Nehru's Idea Of A Young Nation’s Selfhood

In an article he wrote for Time magazine in 2001, reflecting on fifty years of India’s independence, Salman Rushdie connected the “so-called idea of India” to the modern Indian self, through a string of paradoxes: “In the modern age, we have come to understand our own selves as composites, often contradictory, even internally incompatible. We have understood that each of us is many different people. Our younger selves differ from our older selves; we can be bold in the company of our lovers and timorous before our employers, principled when we instruct our children and corrupt when offered some secret temptation; we are serious and frivolous, loud and quiet, aggressive and easily abashed. The 19th-century concept of the integrated self has been replaced by this jostling crowd of ‘I’s. And yet, unless we are damaged, or deranged, we usually have a relatively clear sense of who we are. I agree with my many selves to call all of them ‘me.’”

Reading this article in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) library, a year before submitting my PhD thesis on Nehru and Gandhi, I detected a Nehruvian echo in Rushdie’s evocative passage. We can make an analogous connection between Rushdie’s description of “selves” and what Nehru describes as the nation in this passage from the ‘Epilogue’ to The Discovery of India: “The discovery of India—what have I discovered? It was presumptuous of me to imagine that I could unveil her and find out what she is to-day and what she was in the long past. To-day she is four hundred million separate individual men and women, each differing from the other, each living in a private universe of thought and feeling. If this is so in the present, how much more difficult is it to grasp that multitudinous past of innumerable successions of human beings...India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads.”

What Nehru imagines as India’s selfhood in terms of modern life, Rushdie finds within each self of the numerous selves that make a nation. It is impossible to contain this vast sea of differences without, and accepting, contradictions between people and allowing them to thrive.

The Mexican poet-critic Octavio Paz in his 1967 speech in Delhi said that as a political leader, Nehru “did not fall into the temptation of suppressing the contradictions of history…He does not offer solutions; but shows us the way to find them.” This statement acknowledges Nehru’s ideological flexibility. Nehru did not follow a doctrinaire politics where a combination of scientific rationality and certain revolutionary ideas turned society into a Set Theory and provided absolute answers to the problems of human life. The nation is the contradictory whole of the proliferation of contradicting selves. This is a much deeper understanding than a nation broken down to the category of individuals alone. It provokes a radical idea of individuality itself, where individuals are not defined in terms of mere cogs in the wheel. In an essay titled ‘Personality’, Rabindranath Tagore decried “the rampant materialism of the present age which ruthlessly sacrifices individuals to the bloody idols of organisation.” The meaning of “organisation” here can be extended to include political organisations too, where individual contradictions are sacrificed in the name of a suffocatingly singular idea of the self and the nation.

There are similar resonances even in the imagination of the cultural self in Nehru and Rushdie. When Sir C P Ramaswamy Aiyer, conservative lawyer and politician from Madras, said in public (sometime during 1934-1935) that Nehru “did not represent mass-feeling”, Nehru agreed and extended the point in the epilogue of his Autobiography: “I often wonder if I represent anyone at all…I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere…I cannot get rid of either that past inheritance or my recent acquisitions… [T]hey create in me a spiritual loneliness…I am a stranger and alien in the West…But in my own country also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.”

By eluding representation, Nehru is being not just honest about himself. He is unwittingly raising a larger question about people who claim to belong to a single cultural heritage, whereas that heritage itself has evolved from its encounter with other cultural sources. To deny that encounter is to indulge in historical bluff.

Compare Nehru’s passage to Rushdie writing in the short story on migration, ‘The Courter’, from the anthology of short stories, East, West (1994): “I, too, have ropes around my neck. I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, I kick. Ropes, I do not choose between you…Do you hear? I refuse to choose.”

What for Nehru in the 1930s was a conscious understanding of his spiritual homelessness, unable to rid himself of the genuine rift (and conflict) between his double identity encountering western and Indian modernity, for Rushdie in the 1990s becomes an even more acute struggle to endorse that cultural rift by refusing a fake abandonment of that contradiction. To choose being one over and against another is a false choice. The cultural condition of modernity is the impossibility of choosing between our many selves.

The common thread between Nehru and Rushdie is the idea of the self and the idea of the nation that has a constant tendency to differ from itself, a self that experiences difference within itself. The self is “often contradictory, internally incompatible” [Rushdie] and “a bundle of contradictions” [Nehru]. It is reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s famous lines in Song of Myself: “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

These men of imagination make a fundamental point about the modern self that they realise—intuitively, poetically—being self-conflicted. The postulate is so fundamental that an argument for it only follows from or after the proposition, or hypothesis, is laid out. The self in modernity, to repeat, is self-contradictory. This goes against the Kantian assumption of rationalist thought where reason is the elimination of contradictions, or even the logical formulation of identity from German Idealism that ‘‘I is I’’.

Even Gandhi acknowledged this principle. He wrote on April 29, 1933 in Harijan: “I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my pursuit after Truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things.” He clarified the point further writing on September 28, 1934, in Harijan: “I have never made a fetish of consistency. I am a votary of Truth and I must say what I feel and think at a given moment on the question, without regard to what I may have said before on it.” The difference between truth and thinking precisely lies in the temporal space where thinking is constantly evolving vis-à-vis an ever-changing idea of truth. Time contradicts us and we contradict our older selves in time.

This idea of contradiction has nothing to do with the chameleonesque self where you contradict your past the way people change ideological garbs and wear new masks to suit the demands of the current political weather. That is an instrumentalist—and perfectly logical—way of “self-ing”. The word ‘‘contradict’’, in fact, doesn’t suit this case. This is also not an endorsement of the Hegelian dialectic where you evolve from contradictions in mere ideas alone. It is rather a recovery of the older, more ethical Platonic idea in The Laws that contradictions also involve people. If you follow Plato, you won’t succumb to the corrupt, logical nonsense Fascists, religious fundamentalists, Stalinists and Maoists believe in: that whoever contradicts you is your enemy. To consider others enemies is to consider your (contradictory) self your own enemy.

Nehru understood the modern self and the nation’s selfhood as one where people may avoid the dangers of what Rushdie calls “damaged, or deranged” conditions of the self. If you deny the fact that your self contains elements of other selves and that you are a “bundle of contradictions” held together by “strong and invisible threads” of love, you are most likely to suffer from neurosis.

(Views expressed are personal)

(This appeared in the print as 'A Young Nation’s Selfhood')

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Nehru and the Spirit of India. He is currently working on a book on Gandhi