Historicism and Its Discontents in the Thought of Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru was both a historian and a self-conscious agent of historical change. Sunil Purushotham’s paper explores his political thought by bringing these two perspectives together. His published writings were, as Javed Majeed has argued, “tales about time.” As a political practitioner, he continuously pondered over the nature of political action as a form of temporal mediation and was deeply sensitive to the ways in which causalities move across generations. His approach to a number of issues, including the state project that has been his most significant legacy, shared a common concern with linking together the past, present and future. The paper links key shifts in his political thought to a midcentury conjuncture that marked a perceived transformation of temporal experience and an altered relationship to history as Nehru shifted from an oft-imprisoned dissident to Prime Minster. The paper focuses in particular on what Nehru referred to the “tragic paradox of the Atomic and Sputnik Age,” in which the advances of technological modernity had at once unlocked newfound emancipatory potential while threatening to deny humans authorship of the future.