Jawaharlal Nehru: Architect of Independent India

Jawaharlal Nehru

In March, 1919, India's Imperial Legislative Council passed the repressive legislation known as the Rowlatt Acts. The new laws continued the special wartime powers of the Defense of India Act, which had been intended to protect India against wartime agitators, and aimed them at India's nationalist movement.

At the time the Rowlatt Acts were put in place, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) was a prime example of the "brown Englishmen" that Thomas Babington Macauley had described as the goal of Western education in India. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he practised law with his father, the prominent barrister and nationalist leader Motilal Nehru, and enjoyed a lifestyle that was luxurious by both Indian and European standards. At his father's urging, Nehru had joined the Indian National Congress on his return from England in 1918 but at first his involvement in the nationalist movement was at best perfunctory.

That changed when Mohandas Gandhi called on Indians to "refuse civilly to obey" the newly passed Rowlatt Acts. In the Sikh city of Amritsar, Gandhi's call for a national day of work stoppage escalated into a spiral of arrest, protests and violence that ended in the massacre of thousands of Indians who had gather for a religious observance in a public park called Jallianwalah Bagh.

When Nehru overheard General R. H Dyer boasting about his role in the massacre,e he was outraged. He flung himself into the independence movement, touring rural India, organizing volunteers and making public speeches. It was then, he wrote in his autobiography, that "I experienced the thrill of mass feeling, the power of influencing the masses."

The British imprisoned Nehru for his nationalist activities for the first time in 1921. Arrested nine times, he spent 18 of the next 25 years in jail for his participation in Gandhi's non-violent non-cooperation (satyagraha) campaigns. He used his time in prison to study and write, transforming himself from a "brown Englishman" into an Indian scholar-politician. He practiced yoga, studied the Baghavat-Gita,* and replaced his suits and top hat with clothing made from khadi (homespun).

Gandhi handpicked Nehru as India's first prime minister, despite substantial differences in their vision of India's future. They agreed that poverty would be India's greatest challenge after independence, but disagreed on the solution. Gandhi looked to India's past for the answer, which he believed lay in self-sufficiency at the village level, with a spinning wheel in every hut. Nehru, whose exposure to what he described as "this vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India" had led him to the principles of Fabian socialism, looked for national self-sufficiency, based on "tractors and big machinery." When Gandhi accused Nehru of being unfaithful to his vision of a "harmonious village India", Nehru countered that he did "not understand why a village should necessarily embody truth and non-violence".

When India achieved independence from Great Britain in 1947, Nehru became its the first prime minister and minister for external affairs, a dual position he held until his death in 1964. He developed a policy of "positive neutrality" in regard to the Cold War, and served as a key spokesperson for the unaligned countries of Asia and Africa. He committed India to a policy of industrialization, a reorganization of its states on a linguistic basis, and the development of a casteless, secular state.

*And Marxist political theory.

Road Trip Through History: In Search of Roman Florence

When you're in the heart of Florence, it's hard to remember that anything happened there other than the Renaissance.  You can find the Etruscans in the nearby village of Fiesole.  Sienna is essentially a medieval town.  But Florence seems to be all Renaissance, all the time.

roman-amphitheater-in-florence

In fact, the city of Florentia was founded by the best known Roman of them all, Julius Caesar, in 59 BCE as a settlement for veterans of the Roman army.  It came to be an important stop on the trade route to the sea and a center of the Roman textile industry.  This stuff is not included in the guide books.

My Own True Love was determined to see something of Roman Florence and I was certainly willing.  After all, the Roman baths turned out to be one of my favorite  things in Bath, England—a city which is as closely aligned with the Georgian period as Florence is with the Renaissance.  Besides, at some level the Rnaissance was all about reconnecting with the classical past, right?

For the most part, the Roman past is a ghost in Florence. Built on the plan of a Roman military camp, the grid of the central streets, remains, though I will admit that is is not readily visible to someone who lives in Chicago, where the grid is absolutely clear.* The two major streets from the Roman era, the Via Roma and the Via Coros still cross where the city’s forum once stood.  The Via Proconsul, which takes its name from the title of a Roman official, follows the line of the now invisible Roman city wall.

It took some digging to find something concrete to look at.** The Palazzo Vecchio is in some ways a microcosm of Florentine history: Renaissance rooms in a medieval fortress built over a Roman theater.  The Palazzo itself is stunning, but we were on a quest.  We started with the Roman theater.  While I have my issues with audio tours, in this case I strongly suggest that you download the tour app at the top of the stairs before you enter the excavations.  We went through the excavations without it the first time and were frustrated by the general lack of signs and our own ignorance.  We went back upstairs, My Own True Love (who is less easily discouraged than I am) loaded the app on his phone, and went through the excavation again.  This time we understood what we were looking at and came away with a sense of the structure of the theater, its role in the Roman city, and a renewed appreciation for Roman engineering. ***

We later learned that you can see the ruins of an early Roman Christian church and an even older Roman home under the Duomo.  If we'd just gone down the stairs to the gift shop, we'd have been right there.  Maybe next time.

*Except where it isn’t.  Angled streets, rail yards and the river add elements of confusion.
**Literally and figuratively.  Concrete was one of Rome’s major contributions to world architecture, along with the arch and the vault.

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Moscow Nights

In 1958  the Cold War was at its height--or perhaps its depths.  Think Sputnik, Krushchev's overthrow of Stalin, backyard bomb shelters, and  bomb drills in schools.* Not to mention Elvis Presley's induction into the army--a Cold War weapon of a different kind.

Culture was as much of a battlefield as space.  In April, Soviet Russia hosted the first Tchaikovsky Competition: an international music competition designed to demonstrate Russia's cultural preeminence to the West. The competition was rigged. The Soviets had identified the Russian winners of the violin and piano competitions before the foreign contestants arrived. To everyone's amazement, a twenty-three year old pianist from Texas named Van Cliburn won over Russian audiences and Soviet judges with a lush playing style and a love of classical Russian music that rivaled their own. Popular pressure from Russian audiences in favor of Van Cliburn forced the Soviet judges—with Nikita Khrushchev's blessing—to award first prize to the Texas prodigy.

moscow-nightsIn Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story—How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War, historian Nigel Cliff brings to life Van Cliburn's unexpected triumph and its continuing implications for Soviet-American relations through the end of the Cold War.** Cliff sets the story of the competition firmly in its historical context of political paranoia on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and both Russian and American use of culture as a diplomatic weapon. At the same time, he never loses sight of the musician and the music at its heart: Cliff's Van Cliburn is eccentric, driven, politically innocent, big-hearted, and and wholly charming.

Moscow Nights is an engaging account of an extraordinary historical moment, best read with Van Cliburn's recording of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 playing in the background.

*By the time I reached grade school, we were carrying our chairs to the all purpose room to watch rocket launches and enduring occasional tornado drills based on the same principles as bomb drills.  Good times.

**A scene in the Reagan White House brought me close to tears.

The guts of this review first appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.

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