The lingering influence of Motilal Nehru’s liberalism, Jawaharlal’s Gandhian-Marxism and Jinnah’s poison

THIS IS NOT A STORY ABOUT ALCOHOL. It is a story about hypocrisy.

Motilal Nehru was campaigning for his seat in the central legislature when a pro­vocative heckler asked whether he drank alcohol. Alcohol was not considered ‘polite’ in conventional Indian society, and Mahatma Gandhi made it a non-negotiable sin in Congress when he took over the national struggle in 1920. A teetotal culture was one of those points upon which Hindus and Muslims could easily agree; and each vote counted in the limited franchise under British rule. Only 2.8 per cent of Indians were eligible to vote in that pseudo-democracy, a right determined by wealth as measured in taxes.

Motilal Nehru replied in the thunderous tones that had intimidated many a witness in court: “Jee haan main peeta hoon. Mere pahle mera baap peeta tha aur uske pahle mera dada. Mera beta peeta hai aur main ummeed karta hun ki uske baad mera pota bhi piye ga. Aap ko koi itraaz hai? (Yes, I drink. Before me my father used to drink, and before him my grandfather. My son drinks and I hope my grandson will do so as well. Any objections?)” The English language cannot do justice to the heavy irony, anger and rebuke in the Urdu phrase koi itraaz hai?

The heckler was silenced. Motilal won without any more fuss. He and his genera­tion were above pretence or pretention.

The story is told with panache by Braj Kumar (BK or ‘Bijju’) Nehru, who was brought up by his granduncle Motilal in Anand Bhawan as an intrinsic part of the joint family. Nice Guys Finish Second is not just another mere memoir albeit culled from a phenom­enal memory; it is a classic history of a niche elite within the north Indian gentry of the 20th century. For nearly three decades this book had been on the periphery of my reading list; when eventually I did open the book, I could not put it down. The personality of Motilal is the prism that adds sparkle and dimension to social history, reflecting the mores, passions and beliefs of a generation that laid the foundations of freedom. After 1920 Mohandas Gandhi became the architect who built upon that base, shaped the soul of nationalism and set the ethical rules for self-government which, alas, evaporated within a decade of the Mahatma’s assassination in 1948.

Motilal, patriarch of a family which remains in active quest of power a century later, built his fortune through a fabled legal practice, while simultaneously rising as a star of India’s incipient urge for freedom. He was the ultimate self-made suc­cess story, an eminent public figure long before Gandhi returned to India in 1915.

Motilal disagreed with much of Gandhi’s political theology. He was contemp­tuous of shibboleths like celibacy and teetotalism, dismissive about panacea like village-centric self-sufficiency and bewildered by non-violence. As he told his family, he would have preferred to tear apart the racist, exploitative British ruler, although such animosity never extended to the foreign individual. Motilal preferred Western dress and diet, and lauded the social reform and education which had propelled economic advance. He admired Gandhi’s genius, sacrifice, commitment and com­mand over the Indian imagination. He accepted Gandhi’s leadership but refused to kowtow to every preachy whim. Gandhi, in turn, was too astute to impose his will beyond a point on patriots who wanted their own intellectual space.

Motilal did not hide paternal pride when his spartan son began to overshadow the father, and proclaimed to family and friends that Jawaharlal was, to use a Victo­rian phrase, a “man of destiny”. As India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal married quarter-baked Gandhian ideas to half-baked Marxist notions of state control over the economy to create a curious hybrid that trapped India’s economy in the fetters of licence raj till released into the modern era in the 1980s and 1990s. Hindsight pro­vokes a question: Would Nehru have served India better if he had been more faithful to his father Motilal’s economic instincts than to godfather Gandhi’s recipes or uncle Karl Marx’s authoritarian theories? I do not know the answer, but that does not dilute the question.

As a young man Jawaharlal both enjoyed and resented his princely inheritance and tried to compensate by being contrarian. There were flashes of early petulance, flinging a jar at a retreating servant because it was jam when he had asked for marmalade. Motilal gave his children the best Western education. Jawaharlal had an English private tutor before going to Harrow; his sisters had an English governess. Jawaharlal’s clothes were fashioned by the British King’s tailors; when he took to smoking, his cigarettes were rose or violet-tipped. Home culture was a synthesis. A Kashmiri Pandit cook prepared traditional fare; a Muslim cook made the Western meal (soup, fish, meat, sweet dish) that was de rigueur on Motilal’s table.

But there was never the kind of decadence exhibited in the home of a grandee and fellow Allahabad lawyer Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, whose second son Trijugi Narayan played tennis with majestically minimal running. Ball boys placed the tennis ball on his racket or in his hand when he had to serve, since he considered it too undigni­fied to lift the ball from the ground. When the game ended a servant would rush up to push his arms through the sleeves and head through the neck of a sweater. The blazer was draped in similar fashion. A servant put a cigarette in Trijugi’s mouth and lit it. The Sapru princeling did do his own inhaling, however.

The indulgent lifestyle in Anand Bhawan ended in 1920 with the transformation to Gandhian denial. Jawaharlal conscien­tiously switched to the poor man’s gram at teatime and aban­doned silk shirts for coarse handspun. Motilal, only ready to go thus far and no further in his homage to Gandhism, switched to handspun but ordered the finest weave from Andhra. When a “dear old Kashmiri lady” asked Motilal what Jawaharlal’s con­tribution had been to their fabulous home with every modern facility, Motilal replied: “Woh janab tainchoo nikaltey rahtey hain (That gentleman keeps being a nitpicker).” When furniture was ordered from Tomlin in Calcutta (at a staggering sum of 16,000 rupees when a day’s rate at the Taj in Mumbai was 23 rupees), the son insisted that it be “plain, plain”. Jawaharlal tried to “de-class” himself with the ideological impetus of a man who had surren­dered to Gandhi and remained captive to Marx. Abstinence could be petulant. When he returned from Europe in 1927, Jawaharlal cut down dinner by one course. What father and son agreed upon was a domestic environment governed by rationalism, agnosticism, and spiritual freedom, rather than devotion to ritu­als or caste rules. Motilal refused to preserve high-caste ‘purity’ by doing prayashchit on return from his first trip abroad.

Motilal’s wealth was the fruit of long working days that ended at around 8.30 or 9 in the evening, when was heard the war cry of the British Empire: “Koi hai? (Is anyone there?)” The question mark was irrelevant: it was a summons, not a query. The ever-present valet Bhola would respond: “Hazir! (Present!)”. A bottle of Haig’s Dimple Scotch would appear along with Abdulla cigarettes made with fine Turkish or Egyptian tobacco, rather than inferior Virginia. Motilal’s official quota was two drinks. The size of each drink however remained unquantified and a fly would often mysteriously be found in the diminishing second glass necessitating a third.

Son persuaded father to turn teetotal so that both could become sober soldiers in Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. But the patrician past came to the rescue in unsuspected ways. Motilal, legal luminary and monarch of the courtroom, became, to use his own amused expression, a jailbird when they were sentenced to six months simple imprisonment for challenging British rule. The residence changed but not the resident. Motilal would give orders to the British warden in jail with the same exuberant confi­dence that he exercised at home. He sat on the floor on a dari instead of at a table, but welcomed visitors every afternoon with a large spread of fruit and sweets. There were no restrictions. Word spread that the best afternoon tea in Lucknow was available in jail.

The sound of Motilal’s famous qahqaha, or belly laugh, reverberated through the prison. The reason, as the patriarch explained, was because he knew the governor of the United Provinces, Sir Harcourt Butler, very well. Both had enjoyed the “rivers of champagne” at par­ties hosted by landlords, taluqdars and zemin­dars. Jawaharlal’s spells in prison in the 1930s, after his father’s death, were far less salubrious.

In 1925 Motilal went back to his Dimple Scotch after the death of his great friend CR Das, who had also given up drinking in the zeal for Gandhi. Motilal’s logic was persuasive, at least to himself. Das had died because the sudden denial of alcohol had acted as a shock to his system. Motilal had no desire for a similar fate.

Civilised elitism was part of clan culture, even if finances in every wing of the extended family could not always match the luxury lev­els set by Motilal. BK Nehru’s father Brijlal took an MA from Exeter College, Oxford and ate the required dinners at Inner Temple to become a barrister, opted for the Imperial Civil Service, was selected for the finance department and posted to Allahabad in 1908. Naturally, he lived at Anand Bhawan with wife Rameshwari, daughter of Dewan Narendra Nath of Lahore.

His salary was top tier, but it was still a salary, not a lawyer’s treasury. Braj was allotted a dress allowance of a hundred pounds when he left for England to study, but told to avoid Oxbridge, where he could turn into a fop. But there could be no compromise on dress standards. He was instructed to purchase three lounge suits at a cost of 30 guineas from top-of-the-line Henry Poole, although cheaper tailors offered the same quality at Savile Row. He bought a cheaper suit from Austin Reed, but auxiliaries included an opera hat and patent leather shoes. He discovered that times had changed when his Irish graduate valet at the London School of Economics (LSE) stole the Poole suits and all his belongings kept in two suitcases under the bed.

The author’s maternal inheritance was culturally more Indian but politically pro-establishment. Their ancestor was Pandit Ganga Ram, a Kashmiri purohit who settled down in Lahore to serve Punjab’s great Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1813 and received a jagir, or landed estate. His maternal grandfather was doyen of Lahore; his father was 18 and mother Rameshwari 15 when they were married in 1902.

The Dewan was known as Bhaijanji, roughly translated as ‘Respected Elder Brother’. A scholar in Ara­bic and Persian, he was as familiar with Sanskrit religious texts as he was with the Quran. English became a natural addition to the linguistic repertoire. He was a graduate of Government College in Lahore. Bhaijanji went to the Round Table Conferences of 1930 and 1931 as a representative of Punjab landlords. The Punjab aris­tocracy may have been pro-British but it spoke to the British with head held high. This was not always true of Indian princes. The author’s professor at LSE, the eminent academic Harold Laski, narrated an anecdote which indicates the flavour of that age. The Maharajdhiraj of Darbhanga hosted a dinner at the conference where Ramsay MacDonald (prime minister) was seated at his right and Laski to the left. The only sentence that the Maharajdhi­raj uttered was: “I hope you like the menu…” That was sufficient for the requirements of British imperialism.

The ambience of Fairfields, their Lahore home, matched Anand Bhawan. Family friends included Sir Muhammad Iqbal, Sir Sundar Singh Majithia, Sir Jogendra Singh, Sir Zulfikar Ali Khan of Malerkotla, Sir Umar Hayat Khan Tiwana, Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, Sir Shadi Lal, Sir Fazl-i-Hussain, Sir Feroze Khan Noon, Sir Ganga Khan: premiers, ministers, members of the Viceroy’s Council, poets, leaders. Mian Azizuddin, aristocrat and heir of a famous vazir at the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, was another friend.

BK Nehru learnt Hindi, Urdu and English from his mother. She taught her son that the highest sin was telling a lie; and the ultimate definition of honour came from the Raghukul Riti of Tulsi Das’ Ram Charit Manas: Praan jaaye par wachan na jaaye. Celebra­tions at his janeu ceremony in the winter of 1925 were elaborate, with family and friends descending from all corners, including Saleh Tyabji with his family from Rangoon. The puja lasted for a day; the baradari dinners went on for much longer. The Gayatri Mantra was recited into his ear by a priest who warned that it could not be repeated before women or other castes. The iconoclast in him cut off the top knot the next day.

Between the ages of 10 and 16, ‘Papaji’, or father, taught the young Bijju foranhour everymorning, during a prolonged shave with the help of a small mirror and two bowls of hot water. The learning was eclectic: The Astronomical Atlas, geometry, algebra, arithmetic, trigonometry, dynamics, 19th-century English poets, fiction, Panini’s Sutras, Hitopadesh, Kalidas’ Raghuvansha, Latin, French, Persian, Diwan-i-Hafiz. This is education as it was once understood. Hindus, notes the author, began to give up Urdu only after the Muslim League, in yet another display of profound stupidity, announced that it would be the language of Indian Muslims. They forgot to check with Indian Bengali or Tamil or Malayali Muslims. Language, like culture, is older than any religion.

His mother was an instinctive reformer who brought her talent and spirit to Allahabad, becoming for a while editor of a Hindi magazine for women, Stri Darpan, with the help of Ramakant Malaviya, eldest son of Madan Mohan. The Malavi­yas were close family friends even though caste orthodoxy did not permit them to eat in the home of a Kashmiri Pandit. The better elements of the British mores were incorporated seam­lessly into conduct. Bijju, for instance, would not conceive of canvassing when elected class representative at the Allahabad University Union. Such things were not done at Oxbridge. He notes that half-a-century later Benazir Bhutto was nearly disqualified when she gave an innocent sherry party for friends on the eve of being elected president of the Oxford Union.

The fascinating process of assimilation took another turn in 1930 when the author fell in love with a Hungarian Jewish fellow student, Fori; the resistance from his father proved to be stronger than from the mother. It took years of what can only be described as bilateral diplomacy before agreement, and then arose an unforeseen hurdle: What would be the marriage ceremony? There was no question of either groom or bride changing faith. When God became a problem, Gandhi proved to be a saviour. He decreed that there was nothing in Hinduism which demanded conversion, and so the marriage could be performed by Hindu rites. This formula was repeated in the more famous marriage of 1942 when Jawaharlal’s daughter Indira married a Parsi, Firoz Ghandy, son of Faredoon Jehangir Ghandy. Gandhi was once again deus ex machina.

BK Nehru describes the trauma of Partition, the violent disruptor of history, geography and culture, with a thoughtful mind, a secular spirit and a sharp eye; a nightmare which besmirched the dream of his generation, whose barbaric horrors still whisper their bru­tal incantations in dark corners of the subcontinent’s psyche.

The man who destroyed peace, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a political Muslim. He was never a believer Muslim. He had no knowledge of Islam, a mere convenience for his exalted ambi­tions. One story tells us more than many a tome. Jinnah was travelling with Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru to England by ship. They stopped, as was routine, in Egypt, and went to visit the pyramids. The dragomans asked them if they were Muslims. Both said yes. Sir Tej interjected, in a spirit of friendly teasing, to say that Jinnah was lying. He then recited the kalmia, which proclaims that there is one Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet, to prove his Islamic credentials. Jinnah did not know the kalmia. “It is one of the bitter ironies of history,” writes BK Nehru, “that a man as modern, as rational, as contemptuous of the laws of his hereditary religion (recall his drinking whisky and eating eggs and bacon for breakfast till his last days as Governor General of Pakistan) should have ended up as the leader of a party based on fundamentalism.” If Jinnah had not died of lung disease in 1948, he would have been assassinated by some Pakistani fundamentalist over bacon and eggs.

BK Nehru compares Jawaharlal and Jinnah, the two Anglicised guardians of opposed ideologies: “The Quaid-e-Azam had no concept of the forces which his words and attitudes had let loose among the followers of his religion. Jinnah, like Jawaharlal, was culturally an Englishman and, like him again, he was also probably an atheist. He continued, even when he occupied Government House in Karachi as Governor General of his Islamic State, to eat bacon and eggs for breakfast and drink his evening Scotch. Such a man could not possibly have foreseen what ultimately happened, any more than could have Jawaharlal, for neither of them understood the essential nature of their respective followings.”

India opted for a civilisational state. Pakistan chose a fundamentalist ideology which restricted ‘purity’ to one faith. In 1947 the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Pakistan was seen as a national duty, not an aberration.

Bhaijanji was also fortunate in that he did not live to see Partition; he never believed that Punjabis could ever massacre one another. But the poison sown by Jinnah infected the soul of Punjab. Bhaijanji passed away in 1945. He would have died of a broken heart in 1947. BK Nehru reports the tragedy with the philosophical calm of a humanist; he never raised his voice in conversation, he never raises his voice in print.

In 1950 he was posted to Washington, the year Pakistan Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan came for his first official visit to America. Pakistan Foreign Secretary Ikramullah and Ghulam Ahmed, both old friends, dropped by for a drink. Ghulam Ahmed was brother of the “notorious Hindu hater Aziz Ahmed”. At three in the morning, when drink had loos­ened his tongue, Ghulam Ahmed told BK Nehru that the only effective way to deal with the forty million Indian Muslims would be to “Kill a few, drive out a few and convert the rest”, just as they had done to Hindus who remained in Pakistan.

Indians did not need to kill Indians. Pakistanis, not satisfied with the genocide of 1947, repeated it in 1971, killing millions of their own countrymen, both Hindus and Muslims, a massacre that led to the birth of Bangladesh. 1971 was the year in which Pakistan died.