Murti Bhavan, to wear in his buttonhole. The red rose may have been
a symbol of love, intended to stand either for Nehru’s love for India, or
the sometimes perplexing love many Indians had for the man who came
to be called ‘Panditji’ – an honorific connected with religion and caste
that he himself hated. Or it might merely be the fate of a political leader
to be reduced to an icon: Winston Churchill to his cigar; Gandhi to his
larger-than-life silhouette with his still-larger staff in the artist Nandalal
Bose’s depiction of the 1931 Salt satyagraha; and Nehru, rather less
satisfactorily, to his rose.
It would be disturbing if a single appropriate icon could be found
to characterise Nehru. But this illustrates a wider problem of Indian
politics: it is a politics of iconography, in which Nehru, along with
Gandhi, appear as the twin legitimating icons. Icons can also be cari-
catures; and an iconic presentation of an icon is a caricature at second
remove: thus the rose distils, from the icon that is Nehru, merely another
icon. All this clouds a proper understanding of social and political currents
in which these political actors were involved, of which they were only
partially in control.
One of the major tasks of this book is to rescue Nehru from the
mythologies that his supporters, his detractors, and he himself, did
so much to create; mythologies that have been influential in academic
and non-academic circles both within and outside India. In particular,
this book will argue that the picture usually painted of a radical socialist
gradually tamed by a combination of force of circumstance and the
wisdom of age needs to be qualified. But it must do more than that. It
must also ask a vital question: what were the social forces that made it
possible for Nehru to rise to and to sustain his leadership in the Indian
national movement? Or, to phrase the question somewhat differently,
what was it that made possible the achievements – and the failures – that
are credited to the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru?
This historical biography is an interpretative essay that seeks answers
to that question. It attempts an understanding of Nehru and his times;
it tends at times to decentre its central figure, which in some ways makes
it a curious kind of biography. There is not a great deal of discussion of
Nehru’s personal life. This does not mean that his personal life – or such
of it that is accessible to researchers – was uninteresting; but in keeping
with the central concerns of this book, and due to considerations of space,
such discussion appears mostly where it has a clear connection to aspects
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