That complexity is in large part what makes Nehru an interesting and accessible figure–unlike a Gandhi, say, shrouded in hagiography. Tharoor, the United Nations under secretary-general for communications and a contributor to NEWSWEEK, is best when he picks apart the contradictions that plagued his subject. Returned from England a young firebrand, Nehru is seen tempering his provocations of the colonial authorities, largely out of deference to his political mentors–his natural father, Motilal, and his adopted one, Gandhi. “He had no taste for patricide,” notes Tharoor. The author has a keen eye for Nehru’s blindnesses–the secular upbringing that prevented him from seeing how religious identity had become paramount for India’s Muslims; the stints in prison, some of them almost willful, that prevented him from understanding how eager the British were finally to leave.
Unfortunately, the best of this kind of analysis comes toward the end of “Nehru,” when its subject has already died. There Tharoor addresses the promise of his introduction, to provide a “reinterpretation,” and the Nehru that emerges epitomizes both the glories and the delusions of the age of decolonization. He is a celebrity, a dashing freedom fighter in the mold of Sukarno and Nasser. He is an economic nationalist, whose suspicion of Western investment and urge for social justice would result in a disastrous command economy mired in red tape. He is the charismatic glue holding together a young nation.
The question Tharoor doesn’t entirely answer is why is Nehru only an emblem of that particular time? The challenges he faced–of knitting together a multiethnic society riven by deep divides–have never been more timely; the need for broad-minded leaders never more dire. Yet if Nehru’s stock has not fallen as far as Nasser’s or Sukarno’s, neither is he widely emulated, even within India. Partly this has to do with his economic missteps, which have only in the last decade begun to be reversed. And partly it tracks a general disillusionment with democracy on the Subcontinent, where corruption is rampant.
In large part, though, Nehru faces the same problem as those who would chronicle him–“the gap between the ideals he articulated and their achievement.” So much of the book hails its subject’s virtues that drawing real lessons from his shortcomings becomes difficult. The problem is not only literary: for your average corrupt politician, clad in white dhoti and Nehru cap, it is easy to hail the saintly freedom fighter while exploiting the massive bureaucracy he enabled. It is the sort of pedestal Nehru feared, and for too much of “Nehru,” Tharoor leaves him there.
