Jawaharlal Nehru – The Student, the Author, the Analyst, and the Communicator

I first met A.K. Damodaran, diplomat-scholar, in the early 1980s in a most unlikely place – the American Studies Research Centre (ASRC) at Osmania University in Hyderabad. We were speaking at a conference on the US-India relations hosted by Manoj Joshi, who was then part of the research staff of ASRC.

Over the next decade, he was known as ‘Uncle Damu’ to many of us who regularly interacted with him either at the India International Centre or his home in Delhi’s Green Park. Like the defence strategist K. Subrahmanyam, whom we referred to as ‘KSubs’ and ‘Bomb Mama’, Uncle Damu had a way of relating to young people, making them feel comfortable in their towering intellectual presence. He belonged to a generation of diplomats that was steeped in scholarship and from whom one learnt a lot because they had time for the younger generation.

I regard it, therefore, both an honour and a pleasure to have this opportunity, thanks to the editors of The Wire, to comment on a new edition of Uncle Damu’s book on Jawaharlal Nehru’s record as a communicator of ideas.

First published in 1997, the 2023 edition comes with a foreword written by historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee. As Mukherjee notes, Nehru was not a ‘natural communicator’ and till he became prime minister, he communicated more through the written than the spoken word. His speeches were crafted in simple language, but his letters and books were written in elegant prose.

Mukherjee also notes that this book is not just about Nehru as a communicator but also about his intellectual persona.

In this age of visual and verbal communication on the part of political leaders, there is no political leader who has the scholarship and the skill to communicate serious ideas in writing. The thought, therefore, that a prime minister and a political leader can also be a scholar sounds bizarre.

In recent memory, we have the example of a P.V. Narasimha Rao, who was a scholar in his own right, an ashtavadhani, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was a poet. However, no prime minister has come anywhere near Nehru in the ability and commitment to communicate serious political ideas through the medium of the written word. Manmohan Singh is a learned economist but has rarely put pen to paper to communicate as a political leader and statesman.

Nehru’s education and erudition apart, what defined his influence as a political leader was the power of his pen.

“It is not merely because of his position within the Indian national movement in relation to his great predecessors and contemporaries,” says Damodaran, “that Jawaharlal Nehru becomes interesting as a representative political figure, a communicator, and an agitator, who learnt his trade through long years of apprenticeship, and finally ended up by becoming the accepted instructor, so to speak, in democratic values and the scientific temper, to a whole nation.”

Rather, Nehru’s influence was defined by his scholarship, his ‘sensitivity to new ideas’ and his ability to remain in step with a changing India.

Damodaran examines four dimensions to the Nehru of the pre-Independence period – the student, the author, the analyst, and the communicator. Nehru was a devout student of history and literature and hence his writings, even on mundane matters, were informed by his grasp of both historical fact and shaped by literary elegance.

The ‘tryst with destiny‘ speech of August 1947 was not a one off instance of elegant prose. It, in fact, represented the essence of Nehru’s oratorical style and prose.

Also read: India’s New Tryst With Destiny Has No Place for Jawaharlal Nehru

Damodaran refers to the range of scholarship from Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw to Swami Vivekananda and Gopal Krishna Gokhale who influenced Nehru. He was as familiar with the writings of Bertrand Russell and M.N. Roy as he was with those of Mahatma Gandhi and Annie Besant.

In this Nehru was not an exception in his times. His seniors in the national movement like Pherozeshah Mehta, Dadabhai Naoroji, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Surendranath Banerjee, and so on were all erudite, scholarly and had a profound grasp of history and India’s destiny. “It is in this line of remarkable achievers,” says Damodaran, “that Nehru has his own special place in the annals of popular politics in modern India.”

It was a rare constellation of patriotic and enlightened men and women that provided the intellectual fodder for the national movement and Nehru was very much a part of that firmament. What enabled Nehru to communicate his views was the spread of the printing press, of newspapers, and the assurance of a certain kind of freedom of expression that characterised late colonial rule in India.

To quote Damodaran, “It is then as a great communicator in the special conditions of the British Empire in India, with its institutions, with its reasonably free press and its limited but real rule of law regime that the contribution of Nehru to the freedom movement has been analysed in these pages.”

Nehru wrote frequently and extensively on a variety of topics, from the very local to the global. He wrote for The Hindu, The Independent, The Leader, The Bombay Chronicle, and of course National Herald, which became his main platform. While Mahatma Gandhi became identified with Young India and the Harijan, Nehru never came to be identified with any one platform because he wrote often and widely. Apart from his columns, his three famous and popular books – Glimpses of World History, Discovery of India, and An Autobiography – became important prisms through which the people of India viewed their history and the world, and the international community came to view India and its struggle for freedom from European colonisation.

While Mahatma Gandhi remained the main political and emotional inspiration for the national movement nationwide, its soul and voice, Nehru, became the medium through which Gandhiji’s own views as well as the views of a wider leadership were articulated in prose to the nation and the world.

Also read: Jawaharlal Nehru Was a True Democrat With Strong Secular Ideals

“In the totality of Nehru’s achievements as a communicator,” concludes Damodaran, “it is the written word which is central.”

The emergence of Nehru as a writer in English on the political and economic problems of the country, observes Damodaran, “was a major factor in the attempts of the national movement …. to reach out to a wider audience.”

Regardless of the thinking of the publishers on the relevance and significance of re-publishing this book a quarter century after its first publication, it’s clear to me that the book is a reminder of the Himalayan gap that has come to exist between the intellectual calibre of India’s first prime minister and that of contemporary political leadership across the entire political spectrum.

Consider the fact that among the many controversies that have come to define the persona of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the most farcical is the one about his educational qualifications and whether it is true or not that he has a masters in ‘Entire Political Science’.

Sanjaya Baru is a writer and policy analyst.