In 30 Seconds
Story
In the civil lines of Allahabad stands a house that functioned, for three decades, as the unofficial capital of a country that did not yet exist. Anand Bhavan, the mansion of the Nehru family, hosted the Congress’s councils, sheltered its leaders between jail terms, and raised within its walls a line that would govern India for most of its first half century. No family in the democratic world has held comparable sway for comparable time, and the UP Files, which will meet the Nehrus and their heirs in a dozen later articles, introduces them here, at the house, where the grip on the century began.
The founder of the fortune was Motilal Nehru, Kashmiri Brahmin, self made titan of the Allahabad High Court bar of the previous batch’s university city, whose earnings furnished a household of legendary anglicised splendour, and whose conversion, in middle age, was the era’s great renunciation story. Radicalised by Jallianwala Bagh and his son’s example, the barrister who had shipped his laundry to Europe, so the embroidered legend ran, burned the foreign cloth, gave up the practice, presided over the Congress twice, founded the Swaraj Party to fight the Raj inside its own councils, and drafted, in the Nehru Report of 1928, the first Indian blueprint of a constitution. In 1930 he gave the great house itself to the nation, the mansion becoming Swaraj Bhavan, the Congress’s offices, while the family moved to the newer house beside it that inherited the name Anand Bhavan, an estate planner’s distinction the police raids of the following years treated with indifference.
His son made the house a hyphen between Allahabad and history. Jawaharlal, born in the city in 1889, Harrow, Cambridge, and the bar behind him, found in the kisan campaigns of the Awadh countryside, the taluqdar tenantry of this series’ earlier article marching under Baba Ram Chandra, the education his colleges had not supplied, and rose through the twenties and thirties, jail term upon jail term, nine years of his life in British prisons, much of it writing the books, the autobiography, the Discovery of India, that made him the movement’s voice to the world. The house kept pace, Gandhi a recurring resident, the working committee on the lawns, the women of the family, Kamala Nehru’s satyagraha and early death, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit’s rise toward the presidency of the United Nations General Assembly, the world’s first woman in the chair, and Swarup Rani’s beatings at the police lathi’s end, converting the household entire into the struggle’s first family, and in 1917, in one of its rooms, was born Indira, whose own chapters this series holds for the Congress batch.
The grip that began at the house must be stated as the double fact it is. On one side stands the record, a father and son who gave the movement its treasury, its drafting table, and seventeen years of its first prime ministership, a family whose members went to prison as routinely as other dynasties went to court. On the other stands the critique the republic has argued ever since, that the Congress became a family firm, the succession running Jawaharlal to Indira to Rajiv to the heirs of the present, the constituencies of Phulpur, Rae Bareli, and Amethi, this series’ later article on the family boroughs, becoming heritable seats, and the dynasty’s defenders answering that every heir won elections the family could also lose, and lost them, the argument being, in truth, the standing referendum of Indian democracy on itself. The UP Files states both columns and proceeds.
The house’s later history condensed the family’s. Jawaharlal left it for Delhi in 1946 and never really returned, Indira gave Anand Bhavan to the nation in 1970, and the mansion is today a museum of the movement, the study kept as Motilal left it, the room of Indira’s birth marked, a planetarium in the garden for the schoolchildren whose buses fill the drive, while Swaraj Bhavan beside it houses the memorials of the party that was born in its files. Allahabad, renamed around the house, keeps the family’s geography, the pyres of three prime ministers having met the Sangam’s waters, and the city’s politics, the series will find, never quite escaped the mansion’s gravity.
For the UP Files, Anand Bhavan is the freedom batch’s institutional heart. The heartland’s struggle had its crowds at Chauri Chaura and its guns at Kakori, and it had, on a civil lines lawn, its cabinet in waiting, drafting the republic between arrests. The three streams never fully trusted one another. Together, in this one province, they were unanswerable, and the batch now turns to the men who ran the machine the house designed, beginning with the premier the mountains sent, Pant.
