Jawaharlal Nehru: A Communicator and Democratic Leader

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Jawaharlal Nehru: A Communicator and Democratic Leader explores multiple facets of Nehru's experiments in communication as a speaker, writer and formulator of policy as a part of the Congress. In all this, we find, he is affectionately influenced by Gandhi; but, he remains himself, in his style, his attitude to socialism and secularism, his excitement about science and his urge to communicate his own anguish at the tragic divisions of the modern era as well as his hopes of a better world to the younger generation in his country. Simultaneously he discovers within himself a remarkable capacity to convey all this and much more through the written word-articles, dispatches, addresses and, most of all, books.
With a Foreword by Rudrangshu Mukherjee for this reissue, this book addresses a dimension of the personality of the first prime minister of India which still does not receive adequate attention. How a shy, if not inarticulate, public speaker became the destiny of the millions is an exciting story. In studying Nehru as an effective communicator, other facets of his interaction with people-his peers, his critics and his friends all over the world necessarily come into the ambit of this work, most important of all is relationship with Gandhi. This book therefore, ventures beyond communication to narrate the whole story of his evolution as a political activist, later to be crowned with success as a major statesman of the twentieth century.

A.K. Damodaran (1921-2012) studied at the universities of Madras and Lucknow. He took part in the Quit India movement and was imprisoned in Cochin state from 1942 to 1943. A member of the Indian Foreign Service (1953-80), he served as India's ambassador to Sweden and Italy. He also taught English literature in various colleges in the University of Delhi and international relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was co-editor of Indian Foreign Policy: The Indira Gandhi Years and three collections of V.K. Krishna Menon's speeches at the United Nations.

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU CURRENTLY is caught between hagiography and utter denigration. This is not a situation he would have enjoyed. He would have wanted, as an eager student of history, a sober evaluation of himself as a human being, as a political leader, as a writer and as India's first prime minister. There was a time, not too long ago, when writers were trying to form such an estimate of him by placing him in a given historical context. Today, his direct descendants claim him by retaining control over some of his papers and his critics trace everything that is wrong in India today to his prime ministership. In this atmosphere which is not conducive to a proper historical analysis, it is pertinent to have a reprint of this book by A.K. Damodaran.
Damodaran was a member of the Indian Foreign Service who subsequently became an academic. It was in the academic period of his life that he wrote this book which is based on his researches on the Nehru papers archived in the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library in Delhi. The book claims to have a very definite focus which is indicated in the subtitle. Nehru as communicator and as a democratic leader are integrally related. Nehru emerged as a democratic leader as he acquired the art and the skill of communication; and one of the ways he sustained his position as one of India's leading democratic leaders was through his communication, oral and written.

WHEN I WAS OFFERED by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in 1986 the Chalapathi Rau Fellowship to do research on Jawaharlal Nehru as a communicator I was delighted. To the people of my generation who grew up in the thirties, Nehru was the first communicator to whom we responded with ease. It would be, therefore, a most interesting task to analyse the factors which made him one of the more interesting political communicators of the twentieth century.
And, so, I embarked on the job and over the months it possessed me. I had made a sort of informal contract with myself that I would limit my sources as far as possible to Nehru's own writings at the risk of sometimes eschewing even relevant contemporary comments. In my view this book was going to be the record of a conversation with a remarkable individual who had, over the decades, written and spoken a lot about the Indian national movement, Mahatma Gandhi, world history and the excitements and anguish of international relations.
Fairly soon, however, I discovered that there was going to be inevitably an exception to this self-denying ordinance. Gandhi was this exception. Very early in my work I discovered that I would be able to understand Nehru better as revealed in his Selected Works if I went back to Gandhi's Collected Works of the same period. Nehru became an increasingly confident and articulate political activist precisely at the time when Gandhi assumed the leadership of Congress after his return from South Africa and his study of the domestic situation in India. During most crisis points it became my habit to go back to Gandhi to understand Nehru better.