Remembering Nehru and Non-Alignment in some Postcolonial Indian and French Texts

Résumé En

For readers of Indian history, Nehru was the champion of anticolonialism, the architect of modern India, the ideologue of a mixed economy at the service of social justice, the Pandit from Kashmir, the purveyor of Panch Sheel, the disillusioned Prime Minister who had unwittingly initiated a dynastic democracy by relying on his daughter Indira after the death of his wife Kamala. It is customary for scholars to discuss Nehru by contrasting his ideas with those of Gandhi or his rivals Subbash Chandra Bose and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Nehru's relationship with Ambedkar was rather ambiguous. This purpose of this article is to try and see how Nehru is remembered in Indian English fiction (Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, 1981; Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel, 1989 and his Nehru: The Invention of India, 2003), French fiction (Catherine Clément's Pour l'amour de l'Inde, 1993) and Yin Marsh's autobiography Doing Time with Nehru: The Story of an Indian Chinese Family (2016). Relying on Nehru's own writings, Ramachandra Guha's Makers of Modern India and Nayantara Sahgal's Nehru's India as counter texts, it looks at how in the memorialization of Nehru, his oft-quoted "Tryst with destiny" speech becomes a matrix for fictional creation, how his idea of India as palimpsest shapes the story of the nation and how the national bio-icon is sometimes downsized to a novelistic persona. By examining the plural narratives about Nehru, the article retraces the evolution of India as a nation-state in the face of the ideological shifts of the 20th Century.