has stopped at ten minutes to nine.

Other instances of Nehru’s sense of humour are his references to Gandhiji’s bania’s instinct for careful accounting, his being led like a dog with his hand cuffed to that of his friend Santanum, the British Imperialism in crushing all the initiative of the Congress when he says, “I am sure that if the Congress started a nation-wide propaganda for the greater use of soap, it would come in conflict with the Government in many places.”

Nehru is so intimately bound up with India, that her failures are his failures, her triumphs his own. It is this identification of his with India that makes him feel in the very bower of his bones, the pain and agony of the oppressed and the downtrodden. Wherever he finds people in the grip of abject poverty, whenever he finds people, the innocents, brutally massacred by the Imperialist Government, his heart bleeds, for he is full of the milk of human kindness. Here is a typical reflection of Nehru about the Indian masses: “There they were, these people, looking up with shining eyes, full of affection, with generations of suffering and poverty behind them and still pouring out their gratitude and love and asking for little in return except fellow-feeling and sympathy.” Nehru has in abundance this fellow-feeling and sympathy. It is in his description of the prisoners who are gradually stifled to death, that this aspect of Nehru is best brought to light. To Nehru, ‘the soulless regime’ of the prison officers is a torture and anguish to the mind of the prisoner. Moved by the miserable lot of these prisoners, Nehru prefers administering the punishment of death to “the killing of the spirit by degrees, the slow , vivisection of the soul.” Nehru is essentially an optimist and he has firm faith that these fine young men, imprisoned in gaols, would turn out to be valuable assets to the country, with a little training and some diversion of interest to other objects and jobs. Look at his reaction again at the two angry young men who threatened and warned him at Calcutta, against his propaganda opposing the violent activities of the terrorists: “I was long haunted by the excited faces of these two boys. Full of life and nervous energy they were; what good material, if only they turned the right way!”

Fused with this robust optimism is his reformist zeal. He wants to wipe away the social evils around him and contribute to the sanity of the social order. Speaking about the appalling number of persons sent to gaol in India, he suggests a remedy: “A more sensible economic policy, more employment and more education would soon empty our prisons.” Referring with pain to the deliberate discouragement of intellectual development in Indian prisons, he reflects: “From the point of view of reclaiming a prisoner and making him a fit man, his mind should be approached and diverted and he should be made literate and taught some craft.”

Nehru is no cold-blooded intellectual. He has a delicate feeling for nature and his heart leaps up when he beholds a rainbow in the sky; it begins to swing and sway in tune with a fresh blossom tossing its head in the gentle breeze. Mountain tops mantled with snow, clouds floating feathery overhead, and the rich tints of a red sunset haunt his mind. It is in recording the cyclic change in nature that Nehru is seen at his best in his book: “The winter had denuded all the trees of their leaves and they stood naked and bare….Gaunt and cheerless they (the Peepal trees) stood there till the spring air warmed them up again and sent a message of life to their innermost cells. Suddenly there would be a stir in the Peepals and I would be startled to see little bits of green peeping out all over them. How wonderful is the sudden change from bud to leaf!” There is nothing of vagueness in this description, for Nehru particularizes it by reference to the Peepal trees. We are convinced that the experience of the poet is a first hand one and so the description appears to be refreshingly original and not bookish. We are not merely told of the sudden change from winter to spring but We actually feel the fading out of winter and hear the soft whisper of spring. The description reminds us of Hopkin’s “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”, where we not merely read that the evening strains but actually feel the evening straining. The lines quoted above are a clear proof of Nehru’s keen sense of observation of the life around him. He has an artist’s eye for colour, seen in his subtly distinguishing between the reddish brown russet colour of the fresh mango leaves and the green colour they acquire later on. Nehru and Nature never grow tired of each other. Cloud-gazing was his favourite pastime in prison, and specially so during the monsoon months, when he would be thrilled at the amazingly beautiful ever-shifting clouds assuming fantastic shapes and playing in a riot of colour. A sense of relief, and even a feeling of escape from confinement would soothe him at such moments. “I gasped in surprised delight,” he tells us. He had watched them almost as if in a trance. “Sometimes the clouds would break and one saw through an opening in them, that wonderful monsoon phenomenon, a dark blue of an amazing depth which seemed to be a portion of infinity.” We feel as though it were some Romantic poet writing in prose. Nehru appears at his best in his description of the clouds as seen from the Almora District gaol. Watching the blue sky dotted with clouds he reflects: “Wonderful shapes, these clouds assumed and I never grew tired of watching them, I fancied I saw them take the shape of all manner of animals, and sometimes they would join together and look like a mighty ocean, or they would be like a beach, and the rustling of the breeze through the deodhars would sound like the coming in of the tide on a distant sea-front. Sometimes a cloud would advance boldly on us, seemingly solid and compact, and then dissolve in mist as it came near and enveloped us.” The poet in Nehru is seen even in such fragmentary lines as: “Especially beautiful and fairylike were the deodhar trees….with their garments of snow”….“there is the whisper of spring in the air”…..“Tiny shoots are mysteriously bursting out of the ground and gazing at this strange world.”

It may not be out of place here, to have a look at Nehru’s Will wherein he speaks of his sacred bond with the Ganga: “The Ganga, especially is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and defeats. She has been a symbol of India’s agelong civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing and yet ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the snow- covered peaks and deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below, where my life and work have been cast. Smiling and dancing in the morning sunlight, and dark and gloomy and full of mystery as the evening shadows fall, a narrow, slow and graceful stream in winter and a vast roaring thing during the monsoon, broad bosomed almost as the sea, and with something of the sea’s power to destroy, the Ganga has been to me a symbol and a memory of the past of India, running into the present, and flowing on to the great ocean of the future.” The lyrical texture of the curve of Nehru’s psyche brilliantly comes to light in these lines.

Nature-descriptions sprinkled here and there in the Autobiography serve as a healthy relief to the narration of the manifold political upheavals and incidents. Either the cool breeze from the plains or the misty mountain wind gently turns our shirt collars aside leaving us flushed and fresh, as we glance through the pages of this book. This soothing relief Nehru could give us because, like Wordsworth, though perhaps with a lesser intensity, he must have felt that “Every flower enjoys the air it breathes.”

Writing about the six systems of Philosophy in his book, The Discovery of India Nehru speaks about the Nyaya system in these terms’ “The Nyaya method is analytic and logical. In fact Nyaya means logic or the science of right reasoning. It is a necessary mental training for every educated person.” We find him applying this Nyaya method of investigation, this science of right reasoning at many points in his Autobiography. This scientific temper of his mind is perhaps best inferred from his violent attack of Gandhiji’s explanation of the earthquake that shook North-east India. “I read with a great shock” Nehru tells us, “Gandhiji’s statement to the effect that the earthquake had been a punishment for the sin of Untouchability. This was a staggering remark…..Anything more opposed to the scientific outlook would be difficult to imagine.” His fine sense of logic becomes clearly apparent, as he vehemently opposes the censorship imposed upon reading in prisons: “If a court of law sentences a person to imprisonment, does it follow that not only his body but his mind should be incarcerated? Why should not the minds of the prisoners be free, though their bodies are not?” This scientific temper of the mind of Nehru becomes transparent in places where he makes use of scientific terminology and imagery. Speaking about the heat and opposition between the Hindus and the Muslims he writes: “…..So action and reaction went on and in the process the communal temperature of the country went up,” or again “the centre of gravity (in the Legislative Assembly) moved more to the right.”

The book has a number of exquisite pen-portraits of personages most of whom boldly fought for the freedom of India, like Gandhiji, Motilal, Azad and C. R. Das, Mohammad Ali and Hakim Ajmal Khan, Bhagat Singh and Ganesh Vidyarthi. These persons and a host of others spring up to life, through these pages, and live before us in flesh and blood. The lifelike picture of Motilal (though like a snap-shot) recurs throughout the book so that, as Prof. Kabir puts it “The son’s Autobiography is at the same time the biography of the father.” The pictures of the anguished father dashing off to Lucknow during the night to meet his lathi-battered son....banging the table in his fury and refusing to be an invalid any longer... and….though ill, sitting up in his bed and vehemently refusing to tone down the Civil Disobedience though left all alone to himself, and finally with his massive body and expressionless face, like an old lion mortally wounded, but still very leonine and kingly, greeting his comrades to say farewell to them all,...all these pictures are hard to be erased from our memory.

Among the pen-portraits the best one is that of Gandhiji. To Nehru, he is “the quintessence of the conscious and subconscious will” of the peasant masses of India; “he is the idealized personification” of those vast millions. Nehru does not stop here. He moves on to analyse the different facets of the personality of Gandhiji. In a single sentence he astonishingly packs up a lot of details: “A man of the keenest intellect, of fine feeling and good taste, wide vision, very human, and yet essentially the ascetic who has suppressed his passion and emotions, sublimated them and directed them in spiritual channels, a tremendous, personality, drawing people to himself like a magnet and calling out fierce loyalties and attachments–all this so utterly unlike and beyond a peasant.” There is a lovely lyrical quality about another fragment of a pen-portrait of Gandhiji that appears elsewhere in the book. “His calm deep eyes would hold one and gently probe into the depths, his voice clear and limpid would purr its way to the heart and evoke an emotional response.”

Though Nehru admired the magnetic personality of Gandhi, he was not blind to the weaknesses of even this Mahatma. There were some fundamental points of difference between these two leaders and on many occasions Nehru drifted away from the other. The news of Gandhi’s determination to go on a ‘fast unto death’ on the question of separate electorates was a terrific shock to Nehru and as he puts it: “I felt angry with him at his religious and sentimental approach to a political question and his frequent references to God in connection with it. He even seemed to suggest that God had indicated the very date of the fast….what a terrible example to set!” wonders Nehru. Again when Gandhiji sends a telegram to the British Viceroy mentioning something about ‘honourable peace’ Nehru grows intensely indignant and vehemently challenges the validity of Gandhiji’s stand: “Where was the elusive peace that was being sought when the Government was triumphantly trying to crush the nation in every way and people were starving to death in the Andamans?” Nehru completely disapproves Gandhiji’s idea of Trusteeship. He does not agree even with Gandhiji’s idea of conversion in preference to coercion, as he questions: “Can anything be greater than the psychic coercion of Gandhiji which reduces many of his intimate followers and colleagues to a state of mental pulp?” Nehru’s main charge against Gandhiji is that he did not encourage others to think. Nehru questions again and again the efficacy of the way of faith taught by Gandhiji. “It may pay for a short while, but in the long run?” wonders Nehru.

This critical analysis of the personality of Gandhiji, this bringing even the Mahatma under his microscope.’ is a clear indication of the desire of Nehru to portray the complete man, to bring to the surface the good as well as the bad. In his searching, and at times bitter, analysis of men and matters, Nehru does not spare even father and his own group, namely the Congress Party. “Of course, the Congress movement,” writes Nehru, “like all other mass movements had and has many undesirables–fools, inefficients and worse people.” But he is quick to compliment: “I have no doubt whatever that an average Congress worker is likely to be far more efficient and dynamic than any other person of similar qualifications.” Again, when he speaks of the Britishers, it is not the British people as a whole that he looks down with contempt. It is only the “Tiger of British Imperialism,” the British administration in India, that he abhors. At the same time he is grateful to the Britishers for their scientific aid to India and perhaps more grateful to the England of Shakespeare and Milton, for as he points out in his Discovery of India, “English literature which nourished our minds in the past does even now convey its deep resonance to the recesses of our heart.”

Nehru grows indignant at Srinivasa Sastry and pours bitter ridicule and scorn on him, for “Sastry” according to Nehru “is not a man of action and a crisis does not suit him.” At some other point in the book, Sastry appears to Nehru as “….an Imperial envoy, visiting at the instance of the British Government, various British Dominions, as well as the United States of America, and strongly criticising the Congress and his own countrymen for the struggle they were carrying on against that government.” But this criticism does not take away from Nehru his respect for Sastry, and his own words amply prove this: “though we differed from Mr. Sastry greatly in politics, we respected him.” At this point it is essential to dwell upon a passage that Nehru has recorded in his preface to his Autobiography: “I have discussed frankly some of my colleagues with whom I have been privileged to work and for whom I have the greatest regard and affection. I have also criticised groups and individuals, sometimes rather severely. The criticism does not take away from my respect for many of them I trust however that nothing I have written bears a trace of malice or ill-will, against any individual.”

What is the secret of Nehru’s success with his pen? “It is the vigour of his mind, the earnestness and integrity of his character that shine through his work and give it an extraordinary power and appeal.” The Autobiography has ample samples of this earnestness and integrity of its author. When, once, Nehru was released from gaol, only to visit his ailing wife, though many vital things of national importance were awaiting his immediate attention, he refused to take advantage of his release, for political purposes. Though he had not given any undertaking to the authorities before coming out of the prison, not to indulge in activities of a political nature, his conscience was totally against any such idea. He had to go back to the prison leaving back his ailing wife, for he could not be “disloyal to one’s pledges, to the cause, to oneself.”

Nehru’s references to Sastry in particular, provide us with fine samples of his use of irony. Though he is wholly unable to accept Sastry’s reading of history, he compliments Sastry in such a sarcastic style as: “It is his happy gift to see the world and his own country through the tinted glasses of the British ruling classes.” Again after laying bare before us the utter obliviousness of Sastry to the pain and anguish of his countrymen in their struggle for freedom, Nehru remarks: “Mr. Sastry is an able and sensitive man.” The sting is evidently in the tail and we immediately recall to our memory that brilliant bit of Mark Antony’s oratory packed with irony in such lines as: “But Brutus is an honourable man”….“And sure he is an honourable man” and the like.

Nehru uses images very rarely but how aptly, as in a line like: “Father had taken to the work in the Assembly like a duck to water” or “Laws….in the shape of ordinances appeared suddenly like rabbits from a conjurer’s hat” or “Salt making was spreading like a prairie fire” or “To the tiger of imperialism there will only be the fiercest opposition.” These images are not here for any ornamental purpose. There is an inevitability about them, and they are purely functional. There is nothing conventional about them and they are daringly original.

Nehru’s wide knowledge of books is something astonishing. We have proof in this book of his being familiar with India’s Sanskrit scriptures and philosophic treatises, many of the old Chinese poets, Dickens and Browning, Shakespeare and Shaw, Wordsworth and Blake, Hopkins, Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot. It is but natural that with such a rich harvest of reading in him, couplets from poems and plays, lines from novels and scriptures spontaneously spring up to his lips. Curiously enough, the author of the first quotation appearing on the first page of the Autobiography has his name beginning with the first alphabet of the English language.

A careful reader of the book gets clues to the style of Nehru in the words of Nehru himself. For instance, referring to a speech of his made at Karachi, he says: “That speech made on the spur of the moment and coming from the heart and with little of ornament or fine phrasing in it was probably a greater success than many of my others which had followed a careful preparation.” The phrase “Coming from the heart and with little of ornament of fine phrasing in it” appears to sum up aptly the style of Nehru. Also what he speaks about Gandhiji in these lines can in turn be said of Nehru himself: “This process of spell-binding was not brought about by oratory or the hypnotism of silken phrases. The language was always simple and to the point and seldom was an unnecessary word used. It was the utter sincerity of the man and his personality that gripped.” Nehru writes as he speaks and all that he has written has a ring of sincerity about it.

On Nehru’s table were found, copied down in his own hand, these last four lines from Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which must have immensely appealed to his sensitive heart:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep

And miles to go before I sleep.

Nehru did go miles and miles before he slept into eternity. We have lost “a champion of peace, of human decency, of the brotherhood of man.” But like a phoenix from its ashes, Nehru leaps back to life and his vibrant voice lives through the pages of his Autobiography, conveying its rich resonance to the recesses of our heart.

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