unconcerned with caste, religion and the forms of religious nationalism
that were on offer in his time; and he was often rather impatient with
the debates that stressed such forms of authenticity or mobilisation. The
concern with ‘indigenism’ was to Nehru often too closely associated with
reactionary and obscurantist politics, and with ‘backwardness’.
However, if Nehru saw himself as a moderniser; so did most others
in the Indian political arena. Those among the ‘indigenists’ who were
sometimes described as anti-modern in the course of political debate, such
as Gandhi, questioned the criteriaof modernity, but were nonetheless
publicly committed to achieving modernity – that commitment was
a normative necessity, even if the descriptive content of modernity was not
agreed upon. Instead of a universal modernity, they sought instead a
particularly Indian version of modernity.
Throughout his career, Nehru was forced to grapple with these central
questions of Indian nationalist debate in an attempt to find a legitimate
idiom of nationalism that, though fitting the criteria of being authen-
tically Indian, was not narrow or sectarian. Once again, these are problems
central to the construction of any national consciousness: nationalism,
according to its own somewhat circular logic, is something that every
‘nation’ automatically possesses. It is therefore both ubiquitous (everybody
has one) and unique (nations must differ from each other in a distinctive
way). It has been impossible for any ‘nation’ to find the perfect formula.
To some extent, Nehru’s way of dealing with this was not to attempt
to resolve it. The Nehruvian period saw an emphasis on secularism,
democracy and state-led developmentalism; a containment of religious
nationalism and obscurantism; and an obligatory rhetoric of social justice
which, although called ‘socialism’, was unable to deliver social justice. All
these things took the ‘nation’ for granted instead of defining it; and it was
this open-endedness that might be seen as its strength.
But this was in many ways a later, and perhaps separate, problem
for Nehru; and the inadvertent coalition of forces that supported him, as
we have seen, overrode these considerations. Some are born leaders; some
achieve leadership; some have leadership thrust upon them. It is evident
that Jawaharlal Nehru’s rise to leadership contained elements of all three
routes.10 INTRODUCTION