Indian Summer

by Alex Von Tunzelmann

  During 1897, with Kasturba pregnant again, Mohandas invited several young law clerks to live with the family. He started to implement rules inspired by the vision of society offered by Ruskin and Tolstoy, aimed at egalitarian, cooperative living, and a pure devotion to God through asceticism. One of the founding principles was that everyone was supposed to empty and clean their own chamber pots – a task which Hindus normally delegated to the Untouchables. Kasturba was appalled, not least because of the rule that she and Mohandas had to clean any that had been forgotten. One day, when a Christian Indian of Untouchable parentage accidentally left his pot unemptied, she found it. She refused to move it, to which Mohandas replied that he would clean it himself. For a Hindu wife to allow her husband to defile himself is considered an even greater degradation than to pollute her own body. Weeping with anger and humiliation, Kasturba lugged the pot down the stairs outside the house. Little did she realize that Mohandas was watching. He lost his temper, shouting that not only must she carry around buckets of excrement, but that she should do so cheerfully. She threatened to walk out, at which point Mohandas grabbed her roughly by the arm. He dragged her to the gate and tried to shove her through it. She sobbed that she had nowhere to go. At this, he relented, and let her back.19

  The incident illustrated Gandhi’s growing belief that personal life was an integral part of politics. He insisted on leading by example, no matter what the consequences were for himself, his family, his friends or his followers. In 1899, he demonstrated this again on a grander scale when the Boer War broke out. In spite of his personal sympathy with the Dutch settlers, Gandhi’s reaction was that the Indians must support the British. If they demanded British rights, he reasoned, they must shoulder British responsibilities. He set up the Indian Ambulance Corps and actively recruited his countrymen in the name of the Queen-Empress. The Indians served without pay, and would march up to twenty-five miles every day, bearing the British Empire’s wounded on stretchers back to their camps. Gandhi’s courage, hard work and patriotism paid off. He was awarded the War Medal, and the Indian Ambulance Corps was mentioned in dispatches.20

  The Ambulance Corps was an early example of Gandhi’s flair for the grand gesture. The defining motif of self-sacrifice was important. After the birth of his fourth surviving son, Devadas, in 1900, he attempted to become a brahmachari – a celibate. This decision was strengthened by the family’s move from their villa to the first of his formal ashrams (semi-monastic community retreats) in 1904. Gandhi believed that the community would grow more intimate overall if its members had no special favourites, either through sexual intimacy or family ties.21 There was also the aspect of sin. In his young teens, Mohandas had learnt in the most devastating way to associate sex with moral and physical ruin. In adult life, he began to consider any form of physical pleasure – food, comfort and intoxication, as well as sex – to be degrading, and any form of physical torment – fasting, scrubbing latrines, wearing prickly homespun cloth, being beaten up by the police – to be righteous.

  In 1907, Gandhi coined the term satyagraha, a Sanskrit word, meaning literally ‘truth-force’. The intent was to imply a powerful but non-violent energy.22 During October 1908, while he was in prison for civil disobedience, his commitment was to be tested. Kasturba fell seriously ill. It was possible for Gandhi to have himself released at any time: all he had to do was plead guilty, pay the modest fine, and walk out from the prison gates. But Gandhi was not prepared to admit guilt. Friends, family, life and death meant less to him than truth, faith and politics. ‘I am not in a position to come and nurse you’, he wrote to Kasturba; ‘if it is destined that you shall die, I think it is preferable that you should go before me … Even if you die, for me you will be eternally alive.’ He assured her that he had ‘no intentions’ of remarrying after her death, and told her that her demise would be ‘another great sacrifice for the cause of Satyagraha’.23 Kasturba survived.

  When Gandhi returned to India in 1915, he still did not appear to be the sort of man who shook empires. He seemed to be exactly the opposite. In the King’s birthday honours of 3 June 1915, Mohandas Gandhi of Ahmedabad was awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind (Emperor of India) medal for services to the British Empire.24 It was Sir Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet and Nobel Laureate, who bestowed upon Gandhi the title by which he would become known. Tagore dubbed him ‘Mahatma’, meaning ‘great soul’. But the great soul would require a great lieutenant to link him to the temporal world. In one of history’s more surprising pairings, the lieutenant would be an upper-class Brahmin lawyer, the sophisticated product of Harrow and Cambridge, who spoke Indian languages only haltingly, and did not believe in God at all. And yet, despite their differences, the combined strength of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru would one day command the attention of the world.

  While Gandhi was experimenting with truths, another Indian youth was preparing to go to England for his education. This boy was a far more promising student than Gandhi had been at the same age. He was also more sophisticated, more confident, more charming, much wealthier and conspicuously better looking. It was little surprise that young Jawaharlal Nehru was the apple of his father’s eye – and that father happened to be one of India’s top lawyers and an emerging figure in the Indian National Congress, Motilal Nehru.

  Motilal Nehru was a colossus, of broad shoulder and imposing countenance. It was often remarked that, in profile, he resembled a Roman emperor. He dominated any gathering, both physically and intellectually. He was incisive, bullish, witty, warm, and occasionally fiery. He impressed everybody. Even the British attempted to change their own race rules so that they could invite him to join their clubs.25 He presided over a cheerfully integrated, Westernized and lavish household in the grandest mansion in Allahabad, Anand Bhavan. Under Motilal’s roof, no distinction was drawn between Hindus, Muslims, mixed-race Anglo-Indians, Untouchables and Europeans.26

  As the beloved only child of a very privileged family, young Jawahar (as he was known) was haughty, refined and more than a little spoiled. Lacking brothers or sisters, and schooled at home without classmates, he soon learned to direct his thoughts and questions inwards. He developed a capacity for merciless self-judgement which, ultimately, would set him apart from other statesmen.

  Jawahar only made it to the age of five or six before feeling the full power of his father’s fearsome temper. Motilal had two smart fountain pens in his study; his son took one without asking. A massive search ensued, during which the terrified Jawahar kept silent. The pen was eventually discovered in his possession, and Motilal administered a ferocious beating to the tiny boy. Even forty years later, when he was a veteran of several beatings at the hands of armed policemen, Jawahar’s memory of this first encounter with violence remained raw. ‘Almost blind with pain and mortification at my disgrace I rushed to Mother,’ he wrote, ‘and for several days various creams and ointments were applied to my aching and quivering little body.’27 But he did not hate his father for the pain he had suffered, nor even for the injustice of such a punishment. The explosive Nehru temper was hereditary, and the boy, though naturally of a gentle and even quiet disposition, soon learned to imitate his father’s outbursts. Later in life, he would become notorious for thumping those who irritated him.28

  The counterpoint to this awestruck relationship with his father was the simple, comforting love Jawahar had from his mother, Swarup Rani. She cuddled him after Motilal’s thrashings, and offered him the beguiling images of Hinduism while Motilal doggedly maintained his secularism. For a while, Jawahar felt himself pulling towards the softer, more spiritual side of the Nehru household. He experimented with religion and, under the influence of his tutor, Ferdinand T. Brooks, even signed up to one. Theosophy had been invented in 1875 in England, and relied on fusing parts of Hinduism and Buddhism with the late nineteenth-century European fashions for mysticism, esoteric rituals, and attempted communion with the spirit world. Annie Besant, one of the religion’s most notable devotees and later a leadin
g advocate for Indian independence, inducted Jawahar herself. He was thirteen years old.29 Not long afterwards Mr Brooks left, and young Jawahar’s creed departed shortly after.

  Initially Jawahar had scorned his father’s strict rationalism as unimaginative. But ultimately, as with the temper, he could not help but emulate it. Faced with the indulgent comforts of his mother’s love, and the hard-headed challenge of his father’s, Jawahar preferred the challenge. Though he adored her, part of him began to look down on his mother. Her love for him, he wrote, was ‘excessive and indiscriminating’. If Jawahar was to become a man, it was clear which path he had to follow; and religion, he concluded superciliously, ‘seemed to be a woman’s affair’.30

  In 1900, his first sister was born and named Sarup, which she hated. On marriage, she would rename herself Vijaya Lakshmi, but was always known as Nan. A second sister, Krishna, known as Betty, would follow seven years later. Jawahar doted on Nan, but the gap of eleven years between them prevented her from becoming a confidante until later in life.31 The lonely boy continued to live a large part of his life inside his head, as a recurring dream he began to have at around this time illustrates. ‘I dreamt of astral bodies and imagined myself flying vast distances’, he wrote. ‘This dream of flying high up in the air (without any appliance) has indeed been a frequent one throughout my life; and sometimes it has been vivid and realistic and the countryside seemed to lie underneath me in a vast panorama.’ The Russo-Japanese War was in progress, and news of Asian victories over Europeans sparked Jawahar’s imagination. At night he dreamt of flying over Indian domains; during the day, he pictured himself as a noble knight, sword in hand, freeing beautiful Asia from her wicked European overlords.32

  In 1905, when Jawahar was fifteen, he went with his parents and Nan on a journey to the heart of the overlords’ territory. They reached Britain in May, and deposited Jawahar at Harrow School in north London. Following in the footsteps of Winston Churchill seventeen years before, he joined the Head Master’s House, an imposing red-brick building on the High Street. Life at Harrow was designed to confuse outsiders, with its esoteric traditions, colour-coded bow ties, and private language of beaks, bluers, shepherds and philathletes. Initially this made him homesick, but Jawahar soon learned to conform to the school’s eccentricities. ‘I had deliberately not resisted them so as to be in harmony with the place,’ he later acknowledged. But, within this complicit young denizen of the British establishment, there were already hints of a more controversial future. When he received a volume on Garibaldi as a school prize, Jawahar found himself identifying strongly with the revolutionary soldier, atheist and republican, who had made possible the unification of Italy less than half a century before.33

  After two years Jawahar became bored with Harrow, though in adult life he remembered it with nostalgia. Many years later, when he had become a revolutionary soldier, atheist and republican, he would dig out a dusty volume of Harrow school songs from the library at Anand Bhavan. There, over six thousand miles from the Head Master’s House, he sat with his nieces Lekha, Tara and Rita, singing rousing choruses of ‘Jerry, You Duffer and Dunce’ and ‘When Grandpapa’s Grandpapa was in the Lower Lower First’.34 Grandpapa’s grandpapa had been a landowner in Delhi, and appeared regularly at the Mughal court.35 But the mature Jawahar would be able to enjoy his European refinements without compromising his Indian identity.

  At seventeen, Jawahar persuaded Motilal to let him go up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read natural sciences. A lover of nature, he specialized in chemistry, botany and geology. In his spare time, he went riding, learned ballroom dancing, coxed a college rowing boat in the Lent races, and pursued a satisfying social life.36 Jawahar later wrote with a happy sentimentalism of winter evenings spent by the fire, talking about culture, politics, sex and morality until the embers died out, and the sharp cold of a draughty old sandstone college forced him and his friends to bed.37 The conversations about sex struck him in particular. ‘Most of us were strongly attracted by sex and I doubt if any of us attached any idea of sin to it,’ he wrote. ‘Certainly I did not; there was no religious inhibition.’ And, a few lines later, he added: ‘I enjoyed life and I refused to see why I should consider it a thing of sin.’38 His defensiveness on the matter is intriguing, but there are no further clues to follow. Certainly he was not yet the intoxicating draw for women that he would be in his later years.

  At around this time, his father’s thoughts were also turning to matters of Jawahar’s heart. The choice of possible brides was not one to be taken lightly, and Motilal asked for his son’s opinion in 1909, causing Jawahar to reply, caustically, ‘I am not violently looking forward to the prospect of being married to anybody.’39 While resisting the idea of marriage in general, Jawahar did note that his enthusiasm would be far greater if the bride could be found from outside the Kashmiri Brahmin community. But this was not to be. Motilal answered legalistically, pointing out that intermarriage between castes was invalid under Hindu law and, because the British had never legislated to overrule that point, a free choice was simply not possible.40

  Many letters passed between father and son on this theme, and it became increasingly obvious that Jawahar’s secular upbringing and British veneer were going to make traditional Hindu matchmaking an awkward business. ‘You express a hope that my marriage should be romantic’, he wrote to his father. ‘I should like it to be so but I fail to see how it is going to come about. There is not an atom of romance in the way you are searching [out] girls for me and keeping them waiting till my arrival. The very idea is extremely unromantic. And you can hardly expect me to fall in love with a photograph.’41 But Motilal was not to be put off, and eventually found Kamala Kaul, a girl from Delhi. Pretty though she was, Jawahar found something to object to in the ten-year age gap between them. ‘I could not possibly marry her before she was eighteen or nineteen, and that is six or seven years hence’, he wrote. ‘I would not mind waiting as I am not in a matrimonial state of mind at present.’42

  After Cambridge he went to the Inner Temple in London to follow his father into the legal profession. His studies did not grip him; social and political life did, and two years went by as Jawahar ‘hovered about London’, becoming interested in Fabianism, socialism, votes for women and Irish independence. This left-wing awakening was done in the company of some old public-school friends, and expensively. Motilal had always been a generous father. At Cambridge, Jawahar had £400 a year, which was almost half a professorial salary.43 He had proven to be good at spending it, and had often run short of cash. ‘I was merely trying to ape to some extent the prosperous but somewhat empty-headed Englishman who is called a “man about town”,’ he later confessed. ‘This soft and pointless existence, needless to say, did not improve me in any way.’44 Regular requests for another £100 here and there arrived back in Allahabad; sometimes, there was just a cable with the single word ‘Money’.45 This occasioned at least one Motilal fury being delivered in written form; but the debts were always paid. And Jawahar’s easy life in London was not without its uses. In 1911, Motilal commissioned his son to purchase for him a full suit of court dress – buckled knee breeches over silk stockings, a tail coat with gold embroidery, a bicorne hat and a ceremonial sword. Despite his criticism of the British regime, Motilal was both loyal and important enough to have been one of the very few Indian commoners commanded to attend the Delhi durbar of King-Emperor George V.46

  *

  In the autumn of 1912, a young English gentleman, Jawaharlal Nehru, returned to India, the land of his birth. He had been away for seven years, punctuated by two trips home. He had received a world-class education of the grandest type, read plenty of fashionable books, developed a raffish interest in radical politics, and spent a large amount of his father’s money. Nehru’s verdict on himself at age twenty-two was characteristically sharp: ‘I was a bit of a prig with little to commend me.’47

  In India Jawahar duly began to take on legal cases, and was soon delighti
ng his father with a substantial income. He was interested in politics, but had a crippling fear of speaking in public – especially if he had to do it in Hindustani, rather than English.48 The rest of his time was divided between the bar library and the club, and featured an endless rotation of the same old men discussing the same legal topics in the same stuffy, colonial lounges. It was a life of stupefying tedium, and Jawahar quickly fell into despair. A quote from the pacifist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson struck him hard: ‘And why can’t the races meet? Simply because the Indians bore the English.’ Jawahar added, darkly, ‘It is possible that most Englishmen feel that way and it is not surprising.’49

  This glum lad was hardly cheered by the arrival of what was supposed to be the happiest day of his life on 8 February 1916. The wedding of Jawaharlal Nehru and Kamala Kaul was one of the leading social events of the year, described later by their friend Asaf Ali, with very little overstatement, as the ‘royal wedding’.50 It had been arranged for the first day of spring. A special train, swagged opulently with ribbons and bunting and garlanded with flowers, brought the groom and three hundred guests up from Allahabad to Delhi. A town of tents and marquees was set up outside the walled city, beneath a sign with the words ‘Nehru Wedding Camp’ spelt out in flowers. There were bedroom tents, living-room tents and dining tents, each hung and carpeted with oriental rugs and furnished with Motilal’s usual lavishness. The encampment had a full staff and its own orchestra.