Biography: Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, was also the first of a series of new and unfamiliar figures to emerge in the middle of the last century as the European powers began, painfully and often unwillingly, to divest themselves of their former political domination of vast swathes of Africa and Asia, writes Enda O'Doherty.
It was axiomatic for the leaders of the new independence and national liberation movements, who in most cases went on to become the new leaders of independent states, that the disabilities their people suffered - poverty, exclusion and cultural backwardness - were caused by their lack of political control over their own destiny. Now that the former imperial masters had gone things would surely rapidly improve.
The most obvious contrast between the path that Nehru took and that chosen by some of his illustrious contemporaries - Nasser, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Sukarno - was that India became, and has remained for half a century, a functioning pluralist democracy, though the philosophy of its present Hindu nationalist government stands at some distance from the generous and inclusive vision of its first head of state.
Nehru was born in 1889 into a prosperous northern Indian Hindu Brahmin (upper caste) family. Educated in England at Harrow and Cambridge, he mixed in Fabian socialist intellectual circles and eventually returned home in 1912, where he joined his lawyer father in Congress, the all-India political organisation which, inspired by Gandhi, was implementing a programme of agitation and sporadic non-violent civil disobedience to achieve British withdrawal from the sub-continent.
The struggle was to take Nehru 35 years, a period during which he underwent several periods of imprisonment and established himself as the pre-eminent intellectual force in the independence movement, an indispensable partner of and complement to the spiritual force represented by Gandhi.
Independence, when it came, was not in the form that Gandhi and Nehru had hoped and worked for. For the latter, in particular, India was to be understood as a "composite nation" made up of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and tribal peoples. It was also, quite obviously, composed of different social classes, castes and linguistic communities. Nehru's nationalism, heavily marked by secularism and socialism, was a thoroughly inclusive one and he continually fought in Congress for the co-option and promotion of minority groups, particularly the largest minority, the Muslims.
Cultural and religious particularism, however, which had been fostered by the British and underpinned by their methods of administration, remained a strong force, perhaps stronger than the intellectual and idealistic position of Nehru and his allies. Political separatism was being promoted by the Muslim League of M.A. Jinnah in the territories which were later to become Pakistan. Nehru and Gandhi struggled against this "two nation theory" but were ultimately forced to bow to the tyranny of fact. The appalling communal violence (one million dead) which accompanied independence and the establishment of the two states deeply shocked Nehru and must also have been something of a challenge to Gandhi's conviction of the superiority of Indian over western civilisation.
As prime minister, Nehru set about tackling the challenges of social transformation that had preoccupied him during the decades of struggle and about which he had thought deeply, particularly during his long periods of imprisonment. If his attachment to democracy was unquestionable, his style was often autocratic. Always on the left of his party, he chided the careerists in Congress for their social indifference. Himself from a wealthy background, he adopted as frugal a personal style as he was allowed and abused fellow party members and fellow citizens for "vulgar" displays of wealth.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of the problems independent India faced: poverty, ignorance, high mortality rates, illiteracy and culturally transmitted prejudice against women and low-caste Untouchables.
Nehru, deeply intellectual and widely read, was consumed by a passion for reform and amelioration. He knew what was to be done, but circumstances and societal inertia continually conspired to prevent him doing it. Positive social change in India remained incremental, both during Nehru's period in office and afterwards. There were achievements as well as failures, but the sheer scale of the problems often seemed to dwarf the modest successes notched up.
Though admiring of much of what he took to be the economic and social progress of the Soviet Union, Nehru was never seriously tempted to depart from the democratic road to change. During his decade and a half in power he maintained the territorial unity and integrity of the state he had inherited despite some serious challenges and without recourse to severe repression.
In a supremely difficult period he refused the totalitarian temptation and established democracy and law as unquestionable bedrocks of the nation's political life and thus handed on to his successors the best political means of achieving progress without intolerable human cost.
Judith M. Brown's biography is both scrupulous and fair-minded, and if it occasionally falls down in matters of style or organisation of material, there is no such deficiency of knowledge or background. It is a persuasive and thorough account of the work of an important figure of 20th-century history whose achievements may be questioned but whose idealism and political virtue are absolutely beyond doubt.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist
Nehru: A Political Life. By Judith M. Brown, Yale University Press, 407pp. £25