Nehru, Gandhi and a dream state

When I first visited India, in 1976, political conversation was full of the linguistic conventions of Jawaharlal Nehru, who had died 12 years earlier. One bowed in ritual regard before "the steel frame of the bureaucracy"; one warned against the "fissiparous tendencies" posed by religious or regional chauvinism; one professed faith in "the socialistic pattern of society," even without quite knowing what it meant. The streets were full of white Ambassadors, India's clunky domestic car, as they had been in Nehru's time. And the best and the brightest aspired to join the Indian Civil Service, as they had in Nehru's time.

India, which gained independence from the British in 1946, is today a much older sovereign nation than it was when I was there. And the Nehruvian world I knew seems almost as archaic as the imperial culture that preceded it. Socialism is a dead letter, and India is struggling to thrive in a world of globalized capitalism. Bright young people go into software development. The old Congress Party has been supplanted in power by a party professing the Hindu nationalist values that Nehru and his generation considered the single greatest threat to India's future. The spirit of disinterestedness, personal austerity and secular cosmopolitanism that Nehru sought to foster are all but defunct. Nehru is often considered the George Washington of India, but the Founding Fathers seem to have left a more lasting imprint on the United States than Nehru and his revolutionary generation did on India.

What are we to make of Nehru, and of Nehru's India, 40 years after the great man's death? Nehru is unique in modern history, not only the father figure of his country, but also a gifted writer and global actor who offered his people an exhilarating emblem of modernity.

Nehru is a biographer's dream, and over the last half century he has been the subject of books by leading Indian writers as well as by American and British figures. An exhaustive three-volume work by Sarvepalli Gopal appeared between 1975 and 1984. Stanley Wolpert, a leading American authority on India, published a psycho-biography in 1996 that promised to unearth the "passions and fears which drove and tortured Nehru" and featured dizzying leaps of speculation about the great man's sex life.