Jawaharlal Nehru was in China when war broke out. He was enormously attracted to the idea of India enjoying close relations with another great ancient Asian civilization, and he entertained romantic notions of a grand eastern alliance between the two as they each emerged from the incubus of colonialism and rose to the challenge of developing their fractured societies. He got along well with Chiang Kai-shek but had also arranged to visit the communist revolutionary Mao Tse-tung when news of the war obliged him to cut short his trip and return home. The news left him seething. He blamed British appeasement for the fall of Spain to the Fascists, the betrayal of Ethiopia to the Italians, and the selling out of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis: he wanted India to have no part of the responsibility for British policy, which he saw as designed to protect the narrow class interests of a few imperialists. Why, he asked, should Indians be expected to make sacrifices to preserve British rule over them? How could a subject India be ordered to fight for a free Poland? A free and democratic India, on the other hand, would gladly fight for freedom and democracy.
Under his direction, the Congress Working Committee adopted a resolution making this case (while rejecting Bose’s demand that civil disobedience be launched immediately). Nehru made no secret of his own anti-Nazi views; his dislike of fascism ran so deep that he dismissed a sub-editor at the National Herald who, in an excess of patriotism, had published a pro-German headline. All he wanted was some indication from the British government of respect for his position so that India and Britain could then gladly “join in a struggle for freedom.” The Congress leaders made it clear to the viceroy that all they needed was a declaration that India would be given the chance to determine its own future after the war. The Congress position was greeted with understanding and even some approval in left-wing circles in Britain, and Labour Party politicians, including Clement Attlee (a former member of the Simon Commission and a future prime minister) pressed the government to come to terms with Indian aspirations. But Linlithgow, who had already revealed his lack of tact in making the declaration of war, now revealed his lack of imagination as well. Jawaharlal tried his best to appeal privately to the viceroy in remarkably conciliatory terms, but found him “heavy of body and slow of mind, solid as a rock and with almost a rock’s lack of awareness.” Linlithgow failed to respond to the Congress’s implicit call for talks on the issue and instead turned to the Muslim League for support.
The Congress had in fact hoped for a joint approach on the war issue with the League. Jinnah was invited to the Congress Working Committee meeting in September, but refused to attend. Jawaharlal nonetheless met with him, the second time together with Gandhi, and a convergence of views seemed to be emerging. The viceroy’s statement in October 1939 emphatically rejecting the Congress position, however, prompted the Working Committee, with Jawaharlal in the lead, to order all its provincial ministries to resign rather than continue to serve a war effort in which they had been denied an honorable role. The decision was taken on a point of principle, but politically it proved a monumental blunder. It deprived the Congress of their only leverage with the British government, cast aside the fruits of their electoral success, and presented Jinnah with a golden opportunity. He broke off talks with the Congress — declaring the day of the Congress resignations a “day of deliverance” — and turned to the viceroy instead.
Two years in the political wilderness after the electoral setbacks of 1937 had already transformed the League. Congress rule in many provinces had unwittingly increased Muslim concern, even alarm, about the implications of democratic majoritarian rule in a country so overwhelmingly Hindu. Many Muslims began to see themselves as a political and economic minority, and the League spoke to their insecurities. Jinnah had begun to come to the conclusion that the only effective answer to the Congress’s political strength would be separation — the partition of the country to create an independent state in the Muslim-majority areas of the northwest and east. This demand would be enshrined in the League’s Lahore resolution of March 23, 1940 calling for the creation of Pakistan. Jawaharlal and his fellow Congress leaders were largely oblivious of the change of thinking among many League members, manifest in an increasingly populist political strategy (it was only in 1939, for instance, that Jinnah began to learn Urdu and to don the achkan for official photographs, actions reminiscent of that old saw from the French Revolution: “I am their leader — I must follow them”).
In October 1939 Jinnah persuaded Linlithgow to enlist the League as an interlocutor equal to the Congress and as the sole representative of India’s Muslims, a position to which its electoral results did not yet entitle it. The viceroy, anxious to prevent Congress-League unity on the war issue, consented. The League’s policy, he observed, was now the most important obstacle to any talk of Indian independence, and therefore needed to be encouraged. That November Jinnah was invited, for the first time, to broadcast a special message to Muslims on the occasion of the Id festival — an explicit recognition of the League president as the spokesman of the Muslim community. Nehru and the Congress simply saw such claims as illegitimate and premised on bigotry; they did not do enough to address the real crisis of confidence brewing in the Muslim community at the prospect of majority rule.
That was the month Jawaharlal marked his fiftieth birthday. It was a muted celebration, and the poet Sarojini Naidu captured the mood well in her birthday greetings: “I do not think that personal happiness, comfort, leisure, wealth … can have much place in your life. … Sorrow, suffering, anguish, strife, yes, these are the predestined gifts of life for you …. You are a man of destiny born to be alone in the midst of crowds — deeply loved, but little understood.” It was an assessment that many, not least Jawaharlal’s daughter, Indira, shared.
Through much of 1940 the Congress played a waiting game, hoping for British concessions. It was a period of a “phony stalemate” in India to match the “phony war” in Europe. Jawaharlal spent much of his time writing brilliant articles for the National Herald, none more moving than his paean, upon the fall of Paris, to “the France of the Revolution, the breaker of the Bastille and of all the bonds that hold the human body and spirit captive.” Despite the provincial resignations, Gandhi was not in favor of outright civil disobedience. Jawaharlal, disillusioned by the Soviet Union’s opportunistic conduct in the war, turned increasingly in his writings to the United States as a beacon of freedom and democracy. Together they compromised on what was called “partial noncooperation” with the British. The party was to prepare for satyagraha and nonviolent resistance, but to undertake no action that would undermine the British war effort. Gandhi and Jawaharlal had no desire to be seen as taking advantage of Britain’s hour of peril.
Some of their colleagues were prepared to go even further and extend direct support to the war effort if there was a national government established in India to support it. But Linlithgow’s thinking was far removed from even the most basic of Indian aspirations. (He wrote to London in April 1940: “I am not too keen to start talking about a period after which British rule will have ceased in India. I suspect that that day is very remote and I feel the [less] we say about it in all probability the better.”) When the official response of the government came in August 1940, it was a derisory offer to associate a few “representative Indians” with the viceroy’s toothless advisory councils. Jawaharlal rejected this utterly. Civil disobedience seemed the only answer.
The government decided not to wait for what Jawaharlal might do. They arrested him on October 30, 1940 and, after a trial distinguished by a magnificent statement by the accused (“it is the British Empire itself that is on trial before the bar of the world”), sentenced him to four years in prison. The conditions of his detention were unusually harsh, with a number of petty indignities inflicted upon him, in particular relating to his ability to send or receive mail, which deprived him of the solace that letters had provided over the years. Cleaning, washing, and gardening became his principal chores in prison. He was soon joined
in jail by his brother-in-law Ranjit Pandit, Nan’s husband, who had a greener thumb, and their jail garden flourished. There was time for reading and reflection; once again Jawaharlal’s thoughts turned to the historical forces that had shaped his country, and he began writing, with his now customary rapidity, what was to become a monumental work of Indian nationalism, The Discovery of India.
In December 1941, despite the opposition of Winston Churchill, the War Cabinet in London authorized the release of all the imprisoned Congressmen. Jawaharlal hoped in vain for some policy declaration by the British that would enable him to commit India to the Allied cause, but the reactionary Churchill and his blinkered representatives in New Delhi went the other way, with Churchill (whose subsequent beatification as an apostle of freedom seems all the more preposterous) explicitly declaring that the principles of the Atlantic Charter would not apply to India. The “Tory”Congressman Rajagopalachari even persuaded the Working Committee to offer Britain the defense cooperation of a free India, but the British did not take the bait. This was all the more inexplicable in the face of the rout of British forces in Asia: Singapore fell in February, Burma in March; the Japanese were at India’s gates in the east, and Subhas Bose, who had fled British India, fashioned an “Indian National Army” in mid-1941 out of prisoners of war to fight alongside the Japanese. Jawaharlal had no desire to see one emperor’s rule supplanted by another’s: he started organizing the Congress to prepare for resistance to the Japanese. Chiang Kai-shek visited India to counsel support for the British, then urged U.S. president Roosevelt to persuade the British to change their policies. American sympathy was matched by that of the Labour Party in the War Cabinet. Clement Attlee persuaded his colleagues to send the socialist Sir Stafford Cripps to India in early 1942 with an offer of Dominion status after the war, with the possibility of partition.
Cripps was already a legend in British politics, a former solicitor-general who had been expelled from the Labour Party in 1939 for advocating a united front with the Conservatives (which of course came to pass during the war), and who combined an ascetic vegetarianism with a flamboyant ego (“there, but for the grace of God, goes God,” Churchill remarked of him). Cripps had visited India after the outbreak of war in 1939 and knew many Indian leaders; he considered Jawaharlal a friend. Yet the Cripps mission was welcomed by Jinnah, but foundered on the opposition of the Congress. Gandhi objected principally because the British proposal appeared to concede the idea of partition; he memorably called the offer “a post-dated cheque” (an imaginative journalist added, “on a crashing bank”) and urged its rejection. Rajagopalachari was willing to accept the proposal. Congress president Maulana Azad insisted that the defense of India should be the responsibility of Indian representatives, not the unelected government of India led by the British viceroy, and it was on this issue that Jawaharlal refused to compromise. Cripps was inclined to give in, and spoke of an Indian national government running the country’s defense with the viceroy functioning as a figurehead (like the British king). But he had exceeded his instructions: the egregious Churchill (“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion”), abetted by the reluctance of the hidebound viceroy, Linlithgow, and the diplomatic ineptitude of the commander in chief, Lord Wavell, scuttled the negotiations. Now obliged to disown his own gloss on the offer, Cripps, to his discredit, publicly blamed the Indians and in particular Gandhi for his failure — a misrepresentation of the discussions for which Jawaharlal never forgave him.
Nonetheless, Jawaharlal remained an outspoken advocate of the Allied cause, even threatening guerrilla warfare against the Japanese if they were to invade — an issue on which he earned a sharp rebuke from the Mahatma. His attempts to enlist American sympathy for the Indian case in the negotiations with the British, however, did not succeed; Roosevelt, who might have been able to temper the racist imperialism of Churchill, declined to intervene. Gandhi, increasingly exasperated by the British, argued that Jawaharlal’s proAllied position had won India no concessions. His public message to the Government was to “leave India to God or anarchy.” Jawaharlal, ever the Harrovian Anglophile, quoted Cromwell (in a conscious echo of the Harrovian Amery, who had used the same words just two years earlier in Parliament in calling for Neville Chamberlain’s resignation as prime minister): “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” On August 7, 1942 in Bombay, the All-India Congress Committee, at the Mahatma’s urging, adopted a resolution moved by Nehru, and seconded by Patel, calling upon Britain to — in a journalistic paraphrase that became more famous than the actual words of the resolution — “Quit India.” (Gandhi’s own preferred phrase was “Do or Die.”) Within thirty-six hours the Congress leaders were under arrest. Mahatma Gandhi was incarcerated in the Aga Khan’s palace in Poona; Jawaharlal Nehru and the rest in Ahmadnagar Fort.
Jawaharlal was always a curious combination of the idealist intellectual and the man of action. On the way to jail, an incident occurred that brought out the latter quality. At the station in Poona, when the train made an unscheduled stop, a crowd of people recognized Jawaharlal and ran toward his compartment. The police tried to prevent them approaching him by resorting to a lathicharge. Outraged at seeing unarmed civilians being beaten by police staves, Jawaharlal leapt out onto the platform through the narrow window of the train to remonstrate with the police. Though he was fifty-three, it took four policemen to restrain him and force him back onto the train — and the officer in charge apologized personally for the incident.
Some of that fury communicated itself to the populace at large. For all of the Mahatma’s devotion to nonviolence, his jailing, together with the rest of the Congress leadership, left the Quit India movement in the hands of the young and the hotheaded. An underground movement was born, which actively resorted to acts of sabotage. Ordinary people took improbable risks to hoist the national flag on government buildings. Young newsboys added sotto voce subversion to their sales cries: “Times of India. Quit India. Times of India. Quit India.” In the weeks after the arrests, no day passed without reports of clashes between demonstrators and police. The British responded with ruthless repression, firing upon unarmed protestors, killing dozens every week, flogging offenders, and censoring (and closing down) nationalist newspapers. “Quit India” became the drumbeat of a national awakening, but all it did was to prolong the nation’s continued subjugation.
In this climate, there was to be no respite for Jawaharlal; this became his longest spell in prison, a total of 1,040 days, or more than 34 months, from August 9, 1942 to June 15, 1945. Initially cut off from all communication (even newspapers), the Congress leaders were gradually allowed a few limited privileges, but Jawaharlal rejected many of the humiliating conditions imposed upon him. “I do not fancy being treated like a wild beast in a cage with occasional rope allowed so that I can move a few feet if I behave myself,” he wrote to his sister Nan, imprisoned elsewhere. “… Where force prevents me from acting as I wish, I have to accept it, but I prefer to retain such freedom of mind and action as I possess.” His freedom was not much: Jawaharlal’s prison diary abounds in trivia, featuring the acquisition of new canvas shoes and the death of a cat inadvertently hit on the head by a cook. He read Proust, and learned Urdu poetry from Maulana Azad, for whom his friendship and respect deepened.
Nonetheless the prison experience was not without significance. Tempers frayed among the Congressmen; the strain of prolonged incarceration proved unbearable for many, and Jawaharlal’s close friend for thirty-five years, Syed Mahmud, obtained his release in 1944 by disowning the Congress resolution. Gandhi nearly died after a fast in 1943. And Jawaharlal finished The Discovery of India, which he had begun during his earlier stint in jail. Instead of the Marxian obsession with social and economic forces that characterized Glimpses of World History, Jawaharlal revealed an abiding fascination with the making of the Indian nation, its cultural and historical antecedents, a
nd the continuity of the Indian heritage from the days of the Indus Valley Civilization to the privations of British rule. For all the weaknesses of the book — born from the circumstances of its composition, the lack of source material, and the absence of a skilled editor — it is a striking articulation of a view of Indian nationhood that transcended the petty pride of most nationalisms. To Nehru, India was a palimpsest on which many had written their contributions and none were to be disowned; the greatness of India lay in her diversity, the richness of her varied civilization, her willingness to absorb and accommodate disparate religions and ethnicities. It is a stirring evocation of the past as an instrument to explain the present and give hope for the future, and as such it is the primordial text in what was, ultimately, Jawaharlal Nehru’s invention of India.
But before “Quit India” and prison consumed him, a major development had occurred on the personal front. In March 1942, his daughter, Indira, now twenty-four, married the man who had been courting her for nearly seven years, her mother’s faithful admirer Feroze Gandhi.