Word: nehru
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With China lost to Communism, the free world needed a new anchor in Asia. Whether India could play that role depended largely on the chance of much closer understanding and cooperation between India and the U.S., a land almost unknown to nine-tenths of Nehru's countrymen. Washington was taking careful account of the Prime Minister's longstanding prejudice and his people's instinctive suspicion of the "imperialist West...
Unless the distinguished guest so requested, there would be no conferences of high state, no thought of pressure or promises, no hint of alliances or pacts, no talk of loans or investments. In a packed 3½ weeks' schedule, Nehru would speed from Washington to San Francisco, look in at New York and other cities, speak at the universities of Chicago, California and Wisconsin, inspect farms and factories, Mount Vernon, Hyde Park, the National Gallery of Art, TVA and White Sulphur Springs. The big emphasis would be on getting him acquainted with the productive panorama of U.S. life...
People's Father. This is Nehru's first trip to the U.S., although he has traveled much and is no stranger to Western ways. A man who likes to wear a Homburg, Nehru has preferred Western dress since his British schooldays (Harrow as well as Cambridge). This preference is one of the contradictions which once made him write of himself: "I have become a queer mixture of the East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere...
...Delhi or touring his India, Nehru sticks to salwars, a homespun shirt and a white Gandhi cap for his high bald crown. He is Panditji-literally, Mister Scholar -to his people. To most of them his Cambridge speech is unintelligible, nor is he himself quite at ease in the Hindu vernaculars. The mass of Indians cannot read his prolific English writings. Nonetheless, he has followed in Gandhi's footsteps as a popular national hero...
Partly this is because Gandhi blessed him. Partly it has to do with a tradition of Indian life since Buddha-the imaginative appeal of a highborn Brahman, such as Nehru, giving up a life of ease to join a popular cause such as liberation from British rule. Finally, the largely illiterate masses of India, not yet beyond a feudal horizon, still look up to their ruler as a child looks to its parent...