A HOUSE FOR MR NEHRU
ISWUNG BY ANAND BHAWAN LAST Monday, preparing myself to write about Gitanjali Surendran’s “intimate history” thereof. Since it was both a Monday and a public holiday—Eid-ulZuha—the gates were securely locked, so I had no option but to stare at the unabashedly stylish, stately abode of the Nehrus from a distance. It is a tricky business, writing an intimate history of a monument—finding the right balance between intimacy and monumentality, doing close-up and long-shot, simultaneously. Surendran solves (or maybe evades) the problem by writing mainly about the fascinating lives that were lived here. Of course, this creates problems of its own—the intersections of domestic and public history. But there is no getting away from those if one has undertaken to write about people who were—love ’em or hate ’em—larger than life. Through the interweaving lives of the Family and their distinguished Friends, Surendran paints a picture of a heroic age fading faster than one could have imagined. The black-and-white photographs assembled from the jealously guarded collection of the Nehru Memorial Trust are a fitting complement to this history. I am somewhat baffled by the air of innocence that the mere absence of colour confers on these figures who were, after all, enmeshed in—and so soiled by—history. But I can’t help noticing that this relative “modesty” is a welcome counterpoint to the raucous, technicolour present.
Surendran’s text does not broach the question of the beleaguered Nehruvian legacy and it is, perhaps, just as well. The ‘intimacy’ of her project makes it possible to hold to a mainly ‘domestic’ perspective, despite the scale of the figures who inhabit this history, and the epic events happening barely off-stage—Gandhi’s call for Non-cooperation, the Salt Satya
graha, Quit India. The domestic details—the high teas and the horses—can barely manage to hold in check the public and historical matters that are practically woven into the fabric of these lives.
Surendran acknowledges that Anand Bhawan is more than a house—it represents an “idea and not just a place”. And this sentiment is echoed on a tablet on the rough, undressed rock that stands at the head of the drive leading to the great house—more than a structure, it affirms, Anand Bhawan is a symbol of the struggle for freedom. Any consideration of the afterlife of that ‘idea’—the fate of the Nehruvian vision, of freedom and, even, democracy—in an increasingly Sanghi India in which Nehru is the all-purpose villain of choice, would have crippled the ‘intimate history’.
A mere review can hardly hope to do more, but something happened on my way to the monument. Almost directly opposite the Anand Bhawan gate, there is a newlyinaugurated monument—a massive statue of the sage Bharadwaj—in the style that might be identified as Gurugram Grotesque. It is part of the ‘beautification’ that was inflicted on the city of Allahabad—perhaps as part of its being renamed Prayagraj. Legend has it that Bharadwaj had an ashram on the site and that Rama and his party stopped here on their way from Ayodhya—and in a country in which ‘faith’ can count as evidence, who can deny any of it?
Now, the 50-foot Bharadwaj stares at a slab of undressed rock and while the latter implies a recognition of the symbolic function, allowing a rock to tell of that for which mere words, mere images, are insufficient, the former is a good example of the infantile literalism that characterises ‘New India’—size is the only way of conveying significance. Mine’s bigger than yours. After all, since Patel is 200 metres tall, we have been promised a Rama who will be even taller. Mercifully, Bharadwaj is only sitting, not standing tall and demanding what the nation needs to know, but there is enough there to suggest the questions that Surendran, discreetly, declines. ■