This column goes to print on November 14, Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth anniversary. That much admired as well as much maligned man has been in the news recently, when his name and words were briefly invoked by a young American public figure. It may thus be useful to recall what another young American public figure once thought about Jawaharlal Nehru. His name was Dr Martin Luther King.
As a doctoral student in the early 1950s, Dr King devoured books about Gandhi and the Indian freedom movement. These acquainted him with the work of Gandhi’s charismatic lieutenant and chosen successor. He also appears to have read Nehru’s autobiography. In November 1958, Dr King, then not yet thirty, was bold enough to send the Indian prime minister a copy of his newly-published book, Stride Toward Freedom, which dealt with that epochal event in the civil rights movement, the Montgomery bus boycott. The copy posted to Delhi bore this inscription: “In appreciation for your genuine good-will, your broad humanitarian concern, and the inspiration that your great struggle for India gave to me and the 50,000 Negroes of Montgomery.”
Nehru wrote back acknowledging receipt, saying: “I have long been interested in the work that you have been doing and more especially, in the manner of doing it. This book will give me a greater insight into this and so I welcome it.” He added: “I understand that there is a chance of your coming to India. I shall look forward to meeting you.”
King was indeed visiting India soon, his visit arranged by other old associates of Gandhi’s, including Kaka Kalelkar and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur. King and his wife, Coretta, arrived in India on February 10, 1959. On landing at Delhi airport, he read out this brief statement to the assembled journalists:
“My Friends,
For a long while I have looked forward to visiting your great country.
To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.
This is because India means to me Mahatma Gandhi, a truly great personality of the ages.
India also means to me Pandit Nehru and his wise statesmanship and intellectuality that are recognized the world over.”
Nehru had invited the visiting American couple for dinner to Teen Murti Bhavan on February 13. While doing research in King’s papers in Boston University, I found a one-page typed note which I reproduce in full below:
NOTES FOR CONVERSATION BETWEEN KING AND NEHRU
1. What is the present status of non-violent social change in the world today?
a. for domestic problems
b. for international relations
2. How vital and socially useful is Gandhianism in India’s current struggle to improve the welfare of its people?
a. what modifications are required?
b. does it conflict with industrialization or national defence?
3. Can a nation committed to democracy make progress towards a good life for all of its people fast enough for them not to desert democracy for the more rapid progress of communism?
a. China or India?
b. Which way will Africa go?
4. How can the bonds of friendship between the Negro people of America and the people of India be made stronger?
a.exchange of students and professors and journalists
b. visits to the [American] South of Indian leaders and visits of Negro leaders to India.
Though unsigned, this aide-mémoire was almost certainly written by King himself. Sadly, the conversation King had hoped to have with Nehru never actually transpired. This was because there were other guests at the dinner, which precluded a more intimate, one-on-one chat on matters of great mutual interest to both men.
From Delhi, the Kings commenced a three-week-long tour of India, visiting Calcutta, Patna, Madras, and Bombay, speaking to a cross-section of scholars, activists, and social workers, and not forgetting to pay their homage to Gandhi’s memory at the Sabarmati and Sevagram ashrams. On the couple’s return to Delhi, the head of the Gandhi Peace Foundation, G. Ramachandran, hosted a dinner for them, to which he invited the prime minister. Nehru replied that he was unfortunately out of town that day, adding: “But I should like to pay my tribute to the work being done by Dr. Martin Luther King. It was a great pleasure to meet him and his wife…”
After Dr King’s return to North America, he was interviewed on a popular Canadian TV programme called Front Page Challenge. The interviewer first asked him about his debt to Gandhi, with King answering that while the Indian leader was undoubtedly a major inspiration, he had also drawn from Jesus in “coming to this conclusion that love and nonviolence should be the regulating ideals in any struggle for human dignity”. The conversation then turned to Jawaharlal Nehru, whom King had recently met in India. The Canadian interviewer wondered if Nehru was “a nonviolent type too”. King replied that while Nehru certainly believed that “violence would have been both immoral and impractical” in the independence struggle, there did remain a difference between disciple and mentor, which was that Gandhi “believed in absolute nonviolence in all situations; when I think Nehru would believe in it in internal situations within nations, but when it comes to international conflicts, then he believes that a nation has to maintain an army.”
The documents I have quoted demonstrate that while Martin Luther King had an enormous respect for the Indian statesman, Jawaharlal Nehru admired the younger American too. So let us now return to the conversation between the two men that never took place. King’s notes of what he wanted to talk about with Nehru display the range of his own moral and political intelligence. Consider the four central questions he posed. First, what possibilities and potential did non-violence hold as a means of containing social strife within nations, as well as a means of regulating territorial conflicts among nations? Second, what relevance did Gandhian ideals have in the sphere of social and economic development in India? Third, in seeking to end mass poverty, which was a more suitable political system for the newly-independent countries of Asia and Africa, democracy or authoritarianism? Fourth, how could Indians as a whole and people of colour in America strengthen their bonds of friendship?
The questions that Martin Luther King hoped to discuss with Jawaharlal Nehru in February 1959 spoke to their own time. As well as to ours. For in 2025 too, the role of non-violence in settling social and political disputes, the varying claims of democracy and authoritarianism, the relevance of Gandhian economic (and now especially ecological) ideas, and the present and future of Indo-American relations, all remain of compelling interest and importance.
If an extended conversation between Nehru and King along these lines had indeed taken place, it would have been one for the ages. For both men had an abiding interest in history and in political theory. Both were uncommonly well read, both articulated their thoughts with care and clarity. How, we wonder, might Nehru have argued in favour of India’s multi-party democracy over China’s one-party State? Would King have challenged Nehru on his economic policies, perhaps suggesting that an un-Gandhian emphasis on heavy industrialisation was unwise in a society where capital was scarce but labour abundant? How would they have respectively viewed the past and future of relations between India and America? And would the conversation have turned at some stage from the political to the personal, with Nehru and King exchanging notes on love, romance, family, marriage?
The historian can only speculate. However a creative writer can make of these speculations a work of art. Perhaps a gifted young playwright can write a play around the questions that King wanted to discuss with Nehru, crafting dialogues that go beyond, but do not in spirit repudiate, what the historical record tells us. The play would have only two actors, an Indian in his late sixties and an American in his thirties, as well as only two acts — the first set in the living room of the prime minister’s house in New Delhi, the second in its dining room. And it would be written by someone who was either Indian or American, or best of all, Indian-American.
ramachandraguha@yahoo.in