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Through Gandhi's instinctive appeal to the peasantry and Nehru's insistence on agrarian reforms, the party base has broadened. But calls for reforms have caused defections from party ranks. The great Satyagraha (civil disobedience) campaigns of 1920-21, 1930-32 and 1940 have caused other defections.
Not always have Congress leaders stood up to British rule as stoutly as Gandhi and the Nehru family. Once in political power in eight of the eleven provinces after the 1937 elections, Congress members became more political than reformist.
Nehru & Ideas. The Western world gives its respect to the man who starts with nothing and makes much. India reserves its plaudits for the man who starts with much and gives up everything. Gandhi has the ascetic renunciation that India best understands, but there is also a strong appeal to India in Nehru, for the Brahmin's renunciation of a life of ease.
In the 18th Century Raj Kaul, a Sanskrit and Persian scholar, came down from the mountain province of Kashmir. His descendants settled on the banks of a canal at Delhi. Nahar means canal and this word, changed to Nehru, eventually became the family name.
The Nehrus were dispossessed in the Great Revolt of 1857 and settled finally at Allahabad, where Jawaharlal spent most of his childhood. His father, vigorous, stormy-tempered and brilliant, amassed a fortune as a lawyer, surrounded his only son with English tutors, sent him to be educated at Harrow and Cambridge. In London Jawaharlal dabbled in Fabianism, entered the Inner Temple, lived beyond his generous allowance, argued Indian politics with his father by letter.
He returned to India when he was 23 and began practicing law. But much as he liked and admired the British personally, young Nehru was swept into political activity against what he then felt, and still feels, is the national humiliation of his people.
More leftist than his moderate father, Nehru read Marx, Lenin, Spengler, Plato, Shaw, Thoreau, Voltaire, Li Tai Po, the philosophy of Lord Gautama Buddha, the Upanishads, Christ's Sermon on the Mount. He ended an agnostic, a firm believer that man's after life is not as important as the work he does on earth.
By the time he had finished his first jail sentence in 1922 Nehru was under the spell of Gandhi. He had learned that jails in India crawl with vermin, sometimes with scorpions, and that they break the spirit of most men. He also learned to discipline his emotions and keep his mind and body active. In moods of depression he sometimes reverted, as he still does, to Shirshasana, which entails standing on the head with the fingers supporting the back of the head, elbows on the floor, body vertical. From this "slightly comic position," Nehru found, he could be "more tolerant of life's vagaries."
Nehru & India. The social philosophy fashioned by Nehru out of Cambridge, riots, Gandhi and jail has elements of Communism, but decries Communist dogma and bad manners. It tends, rather, toward an enlightened and idealistic international socialism. The British oppose it. So do 6,000 years of Hindu culture.