Book review: Aditya Mukherjee’s new book on Nehru tirelessly ponders over the ‘Idea of India’
Mukherjee’s book, a fresh break from a lineage of jargonic writing on India’s first prime minister, puts in center the spirit of scientific inquiry and the challenge it poses to the communal project of reconstructing secular India.
Naved Ashrafi
Published on: 22 May 2025, 12:26 pm
Review of ‘Nehru’s India: Past, Present & Future’, Penguin Random House India, Hardbound, Pages 210, MRP: INR 399
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU’S PERSONA HAS MANY FACETS to explore, read and write upon. In the preceding couple of quinquennials, some good titles written by both new and veteran authors bear testimony to this fact. For instance, Comrades against Imperialism (Michele L. Louro, 2019), Nehru's First Recruits (Kallol Bhattacharjee, 2024), Nehru: The Debates that defined India (Tripurdaman Singh and Adeel Hussain, 2022), Nehru and the Spirit of India (Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee, 2022), Nehru: Satya and Mithak (Piyush Babele, 2019), Nehru's India: A History in Seven Myths (Taylor C. Sherman, 2022), Jawaharlal Hazir Hon (Pankaj Chaturvedi, 2024), Planning Democracy (Nikhil Menon, 2022), Who is Bharat Mata? (Purushottam Agrawal, 2019), Sixteen Stormy Days (Tripurdaman Singh, 2020), Forging Capitalism in Nehru’s India (Nasir Tyabji, 2015) etc. represent a huge array of scholarship on topics ranging from foreign policy, foreign services, economic policy, nationalist struggle to post-colonial socio-political dynamics, fact-checking about Nehru and myth busting about Nehru’s India.
These works, though remarkable, may not appear very lucid and articulate to a common man due to inherent jargons or required domain expertise or bulky size. Aditya Mukherjee’s recent book Nehru’s India: Past, Present & Future (Penguin, 2024), on the contrary, deserves special praise for it is a lucid, comprehensible, coherent, short and logical account of Nehru’s India viewed from today’s vantage point. This work has been metamorphosed from Mukherjee’s Presidential address to Indian History Congress in 2023. He approaches the theme with a silver-tongue easily intelligible to a school student or a common man. The book is reportedly being translated into Hindi and Malayalam.
A major portion of the book is centered around the five core values which—according to Mukherjee—make the kernel of what is known as ‘the idea of India’. He proposes these core values in the third chapter, while the next five chapters provide an exegesis of each proposition. In this way, the book turns out to be a coherent and logical endeavour. Preceding two chapters—i.e. chapter 1 and 2—focus upon the ‘demonising of Nehru’ in the present scenario and Nehru’s approach to history respectively.
