Jawaharial Nehru

From Philosopedia

Nehru, Jawaharlal [Prime Minister] (14 November 1889 - 27 May 1964)

India’s first Prime Minister, Nehru was the son of a devoted Hindu mother and a humanistic father. Nehru, who thought spiritualism absurd and the belief in a personal god “very odd” indeed, wrote,

• I am interested in this world, in this life, not in some other world or a future life.

Sibnarayan Ray, a lecturer in English literature at City College, Calcutta University, in 1949 wrote about Nehru to Warren Allen Smith,

• His mind is a queer ensemble of scientific ideas and primitive beliefs; he lives in the Western style, speaks and writes excellent English, talks rationalism and democracy, and then observes all the ancient superannuated rituals of Hindu society. Take for example the custom of Sradh, of offering sacrifices to the dead. Nehru observed it when his father died some years before. He comes of a Kashmir Brahmin family and is quite openly fanatical about preserving the blood-purity of his caste. Most journalists and admirers from the West do not seem to have any guess about this facet of his personality. But what is more surprising is that they refuse to recognise by common consent what is patent and obvious - his insufferable arrogance, his messy thinking and wooliness, his fondness for self-exhibition, and his dictatorial temper. Quite recently (1949) an American journalist, Mr. Martin Ebon of McGraw Hill Co., interviewed him and had some taste of his greatness - ask him for his impression.

Ray added that the real humanists in India have been Jyotirao Phule and Isvar Chandra Vidyasagar but that their work, unlike Nehru’s, has not been translated from Maharashtrian and Bengali, respectively.

Nehru's will, read in part on All India Radio by his sister Madame Pandit, included the following:

• My desire to have a handful of my ashes thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad has no religious significance, so far as I am concerned. I have no religious sentiment in the matter. I have been attached to the Ganga and the Jumna rivers in Allahabad ever since my childhood and, as I have grown older, this attachment has also grown. . . . The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. . . . And though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain her and divide her people, and suppress vast numbers of them, and prevent the free development of the body and the spirit; though I seek all this, yet I do not wish to cut myself off from the past completely. . . . The major portion of my ashes should, however, be disposed of otherwise. I want these to be carried high up into the air in an aeroplane and scattered from that height over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India.

Stanley Wolpert’s Nehru: A Trust With Destiny (1996) provides a negative view. For him, Nehru was a Fabian with an undying belief in the “benevolent despotism” of strong socialist government. Wolpert claims that Nehru did not understand the tension between India’s religious groups, and this allegedly led to the country’s double partition, Punjab and Bengal. He also has outraged certain sections of the Indian intelligentsia because, from the University of California in Los Angeles where he teaches Indian history, Wolpert wrote to The Indian Express (5 February 1997), explaining his suggestion that Nehru may have had homosexual experiences. According to the newspaper, Wolpert said he did not broach the subject during his three meetings with Nehru in 1957–1958. However, Nehru enjoyed dressing in drag:

• Wearing his wig, made up with lipstick, powder and eye shadow, his body draped in silks and satins, Jawahar most willingly offered himself up night after night to those endless rehearsals for the Gaekwar’s At Home as a beautiful young girl, holding out her jug of wine and loaf seductively to her poet lover, Omar.

Wolpert claims that Nehru’s first attachment was with a young man called Ferdinand Brooks, his French teacher. A theosophist, the “handsome” man was a disciple and lover of Charles Webster Leadbeater, a renegade Anglican curate who was accused of child molestation and pederasty on several continents. Leadbeater openly advocated mutual masturbation among young boys. Wolpert also suggested that Nehru may have had a gay relationship in Harrow and he made much of Panditji’s admiration for Oscar Wilde. As a result, many Indians have generally been aghast at the accusation, but not Ashok Row Kavi of the Humsafar Trust, which publishes India’s only registered gay and lesbian magazine. Prakash Narain of the Indian Humanist Union has pointed out that although Nehru used the word “spiritual,” he did so in the sense that many humanists do and had not turned a “theist” nor ceased to be an agnostic.

By his parents' arrangement, Nehru married Kamala Kaul, then seventeen in 1916. At the time of his wedding on 8 February 1916, Jawaharlal was twenty-six, a British-educated barrister. Kamala came from a well-known business family of Kashmiris in Delhi.

Kamala, the mother of his daughter, Indira Gandhi (1917-1984), died of tuberculosis in 1934 after a long struggle. Indira's son, Rajiv Gandhi, became Premier of India also.

(See entries Prakash Narain] and for Sibnarayan Ray. Also see “What Is Religion,” New Humanist, November 1989.)

{CB; CE; CL; The Economist, 18 January 1997; HNS2; TRI; TYD; WAS, Sibnarayan Ray, 1949}