A Young Nation's Selfhood

Nehru understood that the newly independent nation was the contradictory whole of many contradicting selves

- Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee

IN an article he wrote for Time magazine in 2001, reflecting on fifty years of India’s independence, Salman Rushdie connected the “so-called idea of India” to the modern Indian self, through a string of paradoxes: “In the modern age, we have come to understand our own selves as composites, often contradictory, even internally incompatible. We have understood that each of us is many different people. Our younger selves differ from our older selves; we can be bold in the company of our lovers and timorous before our employers, principled when we instruct our children and corrupt when offered some secret temptation; we are serious and frivolous, loud and quiet, aggressive and easily abashed. The 19th-century concept of the integrated self has been replaced by this jostling crowd of ‘I’s. And yet, unless we are damaged, or deranged, we usually have a relatively clear sense of who we are. I agree with my many selves to call all of them ‘me.’”

Reading this article in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) library, a year before submitting my PhD thesis on Nehru and Gandhi, I detected a Nehruvian echo in Rushdie’s evocative passage. We can make an analogous connection between Rushdie’s description of “selves” and what Nehru describes as the nation in this passage from the ‘Epilogue’ to The Discovery of