Glimpses of Nehru

This new album on the Nehrus, covering the whole clan right down to Rahul and Priyanka, has several untypical pictures, says H Y Sharada Prasad

I have been going through an attractive book—an album on the Nehrus. It reminded me of the time I worked in 1964 with the celebrated American designer Charles Eames on an exhibition on the life and work of Jawaharlal Nehru. It was shown in New York, London, Paris and Moscow and was acclaimed as a classic of the art of biographical exhibitions. It was a great learning experience for me. It gave me insights which proved most valuable when planning the national exhibition at the time of the Gandhi centenary.
Gandhi once asked a group of schoolchildren: “Tell me, am I not a handsome man?” He had no illusions about how he looked. Sarojini Naidu compared him to Mickey Mouse. As for Nehru, there was no argument about his good looks. What I learned from the thousands of photographs I saw while working on the two exhibitions was that it is not so much the conventional fair features but the energy and aura they exuded that constituted their magnetism.

They were both men of a thousand moods. They listened with great intensity and their faces registered their thoughts and emotions. They did not wear masks, least of all the mask of a dispassionate saint. They were not at all self-conscious about displaying their feelings, whether joy or sorrow or anger. Don’t think that Gandhi had no anger. Only, he was more successful than most in sublimating it.

The same thing can be said about their words. They spoke and wrote with earnestness and spontaneity. That does not mean that they did not devote careful thought to whatever they said. Gandhi has somewhere described the care he took with every word that he wrote for his weekly journals. But this could not be claimed for Nehru. He said many things on impulse, not only in public meetings but even when he spoke in Parliament—for example, his remark that he would instruct the army to throw out the Chinese from the areas they had occupied.

To be a good leader, you must care for your followers and take an interest in their problems. To be interesting, you must be interested. The more things you can do, the more there is to record in your life. The Nehru album I referred to has been published by Roli Books. It covers not only Jawaharlal but the whole clan down to Rahul and Priyanka. In the opening paragraph of his autobiography, Jawaharlal Nehru had described how the family had come down from Kashmir when his forebear Raj Kaul took employment with the Mughal emperor, Farruksiyar. It is in the present album that I first saw a portrait of Raj Kaul. The album also contains some untypical, though not hitherto unpublished, pictures. One of them shows Nehru wearing the Brahminical sacred thread while immersing his mother’s ashes at the Sangam in 1938. There is also a photograph of his performing a havan at Rajiv Gandhi’s naming ceremony. These show that he did not make a fetish about the non-observance of rituals.

In his will, Jawaharlal Nehru had expressly said that there should be no Hindu ritual when he died, although he had wanted his ashes to be immersed in the Ganga and had gone on to describe his great reverence for the river. But Indira Gandhi, who believed in ritual, overruled the first injunction while observing the second wish. Let me make it clear that this is a remark made off my own bat. Professor Mushirul Hasan, author of the Roli book, makes no mention of it.