Jawaharlal Nehru: the Architect of Modern India

Introduction

On the night of August 14, 1947, as the clock moved toward midnight and India stood on the threshold of independence after nearly two centuries of British colonial rule, Jawaharlal Nehru rose to address the Constituent Assembly of the newly free nation. What he said in those early minutes of independence has echoed across the decades as one of the great speeches of the twentieth century: "Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom." The words were luminous, elegiac, and charged with the weight of history, and they came from a man who had spent more than nine years of his life in British prisons, who had known Gandhi and been transformed by him, who had wrestled with the paradox of being an Anglicized Indian aristocrat who was also one of the most dedicated leaders of a mass movement for national liberation.

Jawaharlal Nehru was the first Prime Minister of independent India and served in that office from August 1947 until his death in May 1964, a period of seventeen years during which he shaped the character of the Indian republic in ways that are still felt, debated, and contested today. He was the architect of a secular, parliamentary democracy in a country where most of its neighbors chose military rule or theocratic governance. He was the author of a planned, state-led economic development model that sought to industrialize India without the social violence of either capitalism or communism. He was one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement, the coalition of newly independent nations that sought to chart a path between the American and Soviet blocs during the Cold War. And he was the head of what would become one of the most powerful political dynasties in the democratic world, a family whose hold on Indian politics would extend through his daughter Indira and his grandson Rajiv for decades after his death.

To understand Nehru is to understand the aspirations and the contradictions of independent India: the dream of a modern, pluralist, scientifically minded nation emerging from the chrysalis of colonial subjugation; the painful gap between that dream and the realities of poverty, communal tension, and institutional weakness; the personal qualities, the eloquence, the intellectual range, the genuine moral seriousness, that made him one of the most remarkable political figures of his century; and the failures, the economic rigidities, the naive trust in Chinese assurances that collapsed so catastrophically in 1962, the authoritarian tendencies that lay latent beneath the democratic rhetoric, that make his legacy a subject of ongoing and sometimes bitter dispute in contemporary India.

Origins: an Allahabad Family and the Making of an Aristocrat

Jawaharlal Nehru was born on November 14, 1889, in Allahabad, in what was then the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh in British India, now the city of Prayagraj in the state of Uttar Pradesh. He was the first child and only son of Motilal Nehru, one of the most prominent and successful lawyers in northern India, and Swarup Rani Thussu, a woman of conservative Kashmiri Brahman background whose influence on her son was principally that of the devoted mother preserving a cherished eldest child.

Motilal Nehru was the dominant presence in Jawaharlal's early life and in many ways the most important single shaping force of his character and outlook. Motilal was a Kashmiri Pandit, belonging to the high-caste Hindu community that had migrated from the Kashmir Valley to the plains of northern India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that had produced a remarkable concentration of lawyers, administrators, and intellectuals who served the Mughal and later the British imperial systems with considerable success. He was also a man of the most spectacular ambition and energy, who had built his legal practice from modest beginnings into one of the largest and most lucrative in India, acquiring in the process a lifestyle that was by any measure extraordinary: his palatial home in Allahabad, Anand Bhavan, was staffed by dozens of servants, maintained stables and automobiles, and hosted a social life of lavish entertainment that mingled the Indian professional class with the British colonial establishment.