Nehru, Nehruvians and Bharat Mata: From being a suspect to the supporter of India’s cultural nationalism

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, was a man who had to ‘discover India’, having alienated himself with colonial education initially and with Marxist bias later. In 1937 Jawaharlal Nehru had complained that he needed a dictionary to understand Vande Mataram while Tamizh poet Bharathi had translated the song into lyrical and simple Tamizh verses as early as 1905. However, the cries of ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and Vande Mataram were the energisers of the masses. According to historian Sita Ram Goel (1921-2003), Nehru tried to replace Vande Mataram with Jai Hind using the popularity of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose despite the fact that Nehru was one of the most bitter critics of Bose. Actually Bose himself had staunchly defended Vande Mataram when there was communal opposition to it. And he was not satisfied with the compromise solution worked out by the Congress working committee under Nehru. Later in 1943, the official programmes of the Provincial Government of Azad Hind (PGAH) always commenced with the singing of Vande Mataram. [caption id=“attachment_11979642” align=“alignnone” width=“316”] Aravindan Neelakandan’s new book, ‘Hindutva: Origin, Evolution and Future’ (Kali, Rs 995)[/caption] Nehru tried to project himself as an enlightened leader who was giving a rational explanation to the uneducated superstitious masses. After writing about how he ‘seldom spoke of Hindustan or of Bharata, the old Sanskrit name derived from the mythical founder of the race’ to his urban audiences who were ‘more sophisticated’, he explains in detail how he enlightened the ignorant masses raising the cry of ‘Bharat Mata’: “Sometimes as I reached a gathering, a great roar of welcome would greet me: Bharat Mata ki Jai — ‘Victory to Mother India’. I would ask them unexpectedly what they meant by that cry, who was this Bharat Mata, Mother India, whose victory cry they wanted? My question would amuse them and surprise them, and then not knowing exactly what to answer, they would look at each other, and at me. I persisted in my questioning. At last, a vigorous Jat, wedded to the soil from immemorial generations, would say that it was the dharti, the good earth of India, that they meant. What earth? Their particular village patch, or all the patches in the district or province or in the whole of India? And so, question and answer went on, till they would ask me impatiently to tell them all about it. I would endeavor to do so and explain that India was all this that they had thought, but it was much more. The mountains and the rivers of India, and the forests and the broad fields, which gave us food, were all dear to us, but what counted ultimately were the people of India, people like them and me, who were spread out all over this vast land. Bharat Mata, Mother India was essentially these people. You are parts of this Bharat Mata, I told them, you are in a manner yourselves Bharat Mata, and as this idea slowly soaked into their brains, their eyes would light up as if they had made a great discovery.” The same story is repeated by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1957. Here he speaks of his talking to ‘stout Jats’ raising the cry ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and here he says: “I said is it some old lady, long haired lady you see in pictures etc, or sitting somewhere in a cave and they said no. I asked, what is it? Well, they were sons of the soil, a Jat is wedded to his soil, more to the mother earth, than his son or daughter or wife. So, he said, Bharat Mata is dharti, mother earth…” Then he continues the same anecdote which he had stated in Discovery of India. Apart from the disturbing stereotyping of Jats (‘stout Jats’, ‘slowly soaked into their brains’), here Nehru presents himself as the suave enlightening brown saheb liberating the ignorant masses from seeing Bharat Mata as more a symbolism of people collective than anything mystical or attachment to the soil of their land. Yet one can see this as a weak echo of the emotional imagery that Swami Vivekananda employed in his 1897 lectures — in which he asked his audience to see Mother India as the only deity worthy of worship through service in all Indians—who are collectively part of Mother India. Still Nehru could not dissociate himself from the cultural nationalist basis of the nation. He conceded that India has always been ‘a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads’. Then he approvingly quoted poet Rabindranath Tagore, who had stated that adoring India was neither geographical idolatry nor mere patriotism of being attached to the land of one’s birth but ‘because she has saved through tumultuous ages the living words that have issued from the illuminated consciousness of her great ones’. This realisation might have been because, after his initial flirting with the Marxist idea of India being a federation of linguistic nationalities, he had realised what Marxist ideologues actually had schemed for India. In 1942, influenced by the Soviet model, Nehru had approved a resolution, speaking of Indian Constitution as ‘a federal one…with the residuary powers vesting in the units’ which was immediately appreciated by Communist Party leader G Adhikari as one coming ‘very near to recognising the right of self-determination’. Writing in his family-owned newspaper National Herald, both under his original name and nom de plume Kautilya, Nehru started exposing the Marxist strategy of dismantling India. The Communist plan was to ‘let India be divided into bits so that the Indian National Congress may end… leaving the Communists free to make a revolutionary conquest of India part by part’ and thus establish an ‘Indian Soviet Republic’. Writing as Kautilya, he actually anticipated what are today called ‘Breaking India forces’: “In fact, Soviet and Communist policy…has opted in favor of splitting the country into many autonomous units. They deny that there is any such thing as an Indian nation. The Communist plan appears to be for a Balkanization of India.” Though Nehru would later move towards a pro-Soviet, even a pro-Stalinist stand and show strong Hinduphobic tendencies, he would always return to the uniqueness of India and even strong cultural nationalism—particularly as he realised that Maoist China was not a civilisational ally as he had romanticised it to be but an aggressor. He rejected the comparison of the Soviet model of it being a union of multinational republics. On 7 July 1952, answering a question making such a comparison he said that ‘because India has much more…of a unity than the Soviet Union’ and hence ‘India cannot function on that (Soviet model) basis’. In the memoirs of sociologist and a staunch admirer of Nehru, Zarina Bhatty, Nehru’s behaviour in London, probably during his visit in late 1950s or 1960s, showed an emotional attachment to the very soil of India, something which he had talked in quasi-ridiculing tone earlier: “When (Nehru) finished talking, a woman raised her hand and shouted, “Pandit Nehru ki Jai!” Panditji became furious and said, “Why Panditji ki jai, you should say Bharat Mata ki Jai." On another occasion, Panditji was scheduled to speak at the Indian club in Osterley, London. A huge crowd of Indians and non-Indians had gathered there. He started speaking and then remembered the previous occasion when that Indian lady had said “Panditji ki jai” and recounted the incident. He then bent down, picked up a little mud from the lawn, and with tears in his eyes said in an emotionally charged voice, “You should all say Bharat Mata ki Jai, Bharat is mahan, her mitti is mahan, not me.” He then wiped his tears and continued his speech.” However, over the decades Nehruvians progressively neglected the unique unity of India that Nehru talked about which he traced to the very early ages of India. They either consider it as a recent phenomenon — a colonial construct, a position that gels with the Marxist as well as colonial view of India, or they want to deny national consciousness to India before the Islamic times. This is seen in Marxist historian Prof. Irfan Habib who boldly asserts that no Sanskrit text has spoken of India as an object of adoration and that real patriotism towards India actually starts with Amir Khusrau. On the contrary, the Nehru government itself appealed to the authority of ancient Sanskrit sacred texts of Hindus, to assert the Himalayan boundaries of India when it was challenged by Maoist China as it claimed substantial portions of Himalayan India for the People’s Republic of China. The Ministry of External Affairs during Nehru’s government issued a white paper in 1959 in which it said the following: “The Himalayas have always dominated Indian life, just as they have dominated the Indian landscape. One of the earliest Sanskrit texts, though its exact date is uncertain—the Vishnu Purana—makes it clear that the Himalayas formed the frontier of India. It states that the country south of the Himalayas and north of the ocean is called Bharat, and all born in it are called Bharatiyas or Indians. Uttaram yat samudrasya himadrescaiva dakshinam/ varsham tad (tam) bharatam naharatiati yatra santatih.” The entire document approved by Nehru and sent to the Chinese authorities to prove the Indian historical presence in the Himalayan regions, quotes Vedas, Ramayana, Mahabharata, wades through tribal-Hindu resistance of Asom rulers to Mughal onslaught, continuance of cultural traditions even during the colonial period and ends with the assertion that “few, if any, land frontiers in the world can claim as strong a sanction of long and unbroken tradition”. Thus, we see in Nehru a gradual transition towards the roots of cultural nationalist definition of India. And he moves from an elitist view explaining Bharat Mata to ‘ignorant’ villagers who considered the soil as Bharat Mata to embracing the very same concept emotionally. Perhaps this transition was at the base of the willingness of Nehru to call the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to the Republic Day parade of 1963. Excerpts from Aravindan Neelakandan’s new book, ‘Hindutva: Origin, Evolution and Future’ (Kali, Rs 995). The writer is currently working as contributing editor with ‘Swarajya’ magazine. Views are personal.  Read all the Latest News , Trending News ,  Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.