Madhavan K. Palat on Nehru the Historian of Home and the World. Public lecture May 26, Jawahar Bhawan
Nehru was not a professional historian, but he composed four books of history to explain its importance. We may decide our future only if we can satisfy ourselves that the past has made it possible. The future he pursued was a united humanity, not one splintered into warring nations; logically, he began with a small work on the history of the earth and the evolution of the human species, the Letters from a Father to his Daughter; he followed it up with the Glimpses of World History, an enormous tome on how that species moved collectively from the Neolithic to the dawn of the nuclear age. Humanity moved in a real sense as one, not necessarily to any predestined goal, but with the growing capacity to shape a common destiny. Writing such a history was one way of heading to that objective.
The other future he dreamed of was for India as democratic, harmonious, and united, and he suggested in his Discovery of India that India had been blessed with democratic panchayats, a composite culture, and civilizational continuity from the Indus age to his day. With such a past, the future was secure. His Autobiography, published between these two great works, contributed to both theses substantially.
His other reason to study history was to imbibe lessons from the past. He accepted that this was impossible because the past did not repeat itself, and no two human situations are sufficiently alike to permit prediction as in experimental physics. However, it was also necessary because human societies exhibited certain regularities in action which, by his reckoning, admitted of a law-like claim that closure of the mind must lead to loss of creativity and decline. He pursued this thesis through the histories of Rome and Greece, the Abbasid Caliphate, Tang China, and ancient India among others, and the explanation never varied. Being an Indian nationalist, he was preoccupied with decline as he posed the question why India had succumbed to imperialism. He explained it through the two-fold thesis of industrialization in the West and mental rigidity in India.
His final question was whether the vigour of anti-colonial nationalism presaged the decline of the West. He did not fall for that nationalist fantasy and still less for the dystopic visions that gripped much of the western world in the first half of the 20th century. He suggested that the resurgence of the colonized world would repudiate imperialism and its fascist twin but work positively with the now chastened western world to forge a common and better future. Nationalism would unite and liberate, but it must be transcended in a larger endeavour. He concluded with his original purpose of uniting humanity by drawing together its collective creative impulses. He never claimed it was inevitable; but he argued that it was possible and worth attempting. In this monumental undertaking, historical consciousness as a single human species had a large and vital role to play.
Rabindranath
Tagore's essay on the cult of the nation
Purushottam Agrawal: Nehru's Spectacularly Indian Vision & the Wrath of the RSS
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya - Antinomies of
Nationalism and Rabindranath Tagore
Madhavan Palat lectures on Dostoevsky
Madhavan
Palat: Utopia and Dystopia in Revolutionary Russia
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Historian of
Decline and Prophet of Revival by Madhavan Palat
