Vol. 20 No. 10 · 21 May 1998
pages 14-15 | 3301 words
The Last Englishman to Rule India
Ashis Nandy
- Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny by Stanley Wolpert
Oxford, 546 pp, £25.00, January 1997, ISBN 0 19 510075 1
Is there something in modern South Asia’s intellectual culture that prompts scholars to separate the private from the public lives of their subjects and deploy the public as a defence against the private? What are the anxieties that afflict middle-class intellectuals whenever someone delves into the personality of a national hero? Are they afraid that their own inner lives and the ambivalences they live with might be exposed? Do the carefully crafted public selves they erect for their heroes hide deeper feelings of betrayal by those same heroes?
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 12 · 18 June 1998
From Peter Robb
Ashis Nandy’s condescending review of Stanley Wolpert’s biography of Nehru (LRB, 21 May) makes important points about modern India. Much – but not all – of it rings true. Nandy argues that a Westernised Nehruvian secularism and progressivism were adopted only by the Brahmanic middle classes. But those classes were never simply Westernised. Moreover, many ideas on rights, representation and state responsibility were and are widely endors-ed in the villages and factories as well as in the academy or the legislature and the goal of material progress has become ever more evident in recent decades. One might expect marginal people to endorse the rule of law and the hopes of democratic socialism, and many have organised themselves around such principles. Nandy counterposes the ‘different … concerns and aspirations’ brought in from beyond the middle classes and claims that they represent India’s ‘own political and communal traditions ‘. This essential-ised India, uncontaminated by the West, is itself a modern invention, now deployed most vehemently by the Hindu Right. It seems to represent, not so much the political emergence of formerly marginal ideas and suppressed classes, as yet another distortion of their interests, and has a disturbing influence among the middle classes and intellectuals.
Peter Robb
London N1
