Octavio Paz was Mexico's Ambassador to India for a brief period in the Sixties. He understood nothing of the country. Manash Firaq Bhatacharjee is Indian. Yet he turns to Paz to make sense of Nehru.
Octavio Paz in his 1966 speech, described Nehru as someone who ‘belonged to a double anti-tradition’.
This is nonsense. Nehru belonged to a comprador tradition. His ancestors served the Mughals before becoming vakils to John Company. His father joined the INC which had been set up by British ex-ICS officials to help the Government. By 1917, it was the stated aim of British policy in India to increase 'responsible' Government. By 1923, this meant elections under 'dyarchy'. Motilal Nehru was one of the leaders of the biggest party in the Legislative Assembly. The INC was the partner which Britain wanted to hand over power to. Thus the Nehrus had always belonged to the governing tradition. There were never against the way things were done.
Educated at Harrow and Cambridge,
like many other sons of ambitious barristers who couldn't get their progeny into the Schools the Brits had set up for the Princes. Later Doon was set up as an Indian alternative to Mayo or Aitchisons' for scions of the barristocracy. That's where Nehru sent his grandsons.
Nehru developed close links with European culture
No. He developed an interest in British and some Continental politics. Culture was of little interest to him.
and, Paz points out, ‘drew inspiration from the rebellious and heterodox thought of the West’.
But that rebellious and heterodox thought was already well represented on Indian campuses. One reason Motilal didn't send his son to school or College in India was because he wanted to keep him away from the Revolutionaries.
In An Autobiography, Nehru describes his introduction at Cambridge to Nietzsche (who was a ‘rage’) and Bernard Shaw, among others.
But it was Iqbal, who got a German PhD, who was Nietzsche's biggest devotee in the sub-continent. Compared to Revolutionaries like MN Roy, Nehru was twenty years behind the times. He had been infantilized by his British education. Oxbridge was just an extension of public school. It aimed to get boys to tire themselves out doing sports rather than having sex.
He thought of himself as ‘sophisticated and talked of sex and morality in a superior way’.
But had an arranged marriage to a 'sanskari' Hindi speaking girl.
One of Nehru’s early influences, he writes, partly via Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, was ‘a vague kind of cyrenaicism’ (a hedonist philosophy that derived from ancient Greece of the fourth century, which considered sensual pleasure as the supreme good).
The Kaulas were followers of Abhinavagupta who had a more sophisticated aesthetic philosophy and a highly esoteric 'tantric' sexual practice. Indeed, they advocated incest as having some sort of spiritual benefit. Fortunately, they concentrated on getting ahead in material not spiritual terms. To his credit, Nehru took little interest in such things though he did provide his daughter with a Yogi to improve her health with his dick. But this was not the main thrust of his thinking which was facile and shallow.
Nehru’s other lineage is traced by Paz back to his ancestors who ‘had frequented the Mogul court and had absorbed Persian and Arabic heritage’, and to his family tradition from which ‘he had a vein of heterodoxy vis-à-vis Hindu traditionalism’.
The Kaulas are Kapalikas. Paz took an interest in such things as did, according to Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi. Nehru didn't bother with it too much. Apparently he developed a taste for Urdu poetry in prison. But Azad thought his taste was poor.
In the beginning of An Autobiography, Nehru mentions his ancestor Raj Kaul, who ‘had gained eminence as a Sanskrit and Persian scholar in Kashmir’, catching the attention of Farrukhsiyar, the man who took over the Mughal Empire after Aurangzeb’s death.
The Kauls had previously served the Muslim rulers of Kashmir. They had always sucked up to the ruling power. -Sadly, the Delhi to which the Nehrus moved was in terminal decline. The family was forced to flee after 1857 despite having transferred their allegiance to the Brits.
Nehru’s younger uncle, Nand Lal Nehru, was ‘considered to be a good Persian scholar [who] knew Arabic also’.
Motilal had mastered Persian before embarking on English. However, it was 'Maulvi' Sapru who outshone all others in this department. Iqbal was distantly related to Sapru.
A little later, Nehru mentions, ‘[father] and my older cousins treated the question [of religion] humorously and refused to take it seriously’.
But their wives went in the opposite direction.
When his father returned home after visiting Europe, he had to undergo the ‘prayaschit’ or the purification ceremony, according to Brahminical norms. But Nehru writes, he ‘refused to go through any ceremony or to submit in any way . . . to a so-called purification’.
Motilal threatened to take anybody who tried to 'boycott' him to Court and ruin him with legal costs. His fellow Kauls were grateful of the excuse to abandon the 'kala pani' taboo. This is one reason that Bihari Kayasths like Rajendra Prasad admired the Nehrus. They were opening doors for their co-religionists.
Nehru emerges as a man of double modernity.
An Edwardian shithead is not modern. He is fucking Edwardian.
This doubleness of identity across two or more cultures makes Nehru an exemplary figure.
No it doesn't. It makes him schizoid. True, if he dressed up as Marilyn Monroe and sang 'Happy Birthday Mr. President' to Kennedy, then we might say he had a 'double identity' but only if, by night, he fought crime on the mean streets of Gotham as the caped crusader.
The relationship with Europe would have been modern in an intellectual but not experiential way.
Why not? He had experience of living in Europe. What he didn't have was the intellectual chops to engage deeply with political and economic matters. But the same could be said of Stafford Cripps.
Nehru did not have to go through any crisis vis-à-vis Christianity.
It was Islam which gave him kittens.
In India, however, Nehru’s identity mirrored an impressive heterogeneity.
Nope. He was a Hindi speaking Brahmin from the largest State in India- one where Brahmins are a significant voting block. That's what got him the top job. Even Rahul is trying to play the 'janeodhari' Brahmin card. But Smriti Irani whupped his ass.
Nehru’s double modernity was
a pose. The guy was referred to as 'Punditji'. He dressed in khadi and made very boring speeches in Hindi. Jinnah, on the other hand, had to make a much bigger effort to pose as 'Qaid-e-Azam'. Nehru's mother tongue was Hindi. It was the language in which he spoke to his wife.
perhaps most responsible in making him restless towards all sorts of traditionalist tendencies.
Because his political leverage arose from the fact that he could cross over to the Socialists.
It also made him prone to more accusations regarding his politics and sense of belonging.
Which is why being known as 'Panditji' was an advantage.
When conservative lawyer and politician from Madras, Sir C. P. Ramaswamy Aiyer
The Justice Party- and thus the two Dravidian parties in T.N- gained by being anti-Brahmin. Separatism, however, was a vote loser. C.P was stabbed repeatedly till he gave up any idea of Travancore going its own way. Say what you like, Iyers can be quite sensible if beaten or stabbed often enough. Not all Iyers. Beating me won't make me smart as a succession of Hindi tutors soon realized.
said in public that Nehru ‘did not represent mass-feeling’, Nehru agreed to the verdict and extended the point in the epilogue of his autobiography:
Mass-feeling is that Brahmins should stick to priest-craft or something boring like Accountancy. They should not run the country because they are as stupid as shit. This only applies to males. Females of any caste or creed can do a good job. They won't, but they can.
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.
Except prison. Guys like Nehru should be locked up for their own good.
Perhaps my thoughts and approach to life are more akin to what is called Western than Eastern, but India clings to me, as she does to all her children, in innumerable ways . . .
India clung to that cunt for too long. To be fair, he had wanted to retire at 70. But there were worse possible successors- Krishna Menon, Morarji Desai- and so maybe it was just as well that this Alaistair Sim` look-alike continued to preside as Headmistress of St. Trinian's.
I cannot get rid of either that past inheritance or my recent acquisitions . . . [T]hey create in me a spiritual loneliness not only in public activities but in life itself. I am a stranger and alien in the West . . . But in my own country also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.
Why? It was because, as he admitted in 1962, he lived in a fantasy world. The fact is, if you work hard doing something worthwhile then you begin to feel at home wherever you might be. If you merely talk bollocks, you can never be at home anywhere save a University Campus or a Lunatic Asylum.
The man who lived a double modernity
He lived a double fantasy- one in which the West could be redeemed by Stalinism and the East could be redeemed by talking endless vacuous bollocks about Panchsheel or the Ahimsa fairy.
suffered in his own admission—a sense of cultural homelessness that we may describe as spiritual unheimlich.
There is nothing 'uncanny' about rejecting empirical Social or Economic science and virtue signaling like crazy while believing in stupid lies. No spiritual malaise is involved in mental masturbation.
The double home of East and West created a tension that was aesthetic and spiritual.
Fuck off! There were plenty of people who had such a 'double home'. Those in the Kipling mode worked hard wherever such work was available. They may have experienced frustration or cognitive dissonance and some did translate this into aesthetic or spiritual or scientific achievement. Not Nehru. On the other hand, he did sign off on most of the files his bureaucrats presented to him and did get the Indian people to accept that their country was a shithole which could not feed or defend itself or do anything except pass around the begging bowl while talking vacuous bollocks.
To belong and not to belong was Nehru’s cultural predicament.
No it wasn't. Like his Daddy he belonged to the INC. Unlike his daddy, his allegiance to Gandhi was stronger and eventually his vision, not that of Gandhi's, prevailed. But this was only because Gandhi's vision involved giving up sex and fasting to death. After 1930, the INC manifesto was Nehruvian- i.e. nonsensical but with plenty of potential for 'rent seeking'.
It produced a divided sense of self in Nehru, which is part of a larger condition of the modern self.
This is an obsolete availability cascade. At one time there was a theory that 'modern life' was making everybody kray kray which is why people should pay good money to Freudians or other such fraudsters. I must admit that some of my early work was in this vein. In my pathbreaking 1974 monograph- 'Virendra Fernandes is a fucking wanker' I showed that masturbation was the result of divided self of fat bastards like Virendra who borrowed my Spiderman comics and never returned them.
There is an estrangement from the ascriptive modes of the self.
That's a good thing. 'Performance orientation' is the way to go. Small kids may think Daddy can beat up Superman. They soon discover that Daddy can't even defend himself from Mummy's frying pan. I'm not saying that's what happened to me. It's the sort of thing which could happen to anybody.
The modern individual is thrown towards the anxious desire—in Rimbaud’s words—‘to be absolutely modern’.
But Rimbaud wasn't modern. He drank absinthe not coco-cola. The poor bastard was butchered by his doctors precisely because he had no access to modern medicine.
Nehru was too modern for India.
No. He had an arranged marriage. True, he let his younger sister marry out of caste. But his other sister wasn't allowed to marry a Muslim. Parsis and Jains and Italians are okay but we have to draw the line somewhere. This was just modern enough for India. That's why the dynasty kept getting re-elected till Rahul decided it was safer not to go the way of his Granny and Daddy.
Walter Crocker called him, the ‘frequently un-Indian nationalist’.
Nehru was an anti-national Indian when it came to China as well as India's own economic and defense needs. But plenty of other tossers were equally stupid. They suffered from what Michael Polanyi called 'moral inversion'. Your own people are always in the wrong. Their enemies are always on the side of the angels.
In the beginning of The Discovery Nehru poses the question he seeks to find out about India: ‘How does she fit into the modern world?’
Discovery is an okay book. Americans reading it thought Nehru was a sensible man. He wanted India to rise through electrification and so G.E would get a big contract while Wall Street provided the money. India would rise the way Stalin's Russia had risen- i.e. by selling grain (even if this meant starving their own people) and importing American Tech. The difference was that Nehru wouldn't slaughter millions because he was an Edwardian gentleman.
Nehru was already modern. India wasn’t yet modern.
Because it refused to cooperate with the Brits, or, after Independence, with the Americans or anybody else who could have helped the country
It is not how modernity fits India, but how India fits modernity that was Nehru’s concern.
Fuck is that supposed to mean? Modernity can 'fit India' if one works out a way by which exporting goods and services pays for the import of technology. Nehru did accept that this should be done by Economists. It wasn't his fault that economists are as stupid as shit. Only mimetics matters. Imitate what smart people are doing. Let the Government supply public goods and entrepreneurs do everything else.
On the other hand, it is true that Gandhi thought India could not fit modernity because High Caste Hindus would not fight. His solution was simple. Let them also not fuck. Thus they would die out. Some other nation would take over the territory. They could name it New Sichuan or New Hejaz or something of that sort.
Modernity was the new thing.
Gandhian shite was the big new thing. For awhile everybody was queuing up to get hit on the head with steel tipped batons after which they would go sit quietly in Prison.
It was the new idea and sensibility that had dawned in history.
In the opinion of some shitty little pedants.
India was an old idea and an old sensibility, lagging behind in time.
No. It was lagging behind in science, technology, commerce. It was ahead of the rest of the world in stupidity. But it existed in the same temporal sequence as everywhere else.
Western modernity had announced a new time in the world, a time of radical change and progress.
But there was radical change and progress before some stupid pedants started talking shite about modernity and post-modernity while their students got stuck with massive student debt and jobs as barristas.
Modernity meant a new structure—a new apparatus of thought, life, social relations and economy.
But then came post-structuralism. Maybe there is a post-post structuralism. Nobody cares enough to find out.
To be modern was in India’s favour.
Being a shithole wasn't. But that's the path the INC chose.
Despite being ushered in by colonial power, the spirit of modernity gave the colonized a chance to be part of universal history.
Very true. Then spirit of post-modernity gave the post-colonial a chance to be part of subaltern studies shite. Previously, when Columbus tried to get to India, spirit of ancientness was telling him to fuck off to Amrika. Vasco da Gama was more successful because he got spirit of ancientness drunk and then fucked it in the ass. Ask Sanjay Subhramaniyam. He has posted many excellent videos on this theme on Pornhub. This is the sort of stuff Manash should be teaching.
It was a matter of historical inevitability. In Octavio Paz’s phrase, ‘the Third World is condemned to modernity’.
No. The Turd World is condemned to being a shit-hole unless it stops being a shit-hole and turns into Singa-fucking-pore.
Nehru’s question also begged the other question that he sought to find an answer for: How do I as a modern subject, fit into India?
Up its arse? No. Nehru became Prime Minister. If you live in a shithole, try to become PM. Life is better if you have a tax-payer funded air conditioned residence.
There are two aspects to Nehru’s modernity and being the modern subject.
'Modern subject' is meaningless.
One is the question of belonging. Nehru confesses:
India was in my blood and there was much in her that instinctively thrilled me. And yet I approached her almost as an alien critic, full of dislike for the present as well as for many of the relics of the past that I saw. To some extent I came to her via the West, and looked at her as a friendly westerner might have done. I was eager and anxious to change her outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity.
Nehru was writing this at a time when every leader was claiming to be modern and technocratic. Ataturk and the Shah had gone the extra mile banning beards and turbans and the veil and so forth. The other point is that Nehru was writing books so as to make money and thus preserve his independence from the the Dalmias and Birlas and Tatas. He needed a narrative 'hook' and fell back on the trope of the deracinated intellectual unable to belong to the 'White' world but repulsed by his own 'Black' backwardness and poverty.
Nehru’s intellectual and cultural ties with India were intercepted by another place, its history and culture.
How? Intellectual and cultural ties are based on history and...culture. How can culture intercept cultural ties? The tie is the thing itself.
Nehru epitomized the modern traveller, who brings ideas from elsewhere.
But ancient travelers did the same thing. It was they who spread religions like Christianity and Buddhism and Islam and so forth. But that had been happening since the stone age.
In this, Nehru was not alone.
Except when he went took a dump. Even Maulana Azad would walk away hurriedly if Panditji started lowering his pajamas to squeeze out a turd.
He was one among other Indian leaders and thinkers to learn and get inspired by western thought.
He was also one among other Indian leaders who took a dump from time to time.
Does that disqualify Nehru, and others like him, from belonging to India?
If they run away from it- sure.
It is an absurd question. The territorial idea of culture is prone to absurdities.
Any idea that occurs to Manash is bound to be absurd.
The outsider–insider question is taken to a conspiratorial level during times when nationalist politics is driven by ethnocentric sentiments.
But nationalist politics is, by definition, ethnocentric. Manash is a cretin.
Who is less Hindu or more Hindu determines who is a good or bad Hindu in ethnocentric terms.
That's how religion's work. A guy who habitually shits on the Pope is a bad Catholic. The fact that he worships Satan is another point against him.
Identity is determined by a measuring tape.
I've a tiny dick. Does this make me less of a man? Yes, according to my ex-wife. Sad.
Less and more, in turn, is determined by who is traditionalist and who is modern.
This is certainly not the case with Hindutva ideology. A traditionalist may believe in hereditary entitlement. That's why they'd vote for 'janeodhari' Rahul not 'backward caste' Modi. But Modi is modern. Foreign politicians took careful note of his party's use of modern technology- holograms yet!- to win elections.
These debates often plummet to shallow polemics. It turns the question of identity, political.
What else could it be? Identity arises from Oikeoisis which arises from oikos which in turn gives rise to the polis and the political. The 'uncorrelated asymmetries' encoded in oikos give rise to 'bourgeois strategies' which are eusocial. Nutters like Nehru and Manash may think this is vulgar. But it is true.
Nehru was more than willing to tailor India for modernity.
The problem was that he was unwilling to do anything sensible.
Nehru concedes modernity is a ‘garb’, a matter of appearance.
No. Garb means clothes. Clothes are real. They are utilitarian- though, no doubt, some garments may be tailored to make one look less like a fat fuck. But that is a useful type of aesthetic consideration.
It lacks (historical) ground, as it is still in the making.
But tradition too lacked historical ground. The indigenous people of the USA had been displaced by more technological advanced immigrants. But those immigrants- e.g Highland Scots- themselves had been displaced from their traditional lands and occupations by modern technology and financial capitalism.
Modernity was a new and alien condition for India.
Not really. There had been European enclaves since the fifteenth century. The first Englishman to live in and write about India did so before the end of the sixteenth century. Indians got guns at the same time as most parts of Europe. It was supplying the British Navy with ships as late as the Battle of Navarino. Steam power and Electricity and Telephones came to India quite soon after they came into use in England. On the other hand, there were some nutters- like Gandhi- who rejected modernity and sex and nice food and saying sensible things because they wanted to set up as Maharishis or Mahatmas or whatever.
Since it was rooted in traditionalist thinking and practices, India had to perform the new script of modernity.
Why? Did 'traditional practices' say 'kindly perform script of modernity. After that, kindly perform striptease. Finally, you may kindly perform script of 'Debbie does New Delhi' ?
Nehru did not believe in the emulative aspect of culture and demanded genuine inspiration.
Nonsense! He understood that all culture is emulative. The reason you go to Skool and Collidge is so as to emulate smart peeps wot r edumicated. You can't just sit under a tree waiting for inspiration, at which point you can suddenly translate Catullus and Kalidasa and get gay with your Collidge buddies.
It was a difficult task for a people who suffered two hundred years at the hands of a new beast called colonialism,
That was a very old beast indeed. The Romans colonized much of Britain. India, of course, had already been colonized by Turks. That's why a lot of its people welcomed the Brits.
and its colonial project of modernization.
There was no such project. Britain wanted its colonies to make money for it. It didn't want them developing an advanced technological infrastructure.
Modernity in India was destined to be a shallow act.
So long as the INC held power- sure. Scratch that. Suppose the dynasty had released its vice like grip on the party. Suppose Montek had taken over from Manmohan and had kicked ass and taken names... But, so long as a single Nehru-Gandhi is alive, Congress can't have a good leader.
People were reluctant to let go of their historically established social prejudices,
nor of those which weren't historically established at all. Take the cult of the MBA. Nobody had heard of the thing in the Sixties. By the Eighties, everybody wanted an MBA son-in-law. Then the IT revolution hit South India and suddenly granny was advising you as to which computer language to learn. But some useless people still got MBAs at shitty colleges though it was obvious that 'placements' were imaginary.
and made ambivalent gestures towards Western values of modernity.
There was some money available for taking the Western line and pretending Hinduism is very evil and that India should be broken up into nice, easily digestible, pieces for China's benefit.
The performance so far has been fraught with contradictions and profound shallowness.
Fuck contradictions. Some people have made lots of money by non-ambivalent gestures. Meanwhile College Professors in non-STEM subjects have come to be seen as drooling imbeciles. There is nothing shallow about being a billionaire. You can fill a swimming pool with gold coins and bathe in the stuff. Manash might say 'how shallow!' but nobody is listening to him.
The shallow act includes Macaulay’s curse of mimicking the colonizer.
What curse was that? Macaulay was descended from 'primitive' Scottish highlanders who had more valor than wealth. They mimicked their Sassenach colonizers to such good effect that the English came to depend on Scottish intellectuals- like Hume and Smith- and writers- like Walter Scott- and soon their technologists and industrialists and financiers. This did not weaken the Scottish sense of identity. It has grown stronger precisely because the Scots will adopt any innovation from anywhere and make it their own. Incidentally, it was the Scots who gave Kiran Majumdar her first break. Now she is a billionaire. The stuff she produces saves the lives of thousands of people. There is nothing wrong in imitating what good and worthwhile people do. But to imitate a fool whose policies were disastrous for India is nothing but folly.
What did Nehru do wrong? The answer comes in three parts
1) Defense. India needed to be part of a defense pact because though it had a strong infantry, it was weak at sea (it had a British admiral till 1958) and in the Air. Thanks to Nehru, Pakistan got American tanks which however weren't enough to stop the Indian infantry steamroller. But the thing was a close call. The story is that it was Bhutto, not Ayub, who pulled the trigger on this. Bhutto knew the army would get the blame if the thing misfired.
2) Foreign policy. Both the US and the USSR offered India China's seat on the Security Council. Nehru refused. He insisted that Communist China get it. By admitting Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, Nehru had conceded that Ladakh and Arunachal and Sikkim and anywhere else which might have been claimed by the Dalai Lama was also Chinese territory. Nehru's balls up over Kashmir is too well known. What is not appreciated is that he let out Sheikh Abdullah at a time when it appeared that he was preparing to hand over the Valley to Pakistan. As I said, Bhutto pulled the trigger on this when, given time, Ayub may have prevailed. The one fly in the ointment was Shastri. Remarkably, both the CIA and the KGB lobbied hard for Shastri precisely because they thought he was weak.
3) Economic policy. Here, Nehru's culpability is considerably reduced by the many others who can be blamed. Also, Hindus wanted a strong center and the Planning Commission was a good way to reduce the power of Chief Ministers. But 'export pessimism' was simply stupid at a time when world trade was booming as never before. Admittedly, strangling labor intensive manufacturing and stupid shit like 'freight equalization' was politically beneficial. After all, Birlas and Bajajs and so forth had fallen for the toothless charms of the crackpot Mahatma. Also, Marwaris were experts at taking over British concerns and very quickly bankrupting them. Indian capitalists, truth be told, were a bit crap. But what they wanted was what the Japs had done in the Eighteen Nineties- i.e. the Govt sets up a shiny new industry and then privatizes it. Speculators make a killing but one or two of them turn into genuine industrialists. After all, G.D Birla started off as a speculator. But, by the Thirties, plenty of Marwaris and Jains and Khattris and Chettiars were going to MIT. Indeed, there already were Bengalis who went to Film School or Agricultural College in the States. Had there been no Partition, Bengal and Punjab would have been 'locomotive economies' pulling up their surrounding regions.
My point is that Indian capitalists- like Indian socialists- were shitty. But competition weeds out shitty capitalists. Stupid socialists we will always have with us. Let them guzzle 'Nehru's spirit' by giving beejays to homeless people. It is what the Mahatma would have wanted. How else are we to save Indian secularism from Hindutva hooligans? Only by getting down on your knees and sucking off all and sundry can we fulfil the vision of Manash Firaq Bhatacharjee. Incidentally, the Mahatma was warned to keep Nehru away from Firaq Gorakhpuri because of the latter's fondness for fellatio.
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