Jawaharlal Nehru

On 13 December 1946 Jawaharlal Nehru rose in the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi to move the resolution that would set the aims of independent India's constitution. It promised its citizens "freedom of thought, expression, belief, faith, worship, vocation, association and action, subject to law and public morality." It did not mention God. Five weeks later a Jesuit member, the Reverend Jerome D'Souza, rose to say: "I cannot help expressing a regret, Sir, that the name of Almighty God finds no place in this momentous declaration." He added that he understood why the mover had avoided anything that might look like a religious profession.¹²

Nehru had set out his own position on religion a decade earlier, in an autobiography written in prison. This chapter asks how a boy initiated into Theosophy by Annie Besant became the agnostic who led the world's most religious democracy, and how he kept his own unbelief and the state's neutrality apart.

A woman's affair

He was born in Allahabad at half past eleven at night on 14 November 1889, into a Kashmiri Brahmin family; his father, Motilal Nehru, was a prosperous lawyer.³⁴ Motilal had refused the purification ceremony expected of a Brahmin returning from Europe, splitting his community, and lived, his biographer Sarvepalli Gopal writes, like an English gentleman.⁵ In the Autobiography Nehru remembered that he had very hazy notions of religion as a boy, and that it seemed to him a woman's affair: his father and older cousins treated it with humour, while his mother and aunt kept the household's festivals, temple visits and dips in the Ganges and told him the old epics.⁶⁷ In the year of his birth, his biographer Frank Moraes notes, the atheist Charles Bradlaugh addressed the Indian National Congress in Bombay.⁸

Theosophy at thirteen

When he was about eleven a resident tutor arrived, Ferdinand Brooks, an Irish-French Theosophist recommended to his father by Annie Besant. Brooks gave him a love of reading and a small laboratory for physics and chemistry, and held weekly Theosophical meetings in his rooms on reincarnation, astral bodies, karma, Blavatsky and the Upanishads. For the first time, Nehru wrote, he began to think consciously about religion and other worlds.^9101112 Besant lectured in Allahabad and moved him deeply; at thirteen he asked his father's permission to join the Theosophical Society, and Motilal, who had joined and dropped out years before, laughingly agreed. Besant herself performed the initiation, with good advice and some mysterious signs that Nehru later took for a relic of freemasonry, and he went on to the Theosophical Convention at Benares, where he saw Colonel Olcott with his fine beard.¹³¹⁴¹⁵ Looking back, he thought he had worn in those days the flat, insipid look of piety and the smugness of one of the elect.¹⁶ Those Theosophical years, about 1902 to 1904, are where the timeline places his faith, and they were the only avowed belief of his life.

A fading

It did not end in a crisis. Soon after Brooks left, Nehru wrote, he lost touch with Theosophy, and, partly because he went to school in England, it left his life completely in a remarkably short time. He kept a debt to Brooks and a warm admiration for Besant.¹⁷ Moraes reads it differently: not a flaw in the doctrines but the impractical and self-regarding manner of its devotees.¹⁷ At Harrow, from 1905, his interests were politics and aeroplanes, not religion.¹⁸¹⁹ At Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1907, he read natural sciences, Nietzsche and Shaw, and drifted into what he called a vague kind of cyrenaicism; not having the religious temper, he wrote, it was natural to seek some other standard.²⁰²¹ A Trinity man, Edwin Montagu, gave him what he called the modern definition of faith: to believe in something your reason tells you cannot be true.²² On the timeline, his doubt is therefore a range, about 1904 to 1910, because the boy's belief faded rather than broke, and the young man's scientific assurance grew up in its place.²³

Gandhi

Accounts differ on how complete the fading was. In 1922, in Lucknow jail, he read the Koran, Arnold's Light of Asia and Besant's translation of the Gita, and Gopal judged him at that date still basically an unthinking, conventional Hindu theist.²⁴ What sharpened him was Gandhi. He first met him at the Lucknow Congress at Christmas 1916, and through the 1920s watched him lay continual stress on the religious side of the national movement.²⁵²⁶ Gandhi put it plainly in his own autobiography in 1929: "those, who say that religion has nothing to do with politics, do not know what religion means."²⁷²⁸ Motilal wrote to his son that he could not follow Gandhi's politico-religious philosophy beyond a certain point.²⁹

In September 1932, in jail, Nehru heard that Gandhi had begun a fast unto death over separate electorates for the untouchable castes. He felt angry, he wrote, at Gandhi's religious and sentimental approach to a political question and his frequent references to God, and he wired that he could not judge from a religious point of view. Gandhi's fast of May 1933 seemed to him sheer revivalism, against which clear thinking had no chance, and he felt himself drifting further and further from Gandhi in mind, despite his strong emotional attachment.³⁰³¹³²

"What is Religion?"

Between June 1934 and February 1935, in prison, he wrote An Autobiography, published in 1936, to trace, as he said, his own mental development.³³ Its chapter "What is Religion?" is where the timeline places his declaration. The spectacle of organised religion in India and elsewhere, he wrote, had filled him with horror, because it stood for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation; and yet he knew it answered some deep inner craving. Others might find a harbour in it. He preferred the open sea, with its storms. He was not much interested in an afterlife; this life was enough to fill his mind.³⁴ He proposed dropping the word "religion" altogether in favour of philosophy, ethics or spirituality, and ended by saying that, on the French writer Romain Rolland's terms, he would be a humble camp-follower of what Rolland called the Grand Army of the religious soul.³⁵ Gandhi, he thought, used the word religion in a sense more moral than doctrinal.³⁶ He also knew that in Hinduism one could profess atheism, as the old philosopher Charvaka had, without ceasing to be a Hindu, and that he himself, born a Brahman, seemed to remain one whatever he said or did.³⁷

Others gave him the labels he would not give himself. Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary after meeting him in 1938 that he was an agnostic in respect of man's relation to the universe.³⁸ In 1940 a Delhi Muslim monthly called him one of the atheists who would not swear in the name of God, and in the same breath accused him of being a staunch Hindu whenever temples were at stake.³⁹⁴⁰

I do not know

In 1944, in Ahmadnagar Fort prison, he wrote The Discovery of India. He restated his position more quietly. Religion as he had seen it practised, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist or Christian, did not attract him: too much superstition, dogma and reliance on the supernatural, though it had given people moral values and an inner need he respected.⁴¹⁴²⁴³ He was interested, he wrote, in this world and this life. Whether there was a soul or a life after death he did not know, and the question did not trouble him. There was a mystery, but he would not call it God, because the word had come to mean too much he did not believe in; the idea of a personal God seemed very odd to him. He could feel at home in an old Indian or Greek pagan and pantheistic mood, without any gods.⁴⁴⁴⁵ What drew him was an ethical approach to life, and Gandhi's stress on right means.⁴⁶ Gandhi, he now wrote, was essentially a man of religion, a Hindu to the depths of his being, but of a religion with nothing to do with dogma or ritual.⁴⁷ These pages of 1944, and the political choices that followed, mark the revision on his timeline, which was not a change of mind but a softening of tone.

A secular state

As Prime Minister he kept his own agnosticism and the state's neutrality apart, but his decisions show the same mind. When President Rajendra Prasad objected on astrological grounds to 26 January 1950 as the date for inaugurating the Republic, Nehru replied that he had no faith in astrology and would not fix national programmes by astrologers.⁴⁸ In 1951 Prasad insisted, against his advice, on inaugurating the rebuilt Somnath temple; Nehru thought it contrary to secularism but did not veto it, and made clear that his government had no part in it.⁴⁹ As president of the Congress that autumn he vowed to fight to his last breath anyone who struck down another on the ground of religion.⁵⁰ The word "secular" itself entered India's constitution only in 1976, after his death.⁵¹

His biographer Gopal sums him up: not a religious person, with no spiritual beliefs or consolations, always a mild agnostic, proud of his pagan outlook on life.⁵² He died in Delhi on 27 May 1964 and was cremated at Shantivan on the Yamuna.⁵³ A will in which he is reported to have asked for no religious ceremonies is quoted widely, but its text could not be checked for this chapter.⁵⁴

Annie Besant, who initiated him into Theosophy at thirteen, after her own journey from atheism with Bradlaugh to the occult, has her own chapter in this book.