Jawaharlal Nehru’s reputation has suffered in recent decades as time and distance diminish his aura. A narrative has gained popular currency in India of him as an incurable idealist, misled by China and others, as has a politically motivated caricature that ascribes today’s failures to original sins in his time. Such narratives gain wide circulation at a time when tweets, blogs, 30-second soundbytes, and TikTok videos bombard the audience. Besides, historical reputations do ebb and rise with time, for historians are congenital revisionists.
Fortunately, however, for those who still believe in historical objectivity and factual evidence, and who have not drunk the postmodern Kool Aid, we also have a recent upsurge of scholarship about Nehru, his times, and his foreign policy choices, some of which are listed below.* These works present a more complete, evidence-based, and empirically rich picture of his actions and times, drawing our attention to contingency, capability, and outcomes to describe Nehru’s remarkable achievements as well as his failures.