Swadeshi ink on Swadeshi paper: Jawaharlal Nehru’s Rajneeti Se Door

Jawaharlal Nehru wrote prolifically, through private and public correspondence. These writings are collated in volumes of his selected works, through a collection of his letters to chief ministers, and most famously in his three English language books Glimpses of World History, An Autobiography and The Discovery of India. All of those books are replete with Nehru’s fascination for history and historical forces, and have politics, both domestic and international in the foreground. The historiographies he lays out often preface the political. In that respect, his book Rajneeti Se Door (Far from Politics), a much later work is fascinating first, unlike all his other writing, for being written in Hindustani, and second, as presenting a foil to Nehru’s political thought. Put together in the winter years of his life, Rajneeti Se Door is a text laden with reflection, and alternative imaginations about the transformation of politics. This paper will attempt to bring the barely studied book more firmly into the pantheon of Nehru’s writing, while drawing links between Nehru’s philosophical thought and Tagore’s fascination with the apolitical.