Their idea of India—as defined by the court poets and philosophers of the dynasty—fundamentally viewed India as a post-colonial state with multiple groups that had to be reconciled in a collective pursuit of peace and progress. In this worldview, Nehru was ‘civilising a savage world’, to borrow from the title of a hagiographic volume on India’s first prime minister by the writer (and Nehru’s niece) Nayantara Sahgal.
