Nehru as Political Thinker
In 'Nehru and the Spirit of India', Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee outlines Nehru’s personal and political career with numerous references, most of which includes India's social and political developments before and after independence.
Nehru and the Spirit of India by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee significantly marks the renaissance of Nehru-scholarship in recent times. As an introduction to this seminal work, the short text in the inner flap of the cover begins with the sentence: “Jawaharlal Nehru was Plato’s philosopher king, who ‘discovered’ an India that remains an undiscovered possibility.” Bhattacharjee’s work illuminates an extraordinary perspective of Nehru’s political career, as is to be expected from any work of this genre. However, the focus of this work is on the genesis or sources of Nehru’s political thought and its evolution during the most turbulent period of India’s democratisation.
Bhattacharjee outlines Nehru’s personal and political career with numerous references, most of which includes India’s social and political developments before and after independence. For Nehru was one of the most dedicated freedom fighters whose life and impact extended not only to the long incubation of the freedom struggle in the first half of the 20th century, but also – and more importantly – to a considerably long post-independence phase in which, as India’s first prime minister, he played a decisive role in the construction of a free and democratic India until his death in 1964. Nonetheless, the leitmotif of this work by Bhattacharjee is not a conventional historical-political contextualisation of Nehru in the independence struggle and the post-independence politics of modernising India. Rather, it clearly highlights and establishes Nehru as a political thinker, whose influence far surpasses his life as a freedom fighter and later as a statesman and architect of modern India. The inundation of historical-political sketching of Nehru’s life so far seems to overshadow any examination of the genesis, sources as well as unfolding of his philosophical and political thought. Bhattacharjee attempts to contextualise Nehru’s influence as statesman-politician of post-independence India through his political thinking.
From this perspective, the fundamental problem that Nehru confronted throughout his life and in his political thinking about India – its history, traditions and cultural diversity – can be identified as the incessant reflection on ‘identity’, as Bhattacharjee convincingly points out and discusses in depth. The two important chapters in this work – The Citizen and the ‘Secular State Business’ and Culture and the ‘Urge towards Synthesis’ – refer to, even build on, this basic problematic, which, along with many other ethnically more homogeneous nations and civilisations on earth strangely engulfs India too. (Accordingly, the contrast between ethnic and civic nationalism, or national identity, constitutes an important point in this study). The sources of the radical polemic against the commonly thought ‘principle of identity’, which has been handed down in the history of philosophy, can be traced back to the foundations of Western philosophical logic. The part ‘I is not Identity’ in the chapter The Citizen and the ‘Secular State Business’ introduces the central polemic against the principle of identity within the theoretical-philosophical framework:
“Identity is not identical to itself.
In other words, we are not identical to our identity. Every identity is a secret: of being bit other to itself. Arthur Rimbaud famously declared in a letter written in 1871 to his friend and minor poet Paul Demeny – ‘I is other’. If I may extend the proposition: I is not identity. I is not identical to itself.
I is/am another – both as experience and possibility. You can’t fully claim to be just one thing, and not the other thing. Identity is not a definition, but a tendency.”
In philosophical logic, the proposition of identity is a fundamental principle that cannot be reduced as such. Therefore, the principle of identity is represented abstractly as A = A. As a fundamental principle of logic it cannot suffer any contradiction. In his major work, Phenomenology of Knowledge (Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis), philosopher Ernst Cassirer problematises afresh this irrefutable and irreducible proposition of identity in philosophical logic. Cassirer quotes the above-mentioned logical principle of identity, and asks: But what is A? It is clearly an ontological question that refers to the existential status of ‘A’ as a mere abstract entity. Cassirer’s polemic indicates that the logical principle of identity equates arbitrarily only the abstract entities with each other, which, as such, cannot ‘exist’. If A is a concrete entity – like a material thing – it becomes more difficult, even impossible, to equate A with A. This is because reality in concreteness is subject to the spatio-temporal framework, which transcends an abstract principle of identity. The prime example of this would be the famous dictum of Heraclitus – the pre-Socratic philosopher of ‘becoming and change’ – that the same river cannot be trodden twice. Even more ingenious is the extension of this Heraclitian observation by Cratylus that the same river cannot be trodden even once.
On the political level, this impossibility of the identity of the same entity in concretion could be expressed as follows: Absolute identity, which is not subject to a contradiction, is based on a mere abstract, i.e., an abstract idea of existence, and can therefore only be imagined within the framework of ‘ideal’ politics. In contrast, the concretion or concretisation of the abstract, on which ‘real’ politics is based, leads to an identity that is not an identity in itself, but an identity with the non-identical.
The non-identical or the ‘other’ in this principle of identity in concretion clearly states, as Bhattacharjee emphasises, that identity is not a definition but a tendency. In other words: Identity is not a final state or a finality that presupposes both the existential finality of the identical and its final knowability. The non-identical in identity generates a rather dynamic tendency towards identity that bursts every limit of definition – the finality of abstract ideas – to culminate in an infinity of cognition and knowability. In Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Emmanuel Levinas (a major 20th century philosopher, referred to several times in Bhattacharjee’s work) points to the infinity of the face of the other – in its exteriority and knowability. The infinity of the face, which always prevents a final or definable cognisability of the other, seems to suggest here an infinite tendency towards identity with the other. Another prime example from the history of philosophy, in which such an infinite-processual tendency towards identity comes to light, would be the doctrine of concidentia oppositorum by Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa), a prominent Neo-Platonist of the late Middle Ages. In this doctrine of Cusanus, a static and final identity of the same is imagined through an infinite tendency of even opposite entities to coincidence or identity in oneness. In his major works De docta ignorantia and De coniecturis, Cusanus shows the infinite tendency of opposites to coincide in the identical by means of a few geometrical thought experiments. Eg: the curved periphery of an infinitely enlarging circle that tends infinitely towards an identity with the linear tangent.
In this way, the proposition of identity, on which the history of philosophical, mathematical and scientific logic and the human sciences – such as politics, sociology, ethnology, etc. – have been built, was already questioned in classical antiquity and medieval Neo-Platonism. Modernity, as we know, is confronted with problems and anomalies that the long-established notion of identity has prompted to emerge in history, as Bhattacharjee convincingly discusses. The most significant of these problems would be the myth of totality, which results in the rather ideal and abstractly imagined homogeneous identity: “Since identity is not identical to itself, it is also not identical to totality. That is why identity politics breaks the norm of (majoritarian) consensus.”
This clearly suggests that majoritarian politics – or politics of totality – arises from an inadequate, even flawed, notion of absolute identity. The cultural-political ‘other’ excluded from the national, majoritarian identity, as represented particularly in the state’s predetermination of citizenship, is based on a false notion of identity in its abstract finality. Identity as a tendency therefore accommodates the other in the identical, which is not imagined in mere abstraction, but experienced as real and concrete.
The problem of identity appears at various points in Bhattacharjee’s work in different contexts. One of them is Paradoxes of Identity, discussed in the chapter The Citizen and the Secular State of Business. The paradoxes of identity are based on the above-mentioned contradictory fact that the “I” is not identical with the same, that the very principle of identity transcends the oneness and presupposes the ‘other’. To introduce and explicate this paradox, Bhattacharjee quotes the Spanish poet Antonio Machado who emphasises the inevitable persistence of the other:
“The other does not exist: this is rational faith, the incurable belief of human reason. Identity=Reality, as if, in the end, everything must necessarily and absolutely be one and the same. But the other refuses to disappear; it subsists, it persists, it is the hard bone on which reason breaks its teeth.”
This discourse leads to one of the most important findings in Bhattacharjee’s study, that the common and prevailing principle of identity, namely the identity of the self or subject with itself, nurtures the majoritarianism or totalitarianism of the ‘majority’: “Majoritarianism is identity that identifies itself completely with totality.” However, the ‘minorities’ are hardly exempt from such totalitarianism of majoritarianism as long as they ethnically and religiously ‘identify’ with themselves on the basis of the common or conventional identity principle. This clearly points to a paradox of identity. Bhattacharjee observes that Nehru’s own identity was hardly liberated from the paradoxes of identity. “Identity also creates paradoxes. Nehru’s own identity was no exception”.
As is well known, Nehru was accused of non-belonging, i.e., the identity of the ‘other’ or even foreigner by the Hindu majoritarianism, especially propagated by the Hindu Mahasabha, because of his Western education and Persian heritage. The intrinsic otherness or foreignness, as Bhattacharjee observes, contributes to or enhances the ‘identity’ in Indian history and politics. For, “identity breaks all ideas of oneness into two”. Moreover, Persia has been an integral factum of Indian culture for millennia, inherent and persistent in languages and in various facets of Indian traditions and everyday life. This seems to suggest that identity also goes beyond twoness – as I and other – to build on many layers of ‘identities’ represented in historical ‘heritages’ and cultural practices. Identity incorporates several particulars within itself, but they hardly constitute a universal, i.e., a universal idea. “Identity is not universal”.
At this point, the old philosophical problem, namely the nature of the belonging or participation of the particular in the universal, seems to reappear. In real politics, the particular refers to all individual identities, which in principle cannot be subsumed under a unified universal, i.e., the whole. In the real-political framework, such universals tacitly lead to totalitarianism. For the whole here, even though it gives the appearance of unity and universality, ultimately implies the totality under which the individual identities are buried. The particular identities are clearly all other groups of peoples who are outside the majority or majoritarian identity, such as Dalits, religious minorities, migrants, and so on. How should the particular participate as a part in the whole that seemingly forms a general identity? If identity is neither unitary nor universal (as Bhattacharjee points out), the participation of particular parts in a general whole proves to be problematic, as it leads to a hierarchical order in which the particulars are subordinated to the general or universal. The problem of the participation of particulars or particular parts in the idea of the whole was famously introduced and discussed in detail in Parmenides, one of Plato’s middle dialogues. Interestingly, this dialectical attempt for a solution ends in a hopeless riddle, i.e., characteristically in aporia.[footntoe]Plato: Parmenides, in: Plato. Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, p. 366 (132a-b)[/footnote] The participation of the particular parts in the idea of the whole, which found no solution in Platonic philosophy, seems to resurface after two millennia. The independence struggle in the early decades of the 20th century also witnessed constitutional debates on the belongingness and autonomy of the minorities and the marginalised Dalits in their participation in the ‘whole’, which clearly points to a totalitarian identity. In the Bombay Legislative Assembly held on October 27, 1939, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, author of the Indian Democratic Constitution, was to polemicise fiercely against the hierarchical subsumption of the particular sections of the population, especially Dalits, under a majoritarian identity, while arguing passionately for the autonomy of the ‘parts’ that signify the autonomy and sovereignty of the historically oppressed Dalits. In the real-political framework, the ancient Platonic aporia resurfaces when Ambedkar establishes the parts not as mere particulars participating in an overarching whole, but as “part apart” or parts in their existential autonomy and sovereignty. Bhattacharjee excellently explicates how this historically persistent aporia – of the participation of the parts in the whole – can emerge from the universalization of identity by means of unification and logification. Here, the real is not congruent with the speculative logical-ideal:
When B.G. Kher argued with Ambedkar that he can’t hold that the depressed classes have ‘precedence’ over the country as ‘the part can never be greater than the whole’, the latter replied, ‘I am not a part of the whole; I am a part apart.’ Ambedkar makes the point brilliantly that if the significance of the whole lies in being whole, the significance of the part in being a/part. The subtractive is as crucial for the whole as the additive. It is only through twoness that oneness is established.
However, Nehru was socio-politically obsessed with the idea of unity, which, as Bhattacharjee observes, explicates his fundamental inclination towards totality. Nehru was sceptical of the majoritarian tendency of minorities, which in turn arises from the prevailing notion of identity. After all, Nehru passionately pleaded for “unity” or “unity in diversity”, wherein a tendency to “secular majoritarianism” can be discerned, as Bhattacharjee diagnoses it. It is interesting to note here that it is actually the legitimate reversal of this famous motto of modern Indian democracy – in a theoretical-philosophical framework – that best corresponds to the above-discussed intrinsic heterogeneity of identity. Accordingly, the basic “democratic” notion of “unity in diversity” can be turned around into the notion of “diversity in unity”, which privileges diversity as a precondition of unity and can also dignify and legitimise the paradoxes of Identity outlined above.
The twoness or multi-layeredness inherent in identity also explains the ambivalence in belonging to a culture that embodies a heterogeneous genesis and historicity. Cultural belonging emerges from a complex constellation of predetermined and chosen sources:
Nehru believed in a rationalist self (with an ‘anchor of precise objective knowledge tested by reason’). When it comes to his cultural identity, the question of belonging is inevitably paramount. Belonging is not a matter of choice. In Nehru’s case it is partly already chosen by his ancestry. Nehru can’t free himself, as he wrote, from ‘past inheritance or my recent acquisitions’. Identity is a paradox and just like modernity, it is a matter of interpretation. They are both narratives of experience and imagination.
If ambivalent affiliations underlie Nehru’s cultural and political outsiderness, they also formed a legitimate background, justified by the heterogeneity and paradoxes inherent in identity itself. The outsider or outsider identity that always accompanied Nehru in his life and politics, and from which he could not detach himself, has in the present become an accusation of his cultural and political non-belonging. Bhattacharjee quotes from An Autobiography a famous confession of Nehru, in which he expresses his diremption or state of being torn between East and West as well as his incessant foreignness and exile in both cultural spaces:
I often wonder if I represent anyone at all … I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere. Perhaps my thoughts and approach to life are more akin to what is called Western than Eastern, but India clings to me, as she does to all her children, in innumerable ways … I can not get rid of either that past inheritance or my recent acquisitions … They create in me a spiritual loneliness not only in public activities but in life itself. I am a stranger and alien in the West … But in my own country also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.
With appropriate references, Bhattacharjee shows the ambivalence in Nehru’s sense of identity as unheimlich (uncanny) or being homeless in the consciousness of a double modernity:
Nehru emerges as a man of double modernity. This doubleness of identity across two or more cultures makes Nehru an exemplary figure. The relationship with Europe would have been modern in an intellectual but not experiential way. Nehru did not have to go through any crisis vis-à-vis Christianity. In India, however, Nehru’s identity mirrored an impressive heterogeneity. (…) The man who lived a double modernity suffered in his own admission – a sense of cultural homelessness that we may describe as spiritual unheimlich.
Paradoxically, if Nehru is accused of cultural disaffiliation because of this intrinsic and cultivated outsiderness in life and politics, he is now consolidating more and more his cultural and political belonging – not merely in the Indian but in the universal framework of democracy – as Bhattacharjee’s investigation seems to imply. To be sure, political and cultural identity and belonging prima facie presuppose cultural and political insidership which is structurally more or less homogeneous. In politics, everyone strives to become an insider. One may ask, whether being a cultural-political outsider even has an identity and belonging that the culture and politics of a nation would require? Which central role can a cultural-political outsider play in real politics? Apparently, the disinterest in power as determined by Plato clearly points to a certain outsider-status of the statesman and hence to the legitimacy of his political existence and cultural belonging. For political insiders are commonly characterised by an incessant interest in political power.
Apart from Plato’s legitimisation, this exceptional status and identity of the outsider seems to have some positive effects in real politics. It is ultimately the political insider who is excluded of a homogeneous political identity and belonging. In contrast, a cultural and political outsider cannot be excluded from cultural belonging or politics. For it is a logical impossibility that an outsider, who is already outside a system, will be excluded again. As is known, it is rather from an outsider’s perspective, which requires a universal rather than a national point of view, that a nation, i.e., its cultural past and present legitimacy in world politics is better understood than an insider’s perspective which cannot free itself from the deceptive spell of particularism. Moreover, any strategic endeavour to culturally and politically exclude an outsider – who, in certain sense, is closer to Plato’s statesman – could lead to a contradictory or dialectical outcome that the outsider becomes more and more an insider. This is astonishingly evidenced in our present time by the ever-increasing studies on Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru and his unparalleled historical-political impact and relevance, to which Bhattacharjee’s work contributes significantly.
Nehru, however, was not uninterested in political power, the maintenance of which he considered a responsibility in the first place. This also corresponds to his statesmanlike status – as Plato defines it. The interest in power from a statesman’s point of view unfolded in Nehru as a continuation of his quest for the discovery of a nation and civilisation – a quest which Nehru maintained throughout his life and which also constituted an important and highly distinctive chapter in his Discovery of India. This quest now seems to have been dimensioned by some of the facts highlighted by Bhattacharjee, namely Nehru’s cultural-political outsidership and fragmentary stance over history, heritages, identities, traditions and modernity. In the common philosophical sense, the quest – like the Cartesian ‘method’ – is directed towards unified and irreducible (as such final) knowledge. Nehru sought the unity of Indian culture in all its diversity and fragmentation. However, the heterogeneity and complexity of identity prompted Nehru’s quest to be always accompanied by the awareness and conviction that his quest for historical and cultural sources and geneses of a nation does not meet with a finality, that Indian culture always hides something as it is discovered more and more. Such a quest rather guides one to identify a heterogeneous base for surfacing unity and continuity. Even the ‘garb of modernity’ that is usually seen as the result of the colonial history of India (and with which Bhattacharjee begins his work) seems to have a much longer incubation in the complexity and heterogeneity of history and cultural identity. When the German writer Hubert Fichte considers history as strata (admittedly on the basis of the etymological potential of German language: “Schichten statt Geschichten”), this reinterpretation seems to correspond to Nehru’s quest for a yet-to-be-discovered history and culture of India. An important feature of this seminal work by Bhattacharjee is the profound examination of Nehru’s fateful encounter with history – in general and Indian history in particular – as discussed in the last chapters: Culture and the Urge towards Synthesis and History and the ‘Roots of the Present’. The problem of identity seems to unfold most significantly in this encounter which, therefore, demands an in-depth analysis.
Babu Thaliath is Professor and Chairperson, Centre of German Studies, School of Language, Literature & Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.