BackNehru’s India: the early years
Images, icons and ideas of the nation under its first prime minister, ahead of his 50th death anniversary on 27 May
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In the 50 years since Jawaharlal Nehru’s death, the man who represented a compelling and enduring idea of India as a progressive and pluralistic nation is now a strangely divisive figure, with his share of devotees and detractors. His heirs have progressively chipped away at his legacy, while the Congress party that he once led is facing its worst-ever crisis.
Scholars seeking an alternative paradigm to unchecked market-oriented growth find inspiration in the mixed-economy model of the day. Other scholars seeking to unearth the reasons behind India’s lost promise also find them in the period between independence and 1964. The deepening of democratic ideals and greater participation in the electoral process coexisted alongside a personality cult that privileged some individuals over others.
There were victories in science, technology, higher education and state-supported classical and folk cultural forms, the spread of ideas of religious tolerance, cultural pursuits, a nation-building fervour, the public sector apparatus, and the ideal of all-round human progress that made no distinction between material and intellectual advancement. But there were also foundational failures, the mishandling of territorial and political aspirations in the North-Eastern states and Kashmir, and national humiliation after the war with China in 1962.
The man himself was complex and fascinating, a democrat-aristocrat who lived out a bulk of his life in public, changed his views and policies midstream and ruled with firmness, obduracy and curiosity. When the cartoonist S. Shankar Pillai launched the magazine Shankar’s Weekly in 1948, Nehru told him, “Don’t spare me, Shankar. Hit, hit me hard."
In true Nehruvian spirit, then, here are some hard knocks, slaps on the wrist, and pats on the back in the form of images that represent the icons, ideas and personalities of the time.
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Nandini Ramnath
Issue editor
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