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WORLD HISTORY IN THE ATOMIC AGE: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE IN THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF JAWAHARLAL NEHRU*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2016

SUNIL PURUSHOTHAM
SUNIL PURUSHOTHAM*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Fairfield University E-mail: spurushotham@fairfield.edu
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Abstract

Jawaharlal Nehru was both a historian and a self-conscious agent of historical change. This essay explores his political thought by bringing these two perspectives together. I argue that his approaches to a number of issues, including the state project that has been his most significant legacy, shared a concern with linking together the past, present and future. My concern here is primarily with the post-1947 phase of Nehru's career, which was marked by key shifts in his political thought due to a perceived transformation of temporal experience and an altered relationship with history. By attending to the way his thought worked through notions of temporality and historicity, this article offers insights into Nehru's understanding of technological modernity, violence, socialism, the individual, the nation and the role of the state.

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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , November 2017 , pp. 837 - 867
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to dedicate this article to the late Chris Bayly. It was originally conceived and composed as an engagement with and tribute to his work, and first presented at his anti-festschrift held in Benares in January 2015. I would like to thank Shruti Kapila, Faisal Devji, Nasreen Rehman, Andrew Arsan, Simon Layton, Jesús Cháirez and Dipesh Chakrabarty, who all made valuable comments on earlier drafts and presentations. I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers and Samuel Moyn for their helpful suggestions.

References

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2 Kapila, Shruti, “Global Intellectual History and the Indian Political,” in McMahon, Darrin and Moyn, Samuel, eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (New York, 2014), 253–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Moyn, Samuel and Sartori, Andrew, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kapila, Shruti, ed., An Intellectual History for India (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar.

3 I borrow this notion of “cognitive perspectives” from Danto, Arthur C., Narration and Knowledge (New York, 1985)Google Scholar.

4 This body of scholarship is too extensive to cite in full here. See especially Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar; and Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Tribe, Keith (New York, 2004; first published 1979)Google Scholar; and Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, 2002). Some other recent examples include the special issues in History and Theory (Aug. 2012) and The American Historical Review (Dec. 2012); Hartog, François, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Brown, Saskia (New York, 2015)Google Scholar; Scott, David, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC, 2014)Google Scholar; Wilder, Gary, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (Durham, NC, 2015)Google Scholar; Lorenz, Chris and Bevernage, Berber, eds., Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future (Göttingen, 2013)Google Scholar.

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6 Hartog, Regimes of Historicity.

7 Majeed, Autobiography, 175.

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13 Speaking at the Asian Relations Conference in early 1947, Nehru observed that they were standing “on this watershed which divides two epochs of human history and endeavour,” at the “end of an era and on the threshold of a new period of history.” Jawaharlal Nehru, “A United Asia For World Peace,” 23 March 1947, in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 2nd series, vol. 2 (New Delhi, 1984), 503–8.

14 Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London, 1986)Google Scholar. Although Chatterjee would later qualify this caricature, it has remained a powerful and important statement. See, for example, Nussbaum, Martha, “Nehru, Religion, and the Humanities,” in Doniger, Wendy and Nussbaum, Martha, eds., Pluralism and Democracy: Debating the Hindu Right (Oxford, 2015), 51–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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18 Nehru, Jawaharlal, “China in Difficulties,” 24 Dec. 1932, in Nehru, Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to His Daughter Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People (Delhi, 1989; first published 1934–35), 449–52Google Scholar, at 450.

19 He similarly described India's national laboratories in 1954 as “temples of science built for the service of our motherland.” Cited in David Arnold, “Nehruvian Science and Postcolonial India,” Isis, 104/2 (2013), 360–70, at 368.

20 Nehru, “The Basic Approach,” 3.

21 Ibid., 3.

22 The classic statement is Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism (New York, 2000)Google Scholar. See also Mazower, Mark, “An international civilization? Empire, internationalism and the crisis of the mid-twentieth century,” International Affairs, 82/3 (2006), 553–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Cited in Brown, Nehru, 281.

24 Cited in Khilnani, “Nehru's Judgement,” 269.

25 “Even science today is almost on the verge of all manner of imponderables.” Nehru, “The Basic Approach,” 3.

26 “World Federation Vital, Nehru Says”, New York Times, 15 August 1948.

27 Arendt, Hannah, “The Gap between Past and Future,” in Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Essays in Political Thought (New York, 1961), 3–17, at 15 Google Scholar.

28 Nehru, “The Basic Approach,” 6.

29 See also Khilnani, “Nehru's Judgement,” 261.

30 Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Kamuf, Peggy (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

31 See especially Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Thought (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar; Guha, Ranajit, History at the Limit of World-History (New York, 2002)Google Scholar. For the argument of the colonial origins of Indian historicism see Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “Globalisation, Democratisation and the Evacuation of History?” in Jackie Assayag and Veronique Bénéï, eds., At Home in Diaspora: South Asian Scholars and the West (New Delhi, 2003), 127–47Google Scholar; Lal, Vinay, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New Delhi, 2003)Google Scholar; Banerjee, Prathama, Politics of Time: “Primitives” and History-Writing in a Colonial Society (New Delhi, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought, the Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, 1993)Google Scholar; and Chatterjee, , “History and the Nationalization of Hinduism,” Social Research, 59/1 (1992), 111–49Google Scholar. Sheldon Pollock argues that premodern history-writing in India took poetic rather than prosaic forms, and that history is not absent from Sanskritic traditions, but is rather actively denied. Pollock, Sheldon, “Mimamsa and the Problem of History in Traditional India,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 109/4 (1989), 603–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For precolonial historiographical practices see Rao, V. Narayana, Shulman, David and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800 (Delhi, 2001)Google Scholar and the forum in History and Theory, 46 (Oct. 2007). See also Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century,” Representations, 91/1 (2005), 26–57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Truschke, Audrey, “Setting the Record Wrong: A Sanskrit Vision of Mughal Conquests,” South Asian History and Culture, 3/3 (July 2012), 373–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 166.

33 Nehru, The Discovery of India, 91.

34 Ibid., 41.

35 Ibid., 44.

36 Kaviraj, Sudipta, “A state of Contradictions: The Post-colonial State in India,” in Skinner, Quintin and Strath, Bo, eds., States and Citizens (Cambridge, 2003), 145–63, at 148 Google Scholar.

37 I want to thank Shruti Kapila for making this point clear to me. For the problem of overcoming the perceived lack of history, see Sartori, Andrew, “Hegel, Marx, and World History,” in Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy and Andrew Sartori, eds., A Companion to Global Historical Thought (Chichester, 2014), 197–212 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For example, C. L. R. James argued that West Indians were, after the Middle Passage and centuries of slavery, thoroughly and radically modern, but without a sustained civilizational tradition to animate and ground postcolonial society and politics. For a brief discussion see C. L. R. James, “Lecture on Federation” (1958), at www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1958/06/federation.htm.

38 For a thoughtful meditation on Nehru's understanding of “reason” as a fragile project see Khilnani, Sunil, “Nehru's Faith,” Economic and Political Weekly, 37/48 (2002), 4793–99Google Scholar.

39 Nehru, The Discovery of India, 8–9, emphasis mine. See also Khilnani, “Nehru's Judgement,” 261; and Donaldson, “Global political order.”

40 Khilnani, “Nehru's Judgement.”

41 See especially Prakash, Another Reason. See also Goswami, Manu, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Edney, Matthew, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 See his 10 May 1957 speech commemorating the 1857 “First War of Indian Independence,” where he discusses India's situation almost exclusively in relation to the potential of nuclear warfare. Nehru, Jawaharlal, “The First War of Independence,” Mainstream Weekly, 45/23 (25 May 2007)Google Scholar, available at www.mainstreamweekly.net/article135.html.

43 Kapila, Shruti, “The Enchantment of Science,” Isis, 101/1 (2010), 120–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Ibid.

45 Nehru, “The Basic Approach,” 6.

46 See, for example, Jawaharlal Nehru, “The Lesson of History,” 5 Jan. 1931, in Nehru, Glimpses of World History, 6–7.

47 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.

48 Nehru, The Discovery of India, 477–8. In his autobiography he remarked of India's encounter with the “scientific and industrial West” that, “perhaps, only a succession of violent shocks could shake us out of our torpor.” Nehru, Jawaharlal, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (New York, 1941), 278 Google Scholar.

49 Cited in Nehru, Krishna, With No Regrets: An Autobiography (New York, 1945), 20 Google Scholar.

50 Cited in Mende, Tibor, Conversations with Mr Nehru (London, 1956), 50 Google Scholar.

51 Khilnani, “Nehru's Judgement,” 274.

52 For Gandhi and anarchy see Devji, Faisal, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (London, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 6.

53 Mende, Conversations, 48.

54 Dipesh Chakrabarty, paper delivered at the Nehru and Modern India colloquium, University of Chicago, 10 April 2015.

55 Nehru, The Discovery of India, 15.

56 Nehru, “The Basic Approach,” 4.

57 Laclau, Ernesto, “The Time Is out of Joint,” Diacritics, 25/2 (1995), 85–96, at 87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Nehru, “The Basic Approach,” 4.

59 Ibid., 4. This is why planning too should be responsive to the contingent present: “That national plan need not and indeed should not have rigidity. It need not be based on any dogma; but should rather take the existing facts into consideration.”

60 Ibid., 4. This represents a significant change from the Nehru of the 1930s: “However important the method may be I entirely fail to understand how it can take the place of the objective.” Jawaharlal Nehru, “Some Criticisms Considered,” in Nehru, Recent Essays and Writings, 25–38, at 33.

61 Badiou, Alain, The Century (Cambridge, 2007), 30 Google Scholar.

62 Nehru, “The Basic Approach,” 4.

63 Ibid., 4.

64 For a similar argument see Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (London, 1990)Google Scholar.

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66 For a history of the Indian political see Kapila, Shruti, “A History of Violence,” Modern Intellectual History, 7/2 (2010), 437–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Between 1946 and 1951 Telangana was the site of an armed peasant insurgency that offered a radical alternative to Nehru's procedural democracy and statist developmentalism. Inaugurating India's experiments with Maoist insurgency, communist-led revolutionary village councils undertook extensive land redistribution and the restructuring of agrarian society more generally. The classic account is Sundarayya, P., Telengana People's Struggle and Its Lessons (New Delhi, 1972)Google Scholar. See also Sunil Purushotham, “Sovereignty, Violence and the Making of the Postcolonial State in India, 1946–52” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013).

68 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “‘In the Name of Politics’: Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India,” Public Culture, 19, 1 (2007), 35–57, at 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 “The workers and the peasants will dominate the situation, and their decisions, imperfect though they be, will take us a long way to freedom. I cannot say what the Constituent Assembly will decide. But I have faith in the masses and am willing to abide by their decision.” Jawaharlal Nehru, “Reality and Myth,” in Nehru, Recent Essays and Writings, 70–80, at 78–9.

70 Sarkar, Sumit, “Popular Movements and National Leadership, 1945–47,” Economic and Political Weekly, 17/14–16 (April 1982), 677–89Google Scholar.

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73 Nehru, Towards Freedom, 171. “Violence is the very life blood of the modern state and social system . . . Governments are notoriously based on violence.” Cited in Khilnani, “Nehru's Faith,” 4797.

74 Nehru, “The Basic Approach,” 4.

75 Ibid. Gandhi was, by contrast, a radical anti-historicist. See Kapila, Shruti, “Gandhi before Mahatma: The Foundations of Political Truth,” Public Culture, 23/2 (2011), 431–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mehta, Uday S., “Patience, Inwardness, and Self-Knowledge in Gandhi's Hind Swaraj ,” Public Culture, 23/2 (2011), 417–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “Whatever conclusions I have reached have not been through historical studies at all. History has played the least part in my make.” Gandhi cited in Skaria, Ajay, “The Strange Violence of Satyagraha: Gandhi, Itihaas, and History,” in Bhagavan, Manu, ed., Heterotopias: Nationalism and the Possibility of History in South Asia (New Delhi, 2010), 142–85, at 142 Google Scholar.

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77 Ibid., 5.

78 Ibid., 6, emphasis added.

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80 Nehru, “The Basic Approach,” 6.

81 Mende, Conversations, p. 39.

82 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, p. 353–54; see also Rosanvallon, Pierre, Counter-democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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84 Nehru, “Whither India?,” 24.

85 It was “essential,” he wrote, to “know the direction before a single step can be taken.” Nehru, “Some Criticisms Considered,” 33.

86 Nehru, The Discovery of India, 9. Constituent Assembly Debates, 28 April 1947, at http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/debates/vol3p1.htm.

87 Nehru to Mohanlal Saksena, 10 Sept. 1949, N. Gopalaswamy Ayyangar papers, Nehru Museum and Memorial Library, File No 23.

88 Kapila, “A History of Violence”; and Kapila, Shruti, “Self, Spencer, and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism, 1890–1920,” Modern Intellectual History, 4/1 (2007), 109–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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90 Nehru, “The Basic Approach,” 5.

91 Ibid., 5.

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93 Nehru, “The Basic Approach,” 5.

94 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 347.

95 Nehru, “The Basic Approach,” 5.

96 Ibid., 6.

97 Ibid., 4.

98 See especially Ambedkar, B. R., “Annihilation of Caste,” in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 1, ed. Moon, Vasant (Bombay, 1989), 23–96 Google Scholar.

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100 See Kothari, Rajni, “The Congress ‘System’ in India,” Asian Survey, 4/12 (1964), 1161–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101 “Prosperity of Country First Consideration: Pandit Nehru's Warning to Disruptionists,” Hindustan Times, National Archives of India, File No 11(1)-H/49 Part II, Ministry of States.

102 Majeed, Autobiography, 154.

103 Prakash, Another Reason.

104 Nehru, The Discovery of India, 22.

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107 Cited in Nehru, With No Regrets, 20.

108 I borrow the term “countertempo” from On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley, 2013).

109 C. A. Bayly at Nehru and Today's India, 12 Feb. 2015, New Delhi, at www.cambridge-india.org/nehru-and-todays-india.

110 Ibid.

111 As he stated in a speech on the last day of the first Lok Sabha (parliament) “We have functioned . . . during these five years not only on the edge of history but sometimes plunging into the processes of making history,” 28 March 1957, cited in “Jaitley Quotes Nehru to Get Congress on Board GST,” Times of India, 14 Dec. 2015, available at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Jaitley-quotes-Nehru-to-get-Congress-on-board-GST/articleshow/50174659.cms.

112 Kapila, An Intellectual History for India.

113 Bayly, “The Ends of Liberalism,” 22.