Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru

Author:Jawaharlal Nehru [Nehru, Jawaharlal]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9789385990069
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2004-05-07T04:30:00+00:00

125

Imperialism and Nationalism in Persia

January 21, 1933

You are entitled to have a grievance against me. I have given you sufficient provocation by rushing backwards and forwards in the various corridors of history. After having reached, by many different routes, the nineteenth century, I have suddenly taken you back a few thousand years and jumped about from Egypt to India and China and Persia. This must be aggravating and confusing, and I have no good answer to the protest which I can almost hear you making. The reading of M. René Grousset’s books suddenly started many lines of thought in my head, and I could not help sharing some of them with you. I felt also that I had neglected Persia in these letters, and I wanted to make some reparation for this omission. And now that we have been considering Persia, we might as well carry on her story to modern times.

I have told you of the old traditions and high accomplishments of Persian culture, of the golden age of Persian art, and so on and so forth. On looking at these phrases again, the language seems rather flowery and somewhat misleading. One might almost think that a real golden age had come to the people of Persia, and their miseries vanished away and they lived happily, like people in fairy-tales. Of course no such thing happened. Culture and art in those days, as even now to a large extent, were the monopoly of a few; the masses, the average person, had nothing to do with them. The life of the masses, indeed, from the earliest days, has been a constant struggle for food and the necessaries of life; it has not differed greatly from the life of the animals. They had no time or leisure for anything else; sufficient and more than sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof; how could they think or appreciate art and culture? Art flourished in Persia and India and China and Italy and the other countries of Europe as a pastime for the Courts and the rich and leisured classes. Only religious art to some extent touched the life of the masses.

But an artistic Court did not signify good government; rulers who prided themselves on their patronage of art and literature were often enough incompetent and cruel as rulers. The whole system of society in Persia, as in most other countries at the time, was more or less feudal. Strong kings became popular because they stopped many of the petty exactions of the feudal lords. There were periods of relatively good rule and other periods of thoroughly bad rule.

Just when Moghal rule was in its last stages in India, the Safavi dynasty came to an end, about 1725. As usual, the dynasty had played itself out. Feudalism was gradually breaking up, and economic changes were going on in the country, upsetting the old order. Heavy taxation made matters worse, and discontent spread among the people. The Afghans, who were then under the

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