4

THE END OF THE RAJ

Jawaharlal Nehru kept a page from his copy of the New Republicon
which W.H. Auden announced the close of ‘a low dishonest decade’ and
the beginning of the war. Auden’s last stanza read: ‘Defenceless under the
night/ Our world in stupor lies/ Yet dotted everywhere/ Ironic points
of light/ Flash out wherever the just/ Exchange their messages:/ May I,
composed like them/ Of Eros and of dust/ Beleaguered by the same/
Negation and despair/ Show an affirming flame.’^1 Feeling increasingly
isolated within the Congress’s fragmented unity, and seeking some
comfort in his never-to-be-lost love of poetry, a throwback to his days of
aesthetic contemplation with his Theosophist tutor, Nehru was more
likely to see himself as an ironic point of light than an affirming flame; and
in September 1939, ironic points of light were easier to find than affirming
flames.
By the end of the 1930s, Nehru seems to have been more sure-footed
when discussing the international situation than in responding to the
domestic one. He was also rethinking his political position. An outside
observer might have been justified in saying that Nehru had sought, and
found, a moral and personal justification in socialism, but ran away from
the practical implications of his ideological commitment. Another,
perhaps more generous way of looking at it would be to trace in Nehru,
as with others at the time, a general disillusionment with the shibboleths
of the socialist movement, but – even when he could see no practical way
forward on this count – a continuing and agonised acknowledgement that