certain that this Committee will either never meet or come to no
conclusion whatever.’ The same session of the Congress gave birth to
an All-India Hindu Sabha (later the Hindu Mahasabha), against the
opposition of Motilal, who refused to join it. Even unity, it seemed, had
now to be established by separate organisations of elite Hindus and
Muslims, speaking for their respective peoples – whether or not these
peoples wished to be so represented, or were even aware that they had
mysteriously acquired representatives. In nationalist organisations, as in
imperialist ones, representationwas not representative.
Despite their differences, father and son were both clear that the
mystification of politics through the introduction of religious symbolism
was a retrograde step. The contentof extremist nationalism was for both
rather questionable, as were the public pronouncements of its major
proponents. At the Cambridge Indian Majlis (the ‘native club’, Motilal
called it, until Jawaharlal pointed out to him that the ‘native club’ was not
the Majlis, but a club for eating natives, which were a kind of oyster),
Jawaharlal heard the Extremist leader and Arya Samajist, Lajpat Rai,
speak on Indian politics. Although impressed by him, Jawaharlal was
annoyed at his derogatory attitude towards Muslims, and his ‘repeated
references to the spiritual mission of India. India, he [Rai] said, was “God’s
chosen country” and the Indians the “chosen race” – a phrase which
reminded me of Israel.’^18 Motilal was ‘disgusted’ by Madan Mohan
Malaviya’s objection to a song based on Vedic verses being sung at the
1910 Congress session on the alleged grounds that the Vedas ought not
to be sung in the presence of non-Hindus – apparently the Shastras, the
sacred books of the Hindus, said so.^19 The Nehrus were to spend much of
their political lives opposing obscurantism of various kinds in Indian
politics.
Motilal’s main objection to the Morley reforms was on the grounds
that they aimed ‘to destroy the influence of the educated classes’. This
would not succeed, he believed, because ‘the law of the survival of the
fittest is too strong even for Morley’.^20 Motilal’s less than egalitarian
appropriation of the right to be described as ‘the fittest’ was questionable,
but his attribution of motive was not unfounded: British government
circles had come to believe that it was the educated middle classes –
inauthentic usurpers, unrepresentative of the ‘real’ India – who were at the
root of nationalist agitation. The problem, from the British point of view,
was that they were increasingly articulate, able to use principles already
THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL 23