India

by Patrick French

  He resisted any challenge to the Constitution. An attempt by President Rajendra Prasad in 1951 to take away power from the prime minister was blocked. Prasad said that he intended to rely on his own judgement when deciding whether to sign bills into law. His legal argument was specious, and Nehru at once referred it to the attorney-general and another respected lawyer. Their response was clear: the president’s position was analogous to that of “a constitutional monarch in England” and any move to alter it would “upset the whole constitutional structure envisaged at the time when the Constitution was passed [and] make the President a kind of dictator.” Prasad’s move inadvertently strengthened the Constitution by clarifying the law and establishing the precedent that power rested with the prime minister and the cabinet.53

  Nehru made a point of consulting Parliament, and refused to give peremptory orders. When his cabinet colleague Amrit Kaur requested him to intervene on a particular matter, he refused. “What you are asking me,” he said to her, “is that I be a dictator. You have come to the wrong person.”54 Unlike other world leaders, he did not seek personal wealth. In his later years, he was supported and advised by his widowed daughter, Indira Gandhi, who became his official hostess. Living in a house formerly occupied by the British military commander-in-chief, Nehru attempted to pull the new rashtra together. Edifying measures were taken to emphasize the unity within the nation’s diversity. He would start each day by seeing flocks of random visitors, some with petitions or grievances, others lobbying over policy, some just come to catch a glimpse of the new ruler. Refugees camped on his lawns and by his gate, and he did not send them away.

  Nehru’s premiership lasted nearly seventeen years, until his death in 1964. By the end, many things were unravelling. His devotion to insular socialist planning had not brought prosperity, and the country’s share of world trade had halved. His government failed to introduce mass education or to enforce land reforms; the Portuguese colony of Goa was annexed at gunpoint; troops were used against the Nagas, a tribal people in the north-east who wanted to secede and had been fighting to establish a sovereign state. The Congress organization was dividing into factions and being challenged at the ballot box—in 1957 a communist administration was elected in the state of Kerala. Gone was the austere glamour of the freedom movement; the Congress uniform of white khadi, or homespun cloth, had become the vestment of a new ruling class. Nehru had colleagues who were mediocre, and in some cases corrupt. When powerful regional politicians like Pratap Singh Kairon in Punjab misused power or embezzled money, he tended to do little. When he did intercede, as in Kashmir—where the leader, Sheikh Abdullah, was imprisoned on dubious charges of conniving with Pakistan—Nehru still somehow managed to retain a personal link. At Nehru’s cremation, a weeping Abdullah would stand by the pyre and throw flowers into the flames.

  After Nehru’s death, the democratic structures he had put in place came right: he had refused to groom or nominate a successor as prime minister, but it took Congress MPs only a week to choose a new leader, by consensus. He was Lal Bahadur Shastri, a small, impressive, scholarly man who had been born to a poor family in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, or what was known from 1950 as Uttar Pradesh.

  • • •

  Were the ideas of Jawaharlal Nehru and the founders too ambitious? Was India really a nation, or a collection of diverse peoples who had been thrown together under British rule, and granted independence? More than six decades later, there are 7 billion people living on the planet. Nearly 1.2 billion of them are Indian. So every sixth person walking on the earth is Indian, and a fair few more are ethnically or culturally Indian (though if you are Pakistani or Bangladeshi, you may not want to hear this). Is it right to ascribe unity and similarity to so many different people? Is it fashionable to do so? Is it possible to say that a nightworker in a call centre in Karnataka, an elderly Sikkimese princess, a displaced Adivasi, or tribal, from Madhya Pradesh, a deposed Rajput maharani, a Mizo craftsman on the Burmese border, a thrusting Punjabi garment exporter, a Malayali nurse, a magistrate from Kashmir, a Tamil Brahmin chef, a rock star from Meghalaya, a Gujarati stockbroker, a Musahar (a hereditary rat-eater) from Bihar, an eye surgeon from Thiruvananthapuram, a thriving Marwari businesswoman, a farmer from Karnataka, an Assamese tea picker, a lecherous Pahari politician, a Maoist revolutionary from Chhattisgarh, a languid Maharashtrian cricketer, an Ollywood (the Oriya-language version of Hollywood) actress and a Bengali painter-cum-civil servant have anything in common?

  The prevailing intellectual convention, arising from the academic straitjacket of poststructuralist theory, multicultural incomprehension and general postcolonial angst, is that it would be wrong to make deductions based on group identity or nationality. To say the French are arrogant, the Japanese inscrutable or the Germans Germanic is unacceptable, even if there is a discernible element of truth in each of these assertions. In the same way, deductions about different Indian communities tend to be made in private rather than in public, but few, even within the communities themselves, would deny their accuracy.

  Take a popular email that has been doing the rounds:

  BENGAL

  1 Bengali = poet

  2 Bengalis = film society

  3 Bengalis = political party

  4 Bengalis = two political parties

  TAMIL BRAHMIN

  1 Tam Brahm = priest at the Vardarajaperumal temple

  2 Tam Brahms = maths tuition class

  3 Tam Brahms = queue outside the U.S. consulate at 4 a.m.

  4 Tam Brahms = Thyagaraja Music Festival in Santa Clara

  MALAYALI

  1 Mallu = coconut stall

  2 Mallus = boat race

  3 Mallus = Gulf job racket

  4 Mallus = oil slick

  GUJARATI

  1 Gujju = share-broker in a Mumbai train

  2 Gujjus = rummy game in a Mumbai train

  3 Gujjus = Mumbai’s noisiest restaurant

  4 Gujjus = stock market scam

  In each case, the depiction is close enough to reality for the stereotype to work: the artistic and disputatious Bengali, the clever, superior Tam Brahm, the Malayali from Kerala with its rivers and coconuts now transplanted to a job in the Gulf and the canny Gujju are all figures from Indian life, whether in the workplace or in a movie. These are only the stereotypes relating to particular states, rather than to more closely defined social, ethnic, religious or caste communities. There are further examples cited in the chain email, but to ensure this book is not burned on the streets of Patna or Lucknow, I will leave out the entries for Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

  One more:

  3 Punjabis = assault on McAloo Tikkis at local McDonald’s

  Any member of a community may be distinct, but the wholesale effect of involuntary group identity is stronger in India than in most other countries. This is caused by two things: the fact that, until recently, marriage outside your community was difficult and unusual, and the absence of substantial immigration. There has been no large-scale migration to India for around 500 years, since the arrival of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur’s armies at about the time the first Europeans were peopling America. Protected geographically by the sea and by the Himalayas, Indian society managed to remain intact to an extraordinary degree during the colonial period. This caused, inevitably, a measure of integration or understanding between the existing communities. In the days of British rule there was little settlement except on a temporary basis, and social restrictions about eating, as well as the barrier of purdah (which had by now been borrowed by Hindus from Muslims, in the same way that caste had been borrowed by Muslims from Hindus), meant the opportunities for quotidian social interaction between Indians and Europeans were severely limited. Barriers of race, religion and culture, as well as their own national sense of identity and exclusivity, made the British less likely than earlier conquerors to be subsumed into India. Some wore local clothes and took a native mistress, but this did not amount to any sort of assimilation. At th
e start of the twentieth century, there were around 1,500 British executive officials in India, in addition to a much larger number of military officers and soldiers, and they existed in a separate world of dances, polo and the club, described in Kipling’s short stories. After independence, apart from a small number of missionaries, tea planters and business people, the Europeans went home.

  Traditions that are today identifiably Indian are rooted in a very distant past. Nearly a thousand years ago, the Muslim polymath Al-Biruni travelled through India and wrote a brilliantly perceptive account of the world and the systems of thought he encountered, Kitab Tahqiq ma li-l-Hind, commonly known as The India. Originally from Central Asia, Al-Biruni noticed the concentration on philosophy and mathematics, the emphasis on the purity of fire and water, the throwing away of earthen plates after use and the avoidance of touching between communities; he commented on the Hindus’ religious flexibility, observing that “at the utmost, they fight with words, but they will never stake their soul or body or their property on religious controversy”; he recorded their “hideous fictions,” like the notion that god could have a thousand eyes; he observed that Hindus “sip the stall [urine] of cows [during rituals], but they do not eat their meat,” and that men wear earrings and “a girdle called yajnopavita [the sacred thread, worn by the higher castes], passing from the left shoulder to the right side of the waist … In their meetings they sit cross-legged. They spit out and blow their noses without any respect for the elder ones present.”55 When the emperor Babur wrote in his diary in the 1520s that Hindustan had “innumerable and endless workmen of every kind … a fixed caste for every sort of work,” or that women “tie on a cloth, a half of which goes around the waist while the other is thrown over the head,” he could have been writing about rural north India now.56 The recipe for kulfi used by the wife of the emperor Jahangir, Noor Jehan, is the same as the recipe used today. The mricchakatika, or little clay cart, is a common child’s toy (you pull a string to make the cart roll along, and it gives a tuk-tuk-tuk sound), but Mricchakatika is also the title of a Sanskrit play dating back to 200 BCE, a play which Nehru was reading when he flew above the carnage of Punjab in 1947.

  So the past becomes a part of the present, and ancient history is linked to everyday life in a way that is unmatched in any other world culture, in a form that is wholly unselfconscious. A seal found at the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro dating to around 2000 BCE shows a figure, seated in a yogic position, which seems to be a representation of the deity Shiva. To a Hindu today (who might sit in that very yoga position each morning) the pose, the trident, the bull and the phallus would be immediately familiar: a similar representation of Shiva might be found painted on a roadside rock or dangling from a truck’s rearview mirror. Many Indians, conscious of their timelessness but often with no informed idea of their own history, are connected to their distant ancestral past every day. Modernity is converted to a purely Indian form.

  The founding parents laid down the Constitution, but would the children follow it? A Delhi lawyer said to me while discussing the high ideals of Nehru and his fellows, “The problem with India is Indians.” He meant that the rules were all there, but nobody obeyed them. Indians do not go by the book.

  2

  THERE WILL BE BLOOD

  IN THE FALL of 1962 the dream of India as a secure, democratic nation which impressed the rest of the world with its peaceful values and ancient traditions took a savage knock. Nehru’s docile policy of “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai,” Sino-Indian brotherhood, was trampled upon by tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers as they poured into north-east India and Ladakh in a violent attempt to resolve a Himalayan border dispute. Nehru, ageing and broken, went on All-India Radio to express his sorrow to the people of Assam, speaking as if they were lost forever because the hordes had breached the Se La, an impregnable mountain pass. Unexpectedly, his daughter Indira seized the headlines by deciding to fly to Assam and advance by helicopter to the front. The prime minister was aghast, worrying privately she might be kidnapped: “She is being very obstinate. Her visit is very dangerous, she should not go.”1

  Indira Gandhi, a striking woman with an angular face, already a widow in her mid-forties, took no notice of her father’s fears and flew off in a plane stuffed with Red Cross supplies. She had been an admirer of Joan of Arc since childhood and made a rousing speech only thirty miles from the Chinese positions, ordered administrators back to work and commended the local tribals for their refusal to flee; then she flew to Delhi, picked up more supplies and went back again. The war was a humiliation for India even though the Chinese withdrew from Assam, but at least the press had a new heroine, a counterweight to the unpopular defence minister Krishna Menon, who was soon forced to resign. Mrs. Gandhi felt appreciated by the people of India. Krishna Menon referred to her as “that chit of a girl, Indira.”2

  More than any politician in modern Indian history, Indira Gandhi’s behaviour was conditioned by her personal story. In the early 1930s, her mother, Kamala, had joined the protests against the British in their home city of Allahabad. Nehru, who was then in prison, was astounded to hear his shy wife had addressed public meetings, encouraged women to break purdah and even been hurt during a demonstration. One of Kamala’s followers was Feroze Gandhi, a young chancer from a Parsi family who took it upon himself to become her attendant, helping out with household chores and political organization. He became part of the furniture at the family house, Anand Bhawan. Feroze grew close to the lonely Kamala, confiding that he admired her sixteen-year-old daughter and would like to marry her. Kamala discounted the proposal; Indira was still a schoolgirl at Shantiniketan in Bengal, a self-consciously Indian school started by the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, where lessons were taken beneath the trees. More importantly, she knew the heavyweights of the Nehru family, with their patrician aspirations, would never agree to such an unlikely match.

  Kamala was a stubborn woman with intense feelings and a devotion to a mystical kind of religion. This led to the end of her sexual relationship with her husband in 1935; Nehru noted in his diary: “Apparently I am not to come in the way of God.” The following year she became seriously ill, and was sent to Europe for treatment, accompanied by Indira. Around this time Nehru told their daughter he was handing over Anand Bhawan to his sister Vijayalakshmi and her husband: “The whole house will be at their disposal,” he wrote. “If you want to put any of your personal effects apart, you may put them in my room.” Indira was now homeless, aged eighteen, with her possessions in storage. Nehru added that she would have to shift for herself, and should remember her famous family had given her “a certain public position which you may have done nothing to deserve.”3 His own energy would be devoted to the freedom struggle. When Kamala died months later in a Swiss sanatorium, Indira was left alone, vulnerable and frail. She was probably suffering from tuberculosis, and now pursued a range of medical treatments in Switzerland and Britain.4

  After his wife’s death, Jawaharlal Nehru was taken up by a love affair with the buxom Congress politician Padmaja Naidu, and even more by his devotion to the cause of India’s freedom: his passion was politics, and he was better at performing the self-regarding role of Chacha Nehru, loving all the children of India, than being a father to the teenage Indira. Later, he regretted the insensitivity with which he had treated his wife and daughter at this time. All of these events had the cumulative effect of leaving Indira feeling bruised, resentful and lost; she was both privileged and neglected, and felt her childhood had been “invaded” by politics. She went to Oxford University but dropped out, conscious of her lack of brilliance compared to other, better-educated Indian students. Her one solace, her anchor, was Feroze Gandhi, to whom she became secretly engaged in Paris. Quite what he was doing in Europe is unclear. He was supposed to be studying at the London School of Economics—his fees were paid initially by his aunt, who went by the name of Dr. Commissariat—and to make ends meet he had a job in a factory. He was busy, fleshy, outgo
ing and sensual, enjoyed Western classical music and had social abilities Indira lacked. They ate hot chestnuts on cold wartime nights on the London streets. Feroze made himself indispensable, as he had with Kamala. Indira kept the relationship secret from her father.

  In 1941 she secured a passage on a ship sailing via South Africa to Bombay, with nightly blackouts for fear of the bombing. Back in India she stayed with friends and relations, filled with resentment but dutiful in her support for her busy, absent father. Although her grandmother pointed out that Feroze came from a different religious community and a different social class and had no money, she was determined to marry him: she wanted happiness, children, a quiet and private life. Her family, and it sometimes seemed the whole nation, were against the marriage. She found herself being interrogated by Mohandas Gandhi—who was a personal friend of her father as well as the guardian of the Congress conscience—about her desire for Feroze. When she told him that her feelings ran much deeper than physical attraction, the Mahatma suggested she might take a penitential vow of celibacy after marriage since “sex-pleasure” was no proper basis for a relationship. “I told him, ‘You can ask a couple not to get married [but] to ask them to live a life of celibacy, makes no sense. It can result only in bitterness and unhappiness.’ ”5 The couple married in 1942, with Nehru’s pained, partial consent.

  The strange thing about Feroze Gandhi is that having attained a position many men would have coveted—entering the family of the probable future prime minister of independent India—he remained resolutely his own person. He was a keen drinker and philanderer, and effectively unemployed, although he worked occasionally and with flair as an editor and journalist. His zest and unsuitability continued to attract Indira, although even before their second son, Sanjay, was born in 1946, he had got too close to Indira’s first cousin, Chandralekha Pandit, and fallen in love with a woman from an aristocratic Muslim family.6 It was an intense, damaged marriage, which continued unhappily, with occasional rapprochements.