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This is an excerpt from chapter four, 'Who is an Indian?' from the book 'The Idea of India' by Sunil Khilnani first published in 1997.
Nehru's intellectual response to the perturbations of India's unity and of a shared Indianness was stated with some subtlety in The Discovery of India (1946), written in prison on the eve of independence. The title announced India as an indubitable presence, but also wryly acknowledged that it could not be taken for granted by people of Nehru's class and background -- its contours had to be actively plotted. For a man who carried with him the burden of an anglicized past, who answered to the name of Joe until his mid-twenties, it was not an easy book to write. Like Tagore and like Gandhi, like all nationalists, Nehru had to make himself Indian. The Discovery, even more so than his Autobiography (1936), was such a work of self-making -- a slow, laborious transformation of the alien critic into an Indian, one who could recognize and embrace the complexity of India's past. The Discovery is correctly read as an expression of the nationalist imagination, but a highly unusual one, capacious, accepting, and with no trace of a desire for purification or hardening the boundaries.
Where Tagore reworked the poetic language and Gandhi turned to religious traditions to make their Indian selves, Nehru discovered India and himself through the medium of history. Temperamentally, he saw the world historically: a perspective that at once defined his sense of political possibility and made him vigilant about attending to how the future would look back on his own actions. But his turn to history in The Discovery was also spurred by a specific insight into Indian culture: that to Indians past was as valuable as language or religion; they valued it themselves and saw the world through it. His book was an elaboration of this insight, and there was little evidence of the Marxisant and sometimes didactic historical scaffold that had buttressed his two earlier narratives, Glimpses of World History (1934) and the Autobiography. In telling his story of the Indian past, Nehru relied on the 'Orientalist' histories the British had written: but he entirely reworked them to suit his own purposes. British histories showed India as a society of self-enclosed communities, always potentially -- and, in the absence of an imperial state, actually -- in gruesome conflict with one another. Tagore, in his great essay 'The Message of Indian History' (1902), had called this 'foreigner's history':
The history of India that we read in schools and memorize to pass our examinations is the account of a horrible dream -- a nightmare through which India has passed. It tells of unknown people from no one knows where entering India; bloody wars breaking out; father fighting son and brother killing brother to snatch at the throne; one set of marauders passing away with another coming in to take its place; Pathan and Mughal, Portugese, French and English -- all helping to add to the nightmarish confusion.
Nehru seized upon Tagore's allusive evocation of what he saw as the authentic message of India's past and elaborated it into an Indian history that defied both the British and the Hindu nationalists' uses of history. Nehru produced for the first time an epic of India's past in which it appeared neither as a meaningless dust-storm nor as a glorified Hindu pageant, but as moved by a logic of accomodation and acceptance. In his imagination, India appeared as a space of ceaseless cultural mixing, its history a celebration of the soiling effects of cultural miscegenation and accretion, 'an ancient palimpset on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously'.
Nehru romanticized the past. He recognizes the allure -- 'that old witchery' -- of his feminized Motherland. He saw too that he was engaged not in a 'meticulous chronicle of facts' but in producing 'living history', an enabling fiction that had to bind together the 'multitudinous past of innumerable successions of human beings' into the shared history of a single political community. But his essential point was not off-beam: that the residents of the subcontinent were at once distinct and shared a family resemblance. Nehru's sense of the differences encompassed within the artificially precise territorial boundaries of India was not the outcome of purely textual or intellectual encounters: it was arrived at literally through politics, the outcome of the gruelling election campaigns of 1936-37, which he saw as his pilgrimage across the country. These electoral peregrinations left him with his own Indian album, a repertoire of turning images. It led him also to recognize that every Indian possessed his or her own portfolio:
If my mind was full of pictures from recorded history and more-or-less ascertained fact, I realized that even the illiterate peasant had a picture gallery in his mind, though this was largely drawn from myth and tradition and epic heroes and heroines, and only very little from history. Nevertheless it was vivid enough.
The experience gave him what today would be fashionably called a de-centred view of Indian culture, it substantiated a point he had made in the Autobiography: just as India never had a single dominant or capital city, so too 'Indian culture was so widespread all over India that no part of the country could be called the heart of that culture'.
The Discovery signalled Nehru's homecoming, not to a single culture but to this profusion. It settled some of the anxieties that had wracked him in the late 1930s and that had pervaded the Autobiography: the sense of being 'lonely and homeless ... India, to whom I had given my love and for whom I had laboured, seemed a strange and bewildering land'. But to know one's home, one had also to know the world, to find a place on that wider stage. Unlike many other nationalists who had come to a sense of their Indianness through the detour of the West, there is no trace in Nehru of the inwardly turned rage of an Aurobindo or Vivekananda, political intellectuals who strove to purge themselves of what they came to regard as a defiling encounter with the modern West -- an encounter that had in the first place planted in them the urge to be Indian.
Isaiah Berlin has written of Tagore that 'he never showed his wisdom more clearly than in choosing the difficult middle path, drifting neither to the Scylla of radical modernism, nor to the Charybdis of proud and gloomy traditionalism', and Nehru too had that capacity to keep to the centre, to find a cultural poise that allowed him to accept the presence of his Englishness as one more layer to his Indian self. There was, for Nehru, no return to a past purity, no possibility of historical cleansing. Colonialism was a humiliation, but it also carried the aroma of modernity. And that modernity too would have to infiltrate and leave its trace on the palimpsest. To that extent, the discovery of India was a forward movement through as yet undescribed and unmade history. Mere recovery of the past could not make Indians self-sufficient: the necessary veneration of a rich and unusual history had to coexist with a modernist, more self-critical idiom that acknowledged the immense failings of that past.
The acceptance of modernity as integral to the definition of free India implied the need to turn this grand, complex nationalist imagination into a state form. In The Discovery, Nehru arrived at an historical image of the link between culture and political power in India that was at odds with the standard conceptions. It avoided the liberal presumption that individuals could transcend their cultural inheritance and remake themselves however they -- or their state -- happened to see fit: a view that placed abstracted individual rationality before any sense of cultural identity. Equally, he steered away from the perception of cultures as self-enclosed wholes, hermetic communities of language or belief, a perception which could nurture either a conservative idea of the state as an instrument at the community's disposal, available for its own aggressive ends, or a more benign view of the state as curator of cultural exhibits, responsible for protecting and preserving communities. Nehru saw cultures as overlapping forms of activity that had commerce with one another, mutually altering and reshaping each other. India was a society neither of liberal individuals nor of exclusive communities or nationalities, but of interconnected differences. That insight or -- to the more sceptical-belief guided his practice after 1947. Given the environment in which he had to act, it is particularly striking that he could maintain this distinctive conception. Partition had given currency to a simple logic: since a Muslim state had been created in Pakistan, India should now define itself as the state of a Hindu 'majority' and make itself the agent of religious preferences.
Half a century later it is easy to miss the sheer novelty of what was attempted in the two decades after independence. Today the idea of multiculturalism is a familiar if vague one, surrounded by sophisticated and unwordly philosophical and legal arguments. Yet in the late 1940s, it was certainly not a standard way to envisage the constructon of a new state. There were few models, from either European or any other history, that could be used to help focus India's assorted diversities into a political structure founded upon a democratic principle. This had to be invented through practice. The minimal precondition for any kind of Indian identity after 1947 was a state, an agency that could in practice enforce a constitutionally defined identity, and this was quickly consolidated. The new Indian state had to rely largely on its inheritance of military and bureaucratic capacities from the Raj. After 1947 these colonial legacies were the sole instruments with effective capacities to impose a political identity over the whole territory. The Congress Party was the only authentically Indian organization that reached across the country; but unlike many anti-colonial nationalist organizations that subsequently emerged elsewhere, it never had the capacity to impose its definition of a nationalist identity. It lacked a military arm, which in so many cases anti-colonial movements turned not only against their colonial enemies but also against their 'own' peoples in order to impose a nationhood - think of Algeria, Indonesia, Vietnam. The army and the civil service gave the Indian state a professional class recruited fro man all-Indian base, able to operate and move easily across the country - an elite of 'functionary Indians.' To these inherited instruments, now turned to forging a common political identity, was added the institution of economic planning: essential, in Nehru's conception, to impart a cohesion, drawing Indians into a shared project of development. Besides these centripetal elemens of the state, the multiplicity of cultural and political voices in the society demanded recognition. No attempt was made to impose a single or uniform 'Indian' identity upon the new nation. This, seen as a potential weakness from the perspective of the Western theories of nationalism which guided the thinking nationalist Hindus, was actually the most remarkable achievement.
Citizenship was defined by civic and universalist rather than ethnic criteria, which guaranteed a principle of inclusion in India's democracy. Although it was the operations of democratic politics that in later decades were to challenge a single conception of India, democracy was also instrumental in sustaining that conception -- through its ability to nclude new political entrants within a common, Indian frame. Democracy was intended to recognize the claims of Indians as individuals. In practice, it was led also to recognize the claims of groups, and this certainly scattered seeds of future tension. But the claims of Indians as members of particular communities did require some sort of recognition and accomodation.
...
This technique of compromise refused to anchor an Indian identity to a single trait -- an option which, had it been chosen, would have suborned regional cultures to majoritarian definitions of a national one. It inscribed as a constitutional principle the practical habit that had made Congress successful as a nationalist movement. Indianness was defined not as a singular or exhaustive identity, but as one which explicitly recognized at least two other aspects. Indian citizens were also members of linguistic and cultural communities: Oriyas or Tamils, Kashmiri or Marathi. India's federal arrangements were intended to embody this idea of a layered Indianness, an accretion of identities. Nehru's initial hope had been for India's regional states to continue as the mixed, multi-lingual administrative units established by the Raj. The precise boundaries of these states were artificial colonial creations, but the principle of mixed linguistic cultures that they embodied was continuous with past Indian historical pattern. Nehru therefore saw no need for internal re-partitioning.
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The Indianness outlined in the two decades after 1947 was an extemporized performance, trying to hold together divergent considerations and interests. The result was a highly unusual nationalism that resists summary in clear or simple doctrinal statements. It tried to accomodate within the form of a new nation state significant internal diversities; to resist bending to the democratic pressures of religion; and to look outwards. This experimental response to the question of how to be Indian was not a victory of theoretical consistency. It was a contingent acquisition, based on a coherent if disputable picture of India. It did not reassure itself by relying on a settled image of the culture, nor did it try to impose one. That was its most important trait: India, an ungainly, unlikely, inelegant concatenation of differences, after fifty years still exists as a single political unity. This would be unimaginable without Nehru's impprovisation.
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