connotations. Iqbal, a poet who wrote in Persian and Urdu (or Persianised
Hindustani), was following established usage – the term ‘Hindi’ referred
to the inhabitants of ‘Hindistan’ or ‘Hindustan’ – the land beyond the
river Indus, Sindu, or with the consonant appropriately shifted, ‘Hindu’.
The Greeks called it the Indus, hence the land ‘Indoi’ (the Greeks do not
pronounce the ‘H’).
These patriotic moments of solidarity, sung and unsung, were poor
consolation for the loss of the unsectarian solidarity of the Khilafat years;
from 1922 onwards, sectarian groups resumed their propaganda and
Hindu–Muslim violence became endemic around the issues of cow
protection and the playing of music before mosques.PERSONAL AND POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
At a personal level, a number of Jawaharlal’s problems remained
unresolved. He was still financially dependent on his father, along with
a family that comprised himself, his wife Kamala and his four-year-
old daughter, Indira – a family that he now allowed himself the time
to discover. Although, as he recounts, the relatively asceticised life of
the Nehrus after Gandhi’s moral intervention in their lives meant that
his family was far less of a burden on his father than it would have been
in earlier times, this dependence was nonetheless galling. Gandhi offered
his advice: Jawaharlal should find a job and break out of his cycle of
dependence. But the larger, more troubling problem that he had not yet
been able properly to articulate remained: he had as yet found no proper
intellectual moorings, no raison d’être, through his political engage-
ment, even as he acquired great respect and love for his political mentor
himself.
At a political level, at least, Jawaharlal’s discontent was a shared
discontent. The aftermath of the Non-Cooperation Movement was a
frustrating time. The period of council entry and the greater use of the
legislatures had plenty of defeats of the official bloc to show for itself,
plenty of debating points scored. However, without the power to influence
legislation this was mock heroics. If it was hoped that these would raise
awareness of political issues outside the legislatures, this was probably
too hopeful. Obscure issues debated in obscure and pedantic English,
without a party wing capable of bringing the issues to ordinary people in
meaningful forms, was hardly popular politics. And ‘popular’ politics, too,54 THE YOUNG GANDHIAN