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Nor are Americans able to warm completely to his rambling style of speech and thought (he sounds at times like Eleanor Roosevelt, if she had read more philosophy). He acts as a statesman, politician and diplomat, but he often speaks as a moralist. Americans, who are far more preoccupied with moral matters than Nehru would give them credit for, are always willing to listen to a moralist.
What is Nehru saying? That bloodshed is evil; that force is self-destructive; that love is the only real conqueror. He says there is something wrong in a world that contains both poverty and technical progress, the reality of war and the yearning for peace. He appeals to everyone who thinks that it is probably sinful to be rich, and certainly sinful to have the atom bomb. His central thesis is Gandhi's: never compromise with evil, not even for the sake of ultimate good.
Thus Nehru the moralist, to whose terrible truisms the only answer is a shamefaced nod.
Now William Blake looks at us with all
the eyes of Asia, And it is not so; we are accused and
silenced.
But Nehru, at least to Western eyes, is no inscrutable, innocent madman of integrity like William Blake. Why, then—Western minds would like to know—doesn't Nehru the moralist make Nehru the leader hang his head in shame? Perhaps he does; but the practical West, which must deal with net results, is necessarily less concerned with Nehru the paradox than with Nehru the politico.
Like millions of Indians who follow in his train, Nehru is a paradox. He is not a typical Indian: he is a Westernized Oriental. Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the godparents of Fabian Socialism, are in a truer sense his creators than Vishnu and Siva.
An Agnostic. In religion, Nehru is a typical Western agnostic. In politics, he is a Western liberal with Socialist leanings. The mind of Jawaharlal Nehru (born 1889) came into consciousness during a quiet period of Indian history. The great Mutiny of 1857 was only a rankling memory, and the Indian National Congress, which was to become the first instrument of liberation, was a polite assemblage in morning coats. It was Western influence that made Nehru a nationalist. Garibaldi was his hero long before Gandhi was. Nehru's family were wealthy and progressive aristocrats; religion, to the men of his house, was "a woman's affair."
Paradoxically, it was a Westerner who first brought Nehru to Hinduism: his Irish tutor was a Theosophist, and such an influence that at the age of 13 Nehru was inducted into the Theosophical Society by Mrs. Annie Besant* in person.
Nehru's attitude toward religion has not basically changed. In later years he would say (like any Westerner who admires the Bible "as literature") that he did not understand or feel drawn to the Bhagavad Gita, but "liked to read the verses."
He went to Harrow and Cambridge, where he acquired the old school tie and what he himself called the "vague humanism" of the day. Nietzsche was "all the rage," as were the prefaces of Bernard Shaw and the sexual case histories of Krafft-Ebing. It was an age which considered religion at best a polite convention and at worst, the opium of the masses. Like his fellow liberals, Nehru believed that science would solve all human problems.