The Importance of Being Jawaharlal, or the Nature of the Nehruvian State Benjamin Zachariah Anniversaries have a habit of confronting us with uncomfortable contrasts. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, would have been 125 years old this year; the state that Nehru saw through its first years of independence is now ruled by forces he found abhorrent: supporters of a narrow-minded, exclusionary definition of national belonging, accompanied by crude capitalist profiteering and a populist cultural chauvinism that can only be seen as ridiculous. Nehru was a socialist, an internationalist, and a defender of civil liberties in an age when most were willing to compromise on personal freedoms in the service of the state, leading a state and at the head of a successful nationalist movement with which he was often at odds. He was a most articulate head of government, an intellectual among mere statesmen. The Indian state of which he became Prime Minister attempted to some extent to maintain the internationalist ethos of the interwar years, an internationalism that was bound to suffer when placed in the hands of a national state. Nehru himself was an anti-nationalist. His formative years were those after the Russian Revolution and of the rise of fascism, and he did not live in an age where there was a choice between nationalism and internationalism: the fate of Republican Spain, Nehru told an audience at Trafalgar Square in London in 1938, was about to be the fate of the world. After that predicted fate had played itself out, the independence and partition of India was one of the outcomes. To what extent was Jawaharlal Nehru in control of, or even representative of, the period to which he lent his name? The ‘Nehruvian’ state was a compromise which was fronted by Nehru; it was inefficiently capitalist, fiercely nationalist and increasingly parochial despite its public rhetoric of socialism, internationalism, justice and tolerance. The Congress’s cautious leftism in the ‘Nehruvian period’ worked on something like the principle of vaccination: a dilute strand of what many in the Congress openly regarded as a disease, ‘socialism’, administered to the body politic, helped to prevent the disease itself from taking root. We can now remember Nehru as a self-reflexive intellectual explaining in rather elegant words the inadequacies of the state, of its policies, and its people, and we can relate to its radical hopefulness. And the question remains: what was the connection between Nehru and Nehruvianism? Jawaharlal Nehru was for a variety of reasons able disproportionately to influence the boundaries of what was legitimate and what was not in the independent Indian state. Nehru backed a modernist, centrist version of the state. He stood against a so-called ‘Gandhian’ insistence on the primacy of the village: economically, and in terms of the alleged self-government of an authentic community, this form of villagism emerged from the romantic anticapitalism of the nineteenth century. By the time it was being peddled in India as authentically Indian, it had degenerated into an indigenism which turned in upon itself and denied its own international origins.