Nehru by Walter Crocker

Author:Walter Crocker [Crocker, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184002133
Publisher: Random House India
Published: 2012-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

The Man

During my years in India I kept a collection of photographs of Nehru taken from the Indian press. The day was infrequent when some newspaper or other did not publish one. The photographs are a revelation of his many sides and many moods. They leave no doubt that in any discussion on him the first question to be disposed of is: Which Nehru are you talking about? Is it the internationalist with hankerings after pacificism? or Nehru the planner of the Goa takeover? or the Nehru who made the moving speech on Gandhi’s assassination? or the Nehru who risked his life when the Hindu mob fell on the Muslims in 1948? or the agnostic Nehru who was drawn to Buddhism? or the revolutionary in a hurry? or Nehru the wily politician? or Nehru the connoisseur of poetry and roses? His variousness was also reflected in the variety of people he was happy to give his time to—scientists, writers, artists, actors, social workers, and certain men of religion, as well as the administrators, politicians and soldiers native to a political leader’s world. There were two men in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; there were more like twenty in Nehru.

Of at least one thing, then, can we be certain: Nehru was complicated—even more than the average man, who is complicated enough. He was divided within himself as few men could be who at the same time retain overriding purpose and essential balance. It is because of this complexity that one cannot be sure of having penetrated to the core of his motivation in any particular action or policy, let alone to the core of the man himself. There is more than one passage in his life which is still to be explained.

And we can be certain of another thing. Politics was far from being the whole world of Nehru; which it is of many, if not of most, ruling men.

Aesthetic

The dominant impression left on a person meeting Nehru for the first time would be aesthetic—his elegance. He was always well dressed, not foppishly but in good material, cut well, worn well, and usually adorned with a rosebud in his buttonhole; the whole matching his good looks and the grace with which he bore himself. Up until the last year or two, when his health was failing, there was little of the old man about him. He never got slovenly. The elegance was more than just clothes; more even than the good breeding which was an inseparable part of him. At times his face took on an expression which got near to beauty; the kind of expression sometimes seen on the face of Yehudi Menuhin98 (for whom Nehru had regard) or in portraits of Cardinal Newman99 or the young Dickens. The clothes were an expression of an internal elegance—an absence of all coarseness. It was not for nothing that one of his severest animadversions was ‘vulgar’.

Nehru arrived at Bandung for the first Afro-Asian Conference in 1955 after a long tiring motor journey under an equatorial sun.

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