BOOKWATCH
Slice of history
By Anita Joshua
A Bunch of Old Letters: Being Mostly Written to Jawaharlal Nehru and Some Written by Him, selected and edited by Jawaharlal Nehru with an introduction by Sunil Khilnani, Viking, Rs. 750.
NEARLY half a century after it was first published, Penguin has just re-run A Bunch of Old Letters: Being Mostly Written to Jawaharlal Nehru and Some Written by Him. And, by sheer chance, this collection — which includes about half-a-dozen letters between Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah — hit the stands at a time when India witnessed a debate on the architect of Pakistan, courtesy Bharatiya Janata Party president L.K. Advani.
Through these letters, as Sunil Khilnani states in his foreword, "we see distance between the two men being articulated... beyond the soon palpable mutual personal dislike, there is a disagreement of political conviction... "
Selected and edited by Nehru himself at a time when he was a tad disenchanted with political life, this collection was initially intended to include only letters written by Mahatma Gandhi to him. While Gandhi's letters to Nehru provide the main body of the book, the 368 letters included in this selection has correspondence to and from a number of Who's Who of those times — Rabindranath Tagore, Mao Tse-tung, Chiang Kai-shek and Harold J. Laski, to name a few.
Besides the Nehru-Jinnah correspondence, of particular interest are the Nehru-Bose letters and some between Subhas Chandra Bose and Gandhi also. The Nehru-Bose letters show them change from colleagues to antagonists while the correspondence between Gandhi and Nehru reflect their temperamental differences which neither allowed to assume proportions that would lead to a breakdown of communication.
Of the Nehru-Gandhi letters, the one written by the latter explaining his surprise decision to call off the Non-Cooperation Movement is particularly telling of the sobering influence of "Bapu" on the younger Congressman. This, like the other 367 letters, provides a better insight into many of the issues that came up during the course of the freedom struggle. For no historical narrative can match these letters in capturing the thoughts of the freedom fighters.
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