Nehru's Idea Of A Young Nation바카라�s Selfhood

In an article he wrote for Time magazine in 2001, reflecting on fifty years of India바카라�s independence, Salman Rushdie connected the 바카라�so-called idea of India바카라� to the modern Indian self, through a string of paradoxes: 바카라�In the modern age, we have come to understand our own selves as composites, often contradictory, even internally incompatible. We have understood that each of us is many different people. Our younger selves differ from our older selves; we can be bold in the company of our lovers and timorous before our employers, principled when we instruct our children and corrupt when offered some secret temptation; we are serious and frivolous, loud and quiet, aggressive and easily abashed. The 19th-century concept of the integrated self has been replaced by this jostling crowd of 바카라�I바카라�s. And yet, unless we are damaged, or deranged, we usually have a relatively clear sense of who we are. I agree with my many selves to call all of them 바카라�me.바카라�바카라�

Reading this article in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) library, a year before submitting my PhD thesis on Nehru and Gandhi, I detected a Nehruvian echo in Rushdie바카라�s evocative passage. We can make an analogous connection between Rushdie바카라�s description of 바카라�selves바카라� and what Nehru describes as the nation in this passage from the 바카라�Epilogue바카라� to The Discovery of India: 바카라�The discovery of India바카라�what have I discovered? It was presumptuous of me to imagine that I could unveil her and find out what she is to-day and what she was in the long past. To-day she is four hundred million separate individual men and women, each differing from the other, each living in a private universe of thought and feeling. If this is so in the present, how much more difficult is it to grasp that multitudinous past of innumerable successions of human beings...India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads.바카라�

What Nehru imagines as India바카라�s selfhood in terms of modern life, Rushdie finds within each self of the numerous selves that make a nation. It is impossible to contain this vast sea of differences without, and accepting, contradictions between people and allowing them to thrive.

The Mexican poet-critic Octavio Paz in his 1967 speech in Delhi said that as a political leader, Nehru 바카라�did not fall into the temptation of suppressing the contradictions of history바카라�He does not offer solutions; but shows us the way to find them.바카라� This statement acknowledges Nehru바카라�s ideological flexibility. Nehru did not follow a doctrinaire politics where a combination of scientific rationality and certain revolutionary ideas turned society into a Set Theory and provided absolute answers to the problems of human life. The nation is the contradictory whole of the proliferation of contradicting selves. This is a much deeper understanding than a nation broken down to the category of individuals alone. It provokes a radical idea of individuality itself, where individuals are not defined in terms of mere cogs in the wheel. In an essay titled 바카라�Personality바카라�, Rabindranath Tagore decried 바카라�the rampant materialism of the present age which ruthlessly sacrifices individuals to the bloody idols of organisation.바카라� The meaning of 바카라�organisation바카라� here can be extended to include political organisations too, where individual contradictions are sacrificed in the name of a suffocatingly singular idea of the self and the nation.

There are similar resonances even in the imagination of the cultural self in Nehru and Rushdie. When Sir C P Ramaswamy Aiyer, conservative lawyer and politician from Madras, said in public (sometime during 1934-1935) that Nehru 바카라�did not represent mass-feeling바카라�, Nehru agreed and extended the point in the epilogue of his Autobiography: 바카라�I often wonder if I represent anyone at all바카라�I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere바카라�I cannot get rid of either that past inheritance or my recent acquisitions바카라� [T]hey create in me a spiritual loneliness바카라�I am a stranger and alien in the West바카라�But in my own country also, sometimes, I have an exile바카라�s feeling.바카라�

By eluding representation, Nehru is being not just honest about himself. He is unwittingly raising a larger question about people who claim to belong to a single cultural heritage, whereas that heritage itself has evolved from its encounter with other cultural sources. To deny that encounter is to indulge in historical bluff.

Compare Nehru바카라�s passage to Rushdie writing in the short story on migration, 바카라�The Courter바카라�, from the anthology of short stories, East, West (1994): 바카라�I, too, have ropes around my neck. I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, I kick. Ropes, I do not choose between you바카라�Do you hear? I refuse to choose.바카라�

What for Nehru in the 1930s was a conscious understanding of his spiritual homelessness, unable to rid himself of the genuine rift (and conflict) between his double identity encountering western and Indian modernity, for Rushdie in the 1990s becomes an even more acute struggle to endorse that cultural rift by refusing a fake abandonment of that contradiction. To choose being one over and against another is a false choice. The cultural condition of modernity is the impossibility of choosing between our many selves.

The common thread between Nehru and Rushdie is the idea of the self and the idea of the nation that has a constant tendency to differ from itself, a self that experiences difference within itself. The self is 바카라�often contradictory, internally incompatible바카라� [Rushdie] and 바카라�a bundle of contradictions바카라� [Nehru]. It is reminiscent of Walt Whitman바카라�s famous lines in Song of Myself: 바카라�Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)바카라�

These men of imagination make a fundamental point about the modern self that they realise바카라�intuitively, poetically바카라�being self-conflicted. The postulate is so fundamental that an argument for it only follows from or after the proposition, or hypothesis, is laid out. The self in modernity, to repeat, is self-contradictory. This goes against the Kantian assumption of rationalist thought where reason is the elimination of contradictions, or even the logical formulation of identity from German Idealism that 바카라�바카라�I is I바카라�바카라�.

Even Gandhi acknowledged this principle. He wrote on April 29, 1933 in Harijan: 바카라�I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my pursuit after Truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things.바카라� He clarified the point further writing on September 28, 1934, in Harijan: 바카라�I have never made a fetish of consistency. I am a votary of Truth and I must say what I feel and think at a given moment on the question, without regard to what I may have said before on it.바카라� The difference between truth and thinking precisely lies in the temporal space where thinking is constantly evolving vis-à-vis an ever-changing idea of truth. Time contradicts us and we contradict our older selves in time.

This idea of contradiction has nothing to do with the chameleonesque self where you contradict your past the way people change ideological garbs and wear new masks to suit the demands of the current political weather. That is an instrumentalist바카라�and perfectly logical바카라�way of 바카라�self-ing바카라�. The word 바카라�바카라�contradict바카라�바카라�, in fact, doesn바카라�t suit this case. This is also not an endorsement of the Hegelian dialectic where you evolve from contradictions in mere ideas alone. It is rather a recovery of the older, more ethical Platonic idea in The Laws that contradictions also involve people. If you follow Plato, you won바카라�t succumb to the corrupt, logical nonsense Fascists, religious fundamentalists, Stalinists and Maoists believe in: that whoever contradicts you is your enemy. To consider others enemies is to consider your (contradictory) self your own enemy.

Nehru understood the modern self and the nation바카라�s selfhood as one where people may avoid the dangers of what Rushdie calls 바카라�damaged, or deranged바카라� conditions of the self. If you deny the fact that your self contains elements of other selves and that you are a 바카라�bundle of contradictions바카라� held together by 바카라�strong and invisible threads바카라� of love, you are most likely to suffer from neurosis.

(Views expressed are personal)

(This appeared in the print as 'A Young Nation바카라�s Selfhood')

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Nehru and the Spirit of India. He is currently working on a book on Gandhi