‘beating his luminous wings largely in vain.’^1 ‘Our beautiful but inef-
fectual angel’, because we all assumed he wanted to do what we wanted to
do. He failed; but he could have succeeded – he so nearly did.
There was always in India an alternative icon: the Mahatma. He
was, indeed, Nehru’s own father figure; yet he was more remote, less
intimate, less, in short, someone we would like to be. His moral authority
was necessary, it worked well, but it wasn’t altogether us. Who would
want to bea Gandhi? At best a follower, a disciple –still difficult – but not
actually the man himself. Nehru, on the other hand, would be nice to be.
Powerful, but not obsessed with power. Vain, but not unreasonably so.
Wealthy in his own right, but never crass. Upper-caste, but not caste-ist.
Modern, urbane, well-read, well-regarded even by his – and our (at least
until not long ago) British overlords, capable of beating them at their own
games. With a gift for the right phrase in the right place – in English.
And yet truly multicultural.
And he did embody an era, a whole period of India’s history. Writing
about Nehru today necessarily means abandoning some dearly held myths- some, indeed, that Nehru himself appears to have held on to tenaciously.
But how much more important this process – of measured iconoclasm,
hopefully, rather than troubled rejection or nostalgic idealisation – at a
time when disputes surrounding collective identities in India are all
funnelled through various understandings of the man and the era to which
he lent his name.
The cause of biography has been both helped and hindered by the
pleas of autobiography. Nehru was a most self-reflexive person, prone
to conducting his periodic self-analyses in public, in his various auto-
biographical writings and in his letters, many of which were published at
his own instigation. He is at his most persuasive when he presents himself
as most vulnerable, with the result that the possible shortcomings of his
self-analyses seldom become the object of scrutiny.
With time, a carefully cultivated image of Nehru began to take
precedence over any actual engagement with his politics or his leader-
ship. At the time of the official celebrations of Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth
centenary, in 1989, the advertising agency in charge of dressing up the
proceedings in appropriate form selected an image to represent Nehru: a
single red rose. The iconography of the red rose was not unambiguous.
Nehru’s own propensity for aestheticism might have been presented there,
in the form of the daily rose he selected from his gardens at his home, Teen
xxii PREFACE