Unlike most of his followers, Jawaharlal Nehru was deeply involved with the problem of the cultural-civilisational personality of India. This much should be obvious in view of his struggle to discover for himself the soul of India as reflected in his Discovery of India. What is not equally obvious is that for Nehru, secularism, both as a personal philosophy and state policy, was an expression of India’s cultural-civilisational personality and not its negation and repudiation.
Secularism suited India’s requirements, as he saw them. For instance, it provided an additional legitimising principle for reform movements among Hindus beginning with the Brahmo Samaj in the early part of the 19th century. It met the aspirations of the Westernised and modernising intelligentsia. Before independence, it denied legitimacy to Muslim separatism in the eyes of Hindus, Westernised or traditionalist. If it did not help forge an instrument capable of resisting effectively the Muslim League’s demand for partition, the alternative platform of men like Vir Savarkar did not avail either. After partition, it served the same role of denying legitimacy to moves to consolidate Muslims as a separate communalist political force.
Spiritual Past
Despite his earnestness, however, Nehru was handicapped in a variety of ways. He did not know Sanskrit, or for that matter, any Indian language well enough. He did not have access to Indian tradition since Motilal Nehru had brought him up in a manner appropriate to an English gentleman.
Above all, he approached India’s past, historical as well as spiritual, through British scholars who inevitably saw Indian through their culturally coloured prisms. Western scholarship was also in its infancy. Much more valuable work was done when Nehru was too deeply involved in public affairs to keep track of it.
His intellectual background led Nehru to take a synthetic (aggregationist) view of Indian culture, though on a more careful reflection it should have been possible for him to recognise its integral unity founded on Yoga of which the Veda itself is a fruit, and its capaciousness resulting from the same Yogic foundation which placed no limit on the freedom of the human spirit. Inevitably, this synthetic view of Indian culture led him, especially in view of the Persianised cultural background of his own forebears, to accept the theory of a Hindu-Muslim cultural synthesis. Nehru recognised the limitation of this theory in his later years.
After independence, Nehru delivered at least three addresses which deserve attention in this connection. They reveal a little known face of the man. It is only fair that when the validity or otherwise the concept secularism, as it has been propounded and pursued in our country is once again being debated that we recall these pronouncements. The first of these was his address to the convocation of Aligarh Muslim University on January 24, 1948.
In it he said: “I am proud of India, not only because of her ancient, magnificent heritage, but also because of her remarkable capacity to add to it by keeping the doors and windows of her mind and spirit open to fresh and invigorating winds from distant lands. India’s strength has been two-fold; her own innate culture which flowed through the ages, and her capacity to draw from other sources and thus add to her own. She was far too strong to be submerged by outside streams, and she was too wise to isolate herself from them, and so there is a continuing synthesis in India’s real history and the many political changes which have taken place have had little effect on the growth of this variegated and yet essentially unified culture.
“I have said that I am proud of our inheritance and our ancestors who gave an intellectual and cultural pre-eminence to India. How do you feel about this past? Do you feel that you are also sharers in it and inheritors of it and, therefore, proud of something that belongs to you as much as to me? Or do you feel alien to it and pass it by without understanding it or feeling that strange thrill which comes from the realisation that we are the trustees and inheritors of this vast treasure?… You are Muslims and I am a Hindu. We may adhere to different religious faiths or even to none; but that does not take away from that cultural inheritance that is yours as much as it mine”.
Bitter experience
In view of his bitter experience of events leading to partition, it is inconceivable that Nehru could be so naive as to believe even vaguely that educated Muslims could possibly regard themselves as sharers and inheritors of the cultural heritage he was speaking about.
Nehru posed another question to his audience. “Do you believe in a national state which includes people of all religions… and is essentially secular as a state, or do you believe in a religious, theocratic conception of a state which regards people of other faiths as somebody beyond the pale?” He, of course, did not remind them that only a few months earlier many of them had sympathised with, if not actively worked for, Pakistan. But he did speak of “one national outlook” which would inform the working of the Indian state.
In a different way and in a different context, though, Nehru expanded on this theme. In his address at the inauguration of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in New Delhi on April 9, 1950, he said, “One can see each nation and each separate civilisation developing its own culture that has its roots in generations hundreds and thousands of years ago. One can see these nations being intimately moulded by the impulse that initially starts a civilisation going on its long path. That conception is affected by other conceptions and one sees action and interaction between these varying conceptions…
“Culture, if it has to have any value, must have a certain depth. It must also have a certain dynamic character… If we leave out what might be called the basic mould that was given to it by a nation’s or a people’s growth, it is affected by geography, by climate and by all kinds of other factors… Obviously, the culture of India in the old days was affected greatly, as we see in our literature, by the Himalayas, the forests and the great rivers of India among other things. It was a natural growth from the soil…
“The individual human being or race or nation must necessarily have a certain depth and certain roots somewhere. They do not count for much unless they have roots in the past, which past is after all the accumulation of generations of experience and some type of wisdom. It is essential that you have that…”
The last of three addresses was the Azad memorial lecture Nehru delivered on February 22, 1959. He said: “When Islam came to India in the form of political conquest, it brought conflict… It encouraged the tendency of Hindu society to shrink still further within its shell… Hence the great problem that faced India during the medieval period was how these closed systems, each with its strong roots, could develop a healthy relationship…
“The philosophy and the world outlook of the old Hindus was amazingly tolerant… The Muslims had to face a new problem, namely how to live with others as equals… In India slowly a synthesis was developed. But before it could be completed, other influences came into play.”
Inconvenient issues
Typically Nehru skirts inconvenient issues. He, for instance, does not tell us why the Christian-Muslim encounter did not lead to a synthesis despite the common Semitic origins of the two faiths.
The statement is notable for us, on the one hand, for its admission that the Hindu-Muslim conflict had not been resolved when the British arrived on the scene to produce new complications, and, on the other, for its diagnosis of the cause of the Hindu decline and the cure.
Nehru, as is well known, was preoccupied with the second problem, as was the Mahatma, with the difference that while Gandhiji saw a resolution of the problem in social reform, with heavy emphasis on the removal of untouchability, Nehru regarded the development of science and technology through the mediation of a strong state and contact with the West as the key to India’s future.
(To be concluded)
The Times of India, 14 November 1991