The Discovery of India

by Jawaharlal Nehru

Nehru returned to India in 1912. His experience abroad implanted in him a marked capacity for distance and detachment towards his own country. It also left him, by his own admission, unconnected to the living world of his fellow Indians.

The book knowledge absorbed in jail was put to the test when Nehru was out of it—in encounters with the intense poverty of the countryside, with the different regional cultures of the subcontinent, and with the intense religious beliefs of his compatriots.

If the world order was indeed on the verge of change, psychological readiness was now essential for an India that had been doubly wounded by the British—the British had colonized not just India’s physical self, but also its historical imagination, and therefore its ability to conceive future possibilities.

The Discovery of India feels distinctly modern in its mixing of genres. Memoir is interleaved with political commentary and philosophical musings, and all this is contained within a narrative that spans Indian history from the Indus Valley to the Quit India movement of 1942. It is not a work of original historical scholarship. It is an act of political and literary imagination.

The conception of India that Nehru set out in The Discovery of India did not stand as a programmatic manifesto for the subsequent practice of the Indian state—it was no Little Red Book.

His conception of India’s history—as a coherent narrative containing and driven by the conflicting internal logics of accommodation and oppression—was innovative and intellectually acute. It was also a political riposte to British instincts. The British had long contended that India’s pre-colonial history lacked unity or particular meaning, and that without British rule to enforce cohesion, there would have been no India to speak of. This high imperial ideology is briskly encapsulated in one of Churchill’s famous slights: that India had no more claim to being considered a country than did the equator.

Nehru situated his account of India’s history within a larger frame and argument—one whose lines he had set out in his first book, Glimpses of World History (1934). That book stands as one of the early attempts to disturb the narrative of ‘Eurocentric’ history—by showing Indian and other non-European histories as parallel narratives to the West’s history, with their own logic and rhythms.

Implicit in The Discovery of India is a view of freedom’s multiple and uneven histories across the globe—in the West, China and India. In the West, religious dogmas ruled for most of human history. There was limited freedom of belief. Yet, there was greater flexibility of social structures in Europe than in other parts of the world. In China, religion had a more limited role and there was greater flexibility of mind as compared with Europe or India—reflected in a social equilibrium that kept China stable and unchanging for long periods. In India, by contrast, ‘extraordinary freedom and flexibility of the mind’ was persistently juxtaposed with the most rigid social forms, resulting in ‘a curious combination of conservatism in practice and explosive thought.’ The Indian mind took free wing, while the Indian social order was a prison.

In reading The Discovery of India, it is interesting to observe how Nehru seeks to contain within himself what Gandhi and Tagore individually represented—and to make himself an heir to two fathers.

Gandhi, Nehru suggested, pursued his ethical goals by means that often put him in a condition of ‘inner conflict’—between his immediate political goals as a national leader and his stature as a man with a visionary message for the whole world. Gandhi could appear rock-like and immoveable in his assertion of moral positions and ethical choices. But Gandhi also had a non-dogmatic capacity to adapt: he was willing to put up with the ‘lesser evil, and hoped that his teaching would gradually sink into the mind of India.’

Gandhi’s practice thus followed a cyclical pattern: ethical assertion, then political action, and back to ethical renewal.

How helpful is the moon in counting the days and the months, for the size and shape of the moon, when it is visible, indicate the day of the month with a fair measure of exactitude. It is an easy calendar (though it must be adjusted from time to time), and for the peasant in the field the most convenient one to indicate the passage of the days and the gradual changing of the seasons.

Men were dying all over the world and killing each other in battle; usually a quick death, often a brave death, death for a cause, death with a purpose, death which seemed in this mad world of ours an inexorable logic of events, a sudden end to the life we could not mould or control. Death was common enough everywhere.

Above all, the Governments of China and Eire, poor in their own resources, full of their own difficulties, yet having had bitter experience themselves of famine and misery and sensing what ailed the body and spirit of India, gave generous help. India has a long memory, but whatever else she remembers or forgets, she will not forget these gracious and friendly acts.

It was not merely the physical acts of aggression in which fascism and nazism indulged, not only the vulgarity and brutality that accompanied them, terrible as they were, that affected us, but the principles on which they stood and which they proclaimed so loudly and blatantly, the theories of life on which they tried to fashion themselves; for these went counter to what we believed in the present, and what we had held from ages past.

During the Czechoslovak crisis, what I saw of Franco-British statesmanship in Prague and in the Sudetenland, in London and Paris, and in Geneva where the League Assembly was then sitting, amazed and disgusted me. Appeasement seemed to be a feeble word for it. There was behind it not only a fear of Hitler, but a sneaking admiration for him.

Time seems to change its nature in prison. The present hardly exists, for there is an absence of feeling and sensation which might separate it from the dead past. Even news of the active, living and dying world outside has a certain dream-like unreality, an immobility and an unchangeableness as of the past. The outer objective time ceases to be, the inner and subjective sense remains, but at a lower level, except when thought pulls it out of the present and experiences a kind of reality in the past or in the future. We live, as Auguste Comte said, dead men’s lives, encased in our pasts, but this is especially so in prison where we try to find some sustenance for our starved and locked-up emotions in memory of the past or fancies of the future.

But it is not life, unless we can find the vital links between it and the present with all its conflicts and problems. It is a kind of art for art’s sake, without the passion and the urge to action which are the very stuff of life. Without that passion and urge, there is a gradual oozing out of hope and vitality, a settling down on lower levels of existence, a slow merging into non-existence. We become prisoners of the past and some part of its immobility sticks to us.

As Schopenhauer says, ‘a man can do what he will, but not will as he will.’

The call of action has long been with me; not action divorced from thought, but rather flowing from it in one continuous sequence.

Even sustained thinking, apart from being itself a kind of action, becomes part of the action to come. It is not something entirely abstract, in the void, unrelated to action and life. The past becomes something that leads up to the present, the moment of action, the future something that flows from it; and all three are inextricably intertwined and interrelated.

There is only one thing that remains to us that cannot be taken away: to act with courage and dignity and to stick to the ideals that have given meaning to life; but that is not the politician’s way.

Yet it was obvious that religion had supplied some deeply felt inner need of human nature, and that the vast majority of people all over the world could not do without some form of religious belief. It had produced many fine types of men and women, as well as bigoted, narrow-minded, cruel tyrants. It had given a set of values to human life, and though some of these values had no application today, or were even harmful, others were still the foundation of morality and ethics.

I find myself incapable of thinking of a deity or of any unknown supreme power in anthropomorphic terms, and the fact that many people think so is continually a source of surprise to me. Any idea of a personal God seems very odd to me.

The lesser liberties may often need limitation in the interest of the larger freedom.

It may be that we of this modern age, who so pride ourselves on the achievements of our times, are prisoners of our age, just as the ancients and the men and women of medieval times were prisoners of their respective ages. We may delude ourselves, as others have done before us, that our way of looking at things is the only right way, leading to truth. We cannot escape from that prison or get rid entirely of that illusion, if illusion it is.

How amazing is this spirit of man! In spite of innumerable failings, man, throughout the ages, has sacrificed his life and all he held dear for an ideal, for truth, for faith, for country and honour. That ideal may change, but that capacity for self-sacrifice continues, and, because of that, much may be forgiven to man, and it is impossible to lose hope for him.

‘Not only the wisdom of centuries—also their madness breaketh out in us. Dangerous it is to be an heir.’

‘We must look the world in the face with calm and clear eyes even though the eyes of the world are blood-shot today.’

But she did not say this to me in words and it was only gradually that I read the message of her eyes.

How fortunate we were, I told her, and she agreed, for though we had sometimes quarrelled and grown angry with each other we kept that vital spark alight, and for each one of us life was always unfolding new adventure and giving fresh insight into each other.

What is this India, apart from her physical and geographical aspects? What did she represent in the past? What gave strength to her then? How did she lose that old strength? And has she lost it completely? Does she represent anything vital now, apart from being the home of a vast number of human beings? How does she fit into the modern world?

Recent events all over the world have demonstrated that the notion that nationalism is fading away before the impact of internationalism and proletarian movements has little truth. It is still one of the most powerful urges that move a people, and round it cluster sentiments and traditions and a sense of common living and common purpose.

Old established traditions cannot be easily scrapped or dispensed with; in moments of crisis they rise and dominate the minds of men, and often, as we have seen, a deliberate attempt is made to use those traditions to rouse a people to a high pitch of effort and sacrifice.

Always there is visible an attempt to understand and adapt the new and harmonize it with the old, or at any rate with parts of the old which were considered worth preserving. Often that old retains an external form only, as a kind of symbol, and changes its inner content. But something vital and living continues, some urge driving the people in a direction not wholly realized, and always a desire for synthesis between the old and the new.

India, constituted as she is, cannot play a secondary part in the world. She will either count for a great deal or not count at all. No middle position attracted me. Nor did I think any intermediate position feasible.

But I have not discovered any special qualities in a literate or slightly educated person which would entitle his opinion to greater respect than that of a sturdy peasant, illiterate but full of a limited kind of common sense.

It is interesting to note that at this dawn of India’s story, she does not appear as a puling infant, but already grown up in many ways. She is not oblivious of life’s ways, lost in dreams of a vague and unrealizable supernatural world, but has made considerable technical progress in the arts and amenities of life, creating not only things of beauty, but also the utilitarian and more typical emblems of modern civilization—good baths and drainage systems.

We might say that the first great cultural synthesis and fusion took place between the incoming Aryans and the Dravidians, who were probably the representatives of the Indus Valley civilization. Out of this synthesis and fusion grew the Indian races and the basic Indian culture, which had distinctive elements of both.

The old inclusive term for religion in India was Arya Dharma. Dharma really means something more than religion. It is from a root word which means to hold together; it is the inmost constitution of a thing, the law of its inner being. It is an ethical concept which includes the moral code, righteousness, and the whole range of man’s duties and responsibilities.

Mahatma Gandhi has attempted to define it: ‘If I were asked to define the Hindu creed, I should simply say: Search after truth through nonviolent means. A man may not believe in God and still call himself a Hindu. Hinduism is a relentless pursuit after truth … Hinduism is the religion of truth. Truth is God. Denial of God we have known. Denial of truth we have not known.’

So long as the old faith and philosophy were chiefly a way of life and an outlook on the world, they were largely synonymous with Indian culture; but when a more rigid religion developed, with all manner of ritual and ceremonial, it became something more and at the same time something much less than that composite culture.

Whatever the word we may use, Indian or Hindi or Hindustani, for our cultural tradition, we see in the past that some inner urge towards synthesis, derived essentially from the Indian philosophic outlook, was the dominant feature of Indian cultural, and even racial, development. Each incursion of foreign elements was a challenge to this culture, but it was met successfully by a new synthesis and a process of absorption. This was also a process of rejuvenation and new blooms of culture arose out of it, the background and essential basis, however, remaining much the same.

How are we to consider the scripture of various religions, much of it believed by its votaries to be revealed scripture? To analyse it and criticize it and look upon it as a human document is often to offend the true believers. Yet there is no other way to consider it.

I could not approach these books, or any book, as Holy Writ which must be accepted in their totality without challenge or demur. Indeed, this approach of Holy Writ usually resulted in my mind being closed to what they contained. I was much more friendly and open to them when I could consider them as having been written by human beings, very wise and far-seeing, but nevertheless ordinary mortals, and not incarnations or mouthpieces of a divinity, about whom I had no knowledge or surety whatever.

It has always seemed to me a much more magnificent and impressive thing that a human being should rise to great heights, mentally and spiritually, and should then seek to raise others up, rather than that he should be the mouthpiece of a divine or superior power. Some of the founders of religions were astonishing individuals, but all their glory vanishes in my eyes when I cease to think of them as human beings. What impresses me and gives me hope is the growth of the mind and spirit of man, and not his being used as an agent to convey a message.

Looking at scripture then as a product of the human mind, we have to remember the age in which it was written, the environment and mental climate in which it grew, the vast distance in time and thought and experience that separates it from us. We have to forget the trappings of ritual and religious usage in which it is wrapped, and remember the social background in which it expanded. Many of the problems of human life have a permanence and a touch of eternity about them, and hence the abiding interest in these ancient books.

These vedic hymns have been described by Rabindranath Tagore as ‘a poetic testament of a people’s collective reaction to the wonder and awe of existence. A people of vigorous and unsophisticated imagination awakened at the very dawn of civilization to a sense of the inexhaustible mystery that is implicit in life.

A country under foreign domination seeks escape from the present in dreams of a vanished age, and finds consolation in visions of past greatness. That is a foolish and dangerous pastime in which many of us indulge.

Many western writers have encouraged the notion that Indians are otherworldly. I suppose the poor and unfortunate in every country become to some extent other-worldly, unless they become revolutionaries, for this world is evidently not meant for them.