by Ravinder Kumar
A number of very distinguished individuals, drawn from different walks of life, have paid tribute to Jawaharlal Nehru on his birth centenary. Some of them have touched upon his unrivalled popularity with the common people of India; others have assessed his role in national and international politics; others, yet again, have focused upon his political and social ideas; finally, some, who knew him personally, have written about the warmth of his presence and the devastating charm with which he captivated all those, men and women, young and old, who came in contact with him.
However, during the course of the centenary year, there has been no attempt to assess the quality of Jawaharlal Nehru's historical scholar-ship. Nor has there been any serious effort to understand the enormous influence which he exercised over the intelligentsia, within India or in the West, through this scholarship. I therefore propose to take a brief look at the historical writings of Jawaharlal Nehru and assess their influence in his own times, as well as over late generations.
The contribution of Jawaharlal Nehru to historical scholarship is very substantial even when judged by the most rigorous standards. Moreover, the influence of his historical writings extended far beyond scholarly circles. Nehru's Autobiography is a fascinating account of how a cultivated Indian, drawn from an upper class background, moved into the vortex of nationalist politics; and thereby not only discovered his own “people” particularly the downtrodden and the impoverished in the villages; but also took upon himself the task of creating a new consciousness of national unity and social equity among millions of his countrymen. The Discovery of India, which Nehru wrote in a British prison between 1942-45, is an altogether different scholarly venture. In this work of classical proportions, Nehru attempted two things. First, he traced the social, political and intellectual outlines of Indian civilisation during its formative phase. Next, he highlighted the changes under-gone by this civilisation, during the medieval centuries, as well as under the aegis of British imperialism. All this intellectual labour was directed towards locating a strategy of social action, whereby India could be liberated from British rule, and transformed into a modern industrial society, socialist in structure and democratic and secular in its values.
The vision of praxis discernible in The Discovery, is even more prominent in Glimpses of World History, which seeks to pursue the changing fortunes of mankind over the centuries. Like other historians who surveyed human society as a whole, Nehru looked upon the major world civilisations as legitimate units of historical enquiry; and in Glimpses, he sought to portray changes in the human condition over historical time through highlighting the values and institutions of different civilisations; and, also, through exploring their modes of production and evaluating their contribution to human development. While Glimpses surveys the entire history of mankind, Nehru pays special attention to the more recent centuries; and to the relationship of subordination between the imperial polities of Europe, on the one hand, and the colonial societies of Asia and Africa, on the other. Indeed, the Asian and African liberation movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries feature as central themes of analysis in Glimpses and they provide a fascinating insight into the motives which prompted Nehru to embark upon a truly monumental survey of the history and destiny of human society.
Although Nehru's reputation as a historian rests upon a substantial corpus of scholarship, it is appropriate to ask whether he meets the full requirements of the discipline. At a formal level, works of historiography are created on the basis of the documentation generated by the actors of history, great or small, in the course of their life. Indeed, since the time of Ranke, if not earlier, documentation of this variety has been looked upon as the basic raw material of rigorous historiography. How does Jawaharlal Nehru measure up to this exacing requirement of historical scholarship? Perhaps the answer to this question is provided by examining the scholarly genre to which Nehru made so substantial a contribution. Like Trotsky in his classical rendering of the Russian Revolution, or Churchill in his narrative account of World War II, Jawaharlal Nehru drew upon his under-standing of politics—and, indeed, upon his involvement in, and leadership of the struggle for freedo m—to write about his life and times, particularly in the Autobiography and in The Discovery of India. In other words, for men like Nehru (or Trotsky or Churchill), the existential experience of grand politics becomes an authentic substitute for archival documents in the creation of works of scholarship.
Yet Nehru, again like Churchill, if not like Trotsky, also wrote about men and events belonging to periods to which he had no direct access. Both The Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History, it should be obvious, largely fall into historical writings of this category. Yet here, Nehru was no more disadvantageously placed than the professional scholar. An overview of a milieu and the direction of social change, a trained imagination capable of establishing a relationship of empathy with political actors, and above all, an ability to draw upon evidence from a variety of sources and to shape it into a balanced account of human achievement or failure over the centuries —these are some of the attributes which go into the making of a great historian. Nehru possessed these qualities in ample measure. Indeed, the manner in which he attracted the scholar and the specialist no less than he attracted the layman and the general reader, and, also, the manner in which his writings continue to fascinate the professional historian and the lay reader half-a-century after his death, is no small tribute to his scholarly stature and intellectual distinction.
While a focus upon substantial works like the Autobiography or The Discovery of India in any assessment of Jawaharlal Nehru as a historian is legitimate, it would be a serious mistake to altogether overlook the scholarly pieces, smaller in length, which he wrote as a nationalist leader or as a Prime Minister. Perhaps essays like “Whither India” or “A Basic Approach” illustrate what we have in view. The former was written in 1933 at a stage when Nehru was engaged in relecting upon the future of India and turned to the socialist ideology to provide answers to the problems of poverty and impoverishment over and above the question of political liberty, which confronted the country. Similarly, the piece entitled “Basic Approach” was penned in 1958, and reflected the vision of a mature statesman, who pondered upon the problems of mankind in the nuclear age, from the vantage point which he occupied as the first Prime Minister of India, and the experience of grand politics which he had gained in that capacity. Indeed, such a creation not only reflected the vision, the experience and the understanding of men and events of a great political actor, who was also a historian, but they also reflected Jawaharlal Nehru at his creative peak as a scholar.
Perhaps very few scholars have written about their country, or about humanity as a whole, with the compassion, the depth of understanding and the literary grace, which we find in the historical writings of Jawaharlal Nehru. For all these reasons, such writings have about them a timeless quality which will continue to fascinate and influence future generations as they fascinated and influenced his contemporaries.