Nehru: The Invention of India

by Shashi Tharoor

when Jawaharlal was just fifteen, his father enrolled him at the prestigious British public school, Harrow. By an intriguing coincidence, some fifteen years earlier the school had educated (and sent on to Sandhurst) a young man called Winston Spencer Churchill, who after stints in the colonies was already embarking upon a prodigious career in British public life. The two Harrovians would come to have diametrically opposed views of India—dismissive on Churchill’s part, proudly nationalist on Nehru’s. ‘India,’ Churchill once barked, ‘is not a country or a nation . . . . It is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.’ A more liberal-minded Harrovian of the previous century, Sir William Jones, had founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, translated many Sanskrit classics, and greatly advanced Western appreciation of Indian culture and philosophy. But ironically, it was Churchill’s view of India that would one day make Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘invention of India’ necessary. ‘Such unity of sentiment as exists in India,’ Churchill wrote, ‘arises entirely through the centralized British government of India as expressed in the only common language of India—English.’ Jawaharlal Nehru, as the product of the same elite British school as Churchill, would use that education and the English language to complete what he called ‘the discovery of India’ and assert its right to be free of Churchill’s government.