diplomatica 2 (2020) 100-117

brill.com/dipl

“India Looks at the World”: Nehru, the Indian

Foreign Service & World Diplomacy

Swapna Kona Nayudu

Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
[email protected]

1 Introduction1

Indian diplomatic practice forcefully thrust forward its own ideas on interna-
tional issues of direct and indirect significance to India, positioning the newly
emergent state as a player of global significance even before it had achieved
independence from British imperial rule. The study of Indian diplomacy, espe-
cially in its formative stages, is significant not only because of its effects on the
making of the Indian nation, but also because of its influence on the making of
international diplomacy. This article is a discussion of India’s experience of
diplomacy, and how it is often written out of the larger body of work that con-
stitutes diplomatic history.
This account overturns multiple assumptions regarding the study of diplo-
macy itself, most significant amongst which is the belief that international re-
lations inform diplomacy, without simultaneously considering the possibility
that diplomacy often makes and unmakes international relations.2 States are
not only concerned with securing political gains; they are also interested in
making political action possible, often outside of the circumscribed limits im-
posed by international relations. In this process, states are interested in not
only the consequences of diplomatic action but in the diplomatic action itself,
in how it is conducted, on what premises it is built, and on what agency it
makes possible. States shape international relations by simultaneously engag-
ing with processes aimed at securing gains and the means to political action.

1 “India Looks at the World.” Note written on 25 January 1939, reproduced in Nehru, J. The Unity
of India (New York: The John Day Company, Inc., 1939), 335–42.
2 For a pioneering collection of articles on this subject, see Sending, O.J., V. Pouliot, and I.B.
Neumann, eds. Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2015). For the chapter most relevant to this article, see Barkawi, T. “Diplomacy, War
and World Politics.” In O.J. Sending, V. Pouliot, and I.B. Neumann, eds. 55–79.

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Nehru, the Indian Foreign Service & World Diplomacy 101

Diplomacy makes possible both these processes – it is through diplomacy that

states secure political objectives but also through diplomacy that they change
how diplomacy is conducted. Thus, diplomacy as a set of ideas is essentially
self-referential and as a set of practices, often draws upon its own history.
Placed within this framework of a constant process of revision and revival,
various strands of diplomatic history emerge. As states have evolved as politi-
cal actors, so have their diplomatic histories been cast either as a longstanding
tradition, as is the case with most Western European states, or as tangents to
those traditions, as is the case with most ex-colonies of Western European
states. This article puts forward an account that does not fit neatly into either
of the above-mentioned categories. The article is interested in what more can
be said about India’s diplomatic history rather than to see how it fits with or
confronts other diplomatic histories. These two conventional approaches have
been particularly tempting to historians of India’s pre-independent and early
post-independent diplomacy, as they look to draw lineage from the Raj or pres-
ent India in stark contrast to British imperial diplomacy. This article is not in-
terested in drawing continuance or presenting a break. Instead of studying
Indian diplomacy as a foil to other such narratives or to that of the crumbling
British Empire, the article discusses Indian diplomacy as self-contained and
evolving.
Early Indian diplomacy was founded largely in the political thought of Jawa-
harlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister. Indian diplomatic practice emerged
from the working of the Indian Foreign Service, an institution molded by Ne-
hru, who was also India’s first Foreign Minister. On the basis of Nehru’s writ-
ings, writings by erstwhile diplomats3 and material collected from interviews
with recruits to the earliest batches of the ifs,4 the article will discuss how
India’s early diplomatic practice came to be. While emerging from its colonial
past into independence, India undertook a diplomatic practice that was not

3 These diplomats’ memoirs include Pandit, V.L. The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir
(New York: Crown Publishers, 1979); Menon, K.P.S. Many Worlds (London: Oxford University
Press, 1965); Menon, K.P.S. Flying Troika (London: Oxford University Press, 1963); Nehru, B.K.
Nice Guys Finish Second (New York: Viking Adult, 1997); Gundevia, Y.D. Outside the Archives
(Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1987); Chagla, M.C. Roses in December: An Autobiography (Mum-
bai: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 2000); Mehta, J. The Tryst Betrayed: Reflections on Diplomacy and
Development (London: Penguin UK, 2015); Mehta, G.L. Understanding India (New York: Asia
Publishing House, 1959); Dayal, R. A Life of Our Times (New Delhi: Sangam Books, 1998).
4 These interviews were conducted in New Delhi, India in November and December 2014. The
names are anonymized throughout the article. In order to be able to differentiate between
the interviewees, they are differentiated by an alphabet placed against a reference to them,
such as “Interview with erstwhile senior officer (B) of the Indian Foreign Service, New Delhi,
December 2014.”

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102 Nayudu

comfortable with Eurocentric assumptions about the nature of diplomacy and

deliberately rejected ideas of diplomacy that it saw as emanating solely from
the metropole, and being thrust on the colonies. This was in addition to an
Indian approach to world politics per se, an approach including but not limit-
ed to Indian non-alignment, and some combination of Third Worldism, Asian-
African cooperation, Pan-Asianism, political thought from the Global South,
and simultaneously, an aspirational approach to the nation-state, with a keen
sense of territoriality, and of sovereignty.
This peculiar two-pronged approach to world politics is fascinating because
it emphasized India’s cosmopolitan desires while working through realist as-
sumptions about a world made up of nation-states. This article will discuss
how in order to be able to constantly offset the contradictions inherent in such
a position, Indian diplomacy offered its own retelling of world politics.

2 “The Problem of Peace is the Problem of Empire”5

Pre-independence diplomatic activity in India had three elements – first, the

consolidation of the Indian National Congress under Gandhi, and subsequent
political activity, which largely consisted of negotiation with the British on In-
dian independence, the partition of India and resulting state creation;6 sec-
ond, political caucusing undertaken by the diaspora i.e. people of Indian origin
overseas conducting meetings, rallies, protests, outside of the fold of the
­Congress, often in parallel to its diplomacy back in India and sometimes in
contradiction to its chosen methods;7 and, third, the rise of Nehru as an inter-
nationalist figure within his own firmament, many of whom were public
­figures like his sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, often in attendance as Indian rep-
resentation or leading Indian delegations at international conferences, and
speaking of issues relevant to India, but also of larger matters of relevance to

5 “Peace and Empire.” Presidential Address at the Conference on Peace and Empire, organized
by the India League and the London Federation of Peace Councils, Friends House, London,
July 15 and 16, 1938, quoted in Nehru, J. The Unity of India, 268–77.
6 For a study of this phase, see Raghavan, P. “Establishing the Ministry of External Affairs.” In
The Oxford Handbook of Indian Foreign Policy, eds. D.M. Malone, C.R. Mohan, and S. Ragha-
van (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), 80–91.
7 See for instance, Davis, A.E., and V. Thakur. “Walking the Thin Line: India’s Anti-Racist Diplo-
matic Practice in South Africa, Canada, and Australia, 1946–55.” The International History
Review, 38 (5) (2016), 880–99. See also Thakur, V. “The Colonial Origins of Indian Foreign Poli-
cymaking.” Economic and Political Weekly, 49 (32) (2014), 58–64.

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Nehru, the Indian Foreign Service & World Diplomacy 103

the colonies in general.8 Thus, in the period immediately preceding indepen-

dence, diplomatic activity emanating from and representing India or Indians
was significant and diffuse.
As a consequence of these animated periods, on achieving independence in
1947, India already had a policy towards various international issues leading to
the peculiar situation in which India had a foreign policy before it had a for-
eign service.9 Much of newly independent India’s approach to world affairs
was then formalized through the setting up of the Ministry of External Affairs,
recruitment to the Indian Foreign Service, the establishment of close to 40
missions worldwide in the first few years and the appointment of public fig-
ures of stature to ambassadorial positions. Most significantly, this also includ-
ed the setting up of India’s permanent mission to the United Nations, to reflect
India’s new status as a sovereign state, even though India had been a founding
member of the UN from its inception in 1945. This opening up of relations was
reflected in Indian diplomatic missions as they were set up in London, Wash-
ington D.C., Moscow, New York, etc. The idea was to bring in quite centrally
and with emphasis the permanence of India, a fact taken for granted now but
rather fraught with doubt in the 1940s, when the world at large was still coming
to terms with the idea of a free and modern India. In the 1930s, and subse-
quently, through the World War ii and in the post-war world, just as the world
was looking at the emergence of India, India too was looking at the world.10
Nehru had himself expended a considerable amount of his early political
career thinking quite deeply about India and its place in the world.11 His early
works, particularly the Discovery of India had foregrounded India against the
global, and had picked up themes that were to find wider resonance in India’s
own experiments with world politics. When confronted with a post-war world
divided into the two blocs of the Cold War, India’s approach to world affairs

8 On Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit’s diplomacy, see Ankit, R. “Between Vanity and Sensitive-
ness:  Indo–British Relations During Vijayalakshmi Pandit’s High-Commissionership
(1954–61).” Contemporary British History, 30 (1) (2015), 20–39; Ankit, R. “In the Twilight of
Empire: Two Impressions of Britain and India at the United Nations, 1945–47.” South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies, 38 (4) (2015), 574–88.
9 The exact nature of this foreign policy was and is still very much a matter of debate. For
an account of this tradition and competing visions from a diplomat’s point of view, see
Dixit, J.N. Makers of India’s Foreign Policy: Raja Ram Mohun Roy to Yashwant Sinha (New
Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2004).
10 “India Looks at the World.” In Nehru, J. The Unity of India, 335–42.
11 These can be found in his writings, particularly in Nehru, J. Discovery of India (London:
Penguin UK, 2008); Nehru, J. Glimpses of World History (London: Penguin UK, 2004), 1192;
and also after 1947, in Nehru, J. Letters to Chief Ministers, 1947–1964, 5 vols., ed. G. Par-
thasarathi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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104 Nayudu

came to be represented by the term “non-alignment,” an approach to politics

that was adaptive, open, and skeptical. Indian non-alignment was a response
to the urgencies of the time, and within a decade, India’s diplomacy morphed
into complex machinery, a wide network grappling with rapid decolonization
on the one hand and Cold War rivalries on the other.12
The competing problematiques of nationalism/internationalism, statism/
cosmopolitanism and ideology/sovereignty played out in the making of mod-
ern India through multiple tropes, often through the person of Nehru.13 Nehru
is key to this chronicle not only because he came to hold offices directly rele-
vant to the theme of this article, but also because his thought was built on a
juxtaposition of these opposing concepts. Nehru’s early life indicates that he
would have been predisposed to the sort of internationalism that he came to
represent in his later years. His arrival on the international scene can be
marked by his attendance in 1927 of the League Against Imperialism, an anti-
imperialist conference held in Brussels.14 In the two decades that followed, up
to his taking office in 1947, he iteratively refined his thoughts about the place
India would have in world politics.15
The main theme running through the writing from this period was that of
the “problem of peace.” Nehru constituted peace in opposition to Empire, rath-
er than in opposition to war or violence. When he wrote that the “essence of
the problem of peace [was] the problem of empire,”16 he was in fact, allud-
ing  to the idea that there would be no real peace as long as the threat of
­imperialism loomed large over the world, including the newly independent

12 Nehru’s first pronouncement on what came to be called non-alignment was in his speech
as Vice-Chairman of the Interim Government, delivered on 7 September 1946, the text of
which can be found in this book, Nehru. J. Speeches, Vol. 1 (New Delhi: Publications Divi-
sion, Government of India, 1967); an even earlier outline proposed by him is from 1927,
see Nehru, J. “A Foreign Policy for India,” aicc File No 8, 1927, Nehru Memorial Muse-
um and Library (nmml), New Delhi, India. For a detailed study of the origins of non-­
alignment in the political thought of Gandhi, Tagore and eventually Nehru, see Nayudu,
S.K. “The Nehru Years: Indian Non-alignment as the Critique, Discourse and Practice of
Security (1947–1964)” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, King’s College London, 2015.
13 For a critique of this thought process, see Chatterjee, P. The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 132. Even though the primary objective of
Chatterjee’s critique is to make explicit the “relaxations of nationalist thought” in Nehru’s
thought, this is by far the most sophisticated treatment of Nehru’s struggle with contra-
dictory impulses.
14 See Louro, M.L. Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar International-
ism, (London: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 324.
15 See Nehru, J. Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, First Series, 15 vols. (New Delhi: B.R. Pub-
lishing Corporation, 1972); Nehru, J. Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, 61
vols. (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1990).
16 “Peace and Empire.” In Nehru, J. The Unity of India, 268–77.

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Nehru, the Indian Foreign Service & World Diplomacy 105

nation-states. In this problematization, it was clear that true sovereignty, as

embodied in the people of a nation, the citizens of a state, could only come
from having complete independence of thought and action and freedom from
their colonial past. This approach to sovereignty was in fact, a Gandhian for-
mula, one that saw sovereignty as defragmented further and further until it
was made indivisible in the person of a citizen.17
The Gandhian approach, of course, was even more radical and consisted of
an appeal to the morality of a human being, especially as Gandhi’s politics re-
sented the state, and saw it as the enemy of the people. Nehru differed with
Gandhi in this respect, and his approach to sovereignty saw the state and its
citizens as mutually reinforcing. Thus, in this conceptual framing, peace be-
came inevitably linked to the sovereignty of the nation-state, and both the Em-
pire and the Cold War were rendered problematic because they represented
allegiance and alliance, which Nehru considered an assault on a state’s sover-
eignty, a ploy to render it hollow. Yet, India had emerged into such a world, one
still colonized and/or divided into blocs. How would India then approach such
a system of states? Would this mean that India would become insular, protec-
tive of the state it had built and the nation it had inherited?
Faced with such questions, Nehru sought to overcome them by using yet
another Gandhian method – the idea that for Empire to be problematized, the
relation between the colonizer and the colonized had to be disrupted. Gandhi
had successfully achieved this in phases of the Indian independence move-
ment by famously compelling the British to confront in India the inadequacies
of their own liberalism, thereby placating the radicals. Yet, Gandhi’s ruse had
been to hold the British to their own political standards by employing language
so steeped in morality that it had pleased the liberals. Thus, on the Indian po-
litical landscape, he was able to launch a mass movement for Indians of all
stripes and political dispensations to follow, and claim a stake in. This was a
masterstroke, one that Gandhi achieved through his mastery of that historical
moment, in which he embodied his own ideas, and successfully translated
those belonging to others.
Nehru remained alive to the prospect that this could work in India’s ap-
proach to world politics as it did in India’s approach to its colonial subjugation.
In the first instance, the Nehruvian approach to diplomacy was to present it
outside of its past. In configuring diplomacy in relation to “peace” but not
in contradiction to “war,” but instead to “Empire,” Nehru attempted to dislo-
cate the binaries in which diplomacy had become lost. For him, to recover the
true prospect of an elevated diplomacy, it had to be unshackled from its own

17 Devji, F. “Morality in the Shadow of Politics.” Modern Intellectual History 7 (2) (2010),
373–90.

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106 Nayudu

bloodied past. Diplomacy as an idea had become for centuries so mired in the
language of war, whether in preventing it or emerging victorious from it, that a
fresh perspective was only possible when it could free itself of that history.
This could be achieved by employing the intertwined language of moder-
nity and globality. In order to represent a definite break from the past, diplo-
macy was recast as looking to the future. The accent on the coming centuries
meant that his speeches, and indeed those of Indian delegations at interna-
tional fora, spoke in terms of free and sovereign states. While recognizing the
realities of the world they lived in, they chose to infuse their diplomacy with an
element of futurity – the idea that what was to come would surpass what had
been. Nehru referred constantly to India’s philosophical past, but did it in a
way that highlighted the Indian riposte to British colonialism. Repeated itera-
tions of India’s coming future were also foregrounded within a larger Asian
backdrop, which in turn was located within a larger internationalist world.
These relations were made most tangible through the United Nations, which
became the setting for collaboration within the ex-colonies, but also the space
where the ex-colonies could act collectively with the colonizers, often petition-
ing them to give up their colonies. The Foreign Service involved in these nego-
tiations, despite having originated in or been influenced by institutions of the
Empire, now pursued an explicitly anti-imperialist agenda. Thus, this model
set up a process in which diplomacy became self-referential, and contained
within it the seeds for its own renewal. By theorizing the elements of time
(modernity) and space (globality) differently, Nehru had sought to energize an
old tradition. This remodeling became a formative moment in the history of
diplomacy.

3 “The Defences of Peace Must Be Built in the Minds of Men”18

The British Empire, at one point, covered nearly a quarter of the earth’s area,
both land and sea. Thus, of all the institutional elements passed on from the
British colonial period, the most significant inheritance was a sense of the
globe. Taking those ideas further and changing them along the way, figures like
Gandhi and Nehru, who had had an overseas education, saw beyond the
world’s atlases and censuses19 and imbibed quite quickly the idea that to a

18 This phrase is from the unesco Charter, but is cited here from the quotation in Pandit,
V.L. The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir, 218.
19 For a treatment of this question of the extent of the British Empire, see Ferguson, N. Em-
pire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin UK, 2012).

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Nehru, the Indian Foreign Service & World Diplomacy 107

large extent, geography determined history. This sense of the world’s connect-
edness comes alive in Nehru’s Glimpses of World History, in which he sought
repeatedly to connect India’s emergence into modernity to that of the larger
world. Indeed, from an early moment, “Nehru was linking India’s struggles
with struggles everywhere – Spain, Czechoslovakia, Abyssinia, Palestine.”20 For
the Indian Foreign Service, this meant that Nehru had a vision beyond the idea
that Indian diplomats would remain “petitioners in Western courts and
chancelleries.”21 Not only did the internationalism of Indian diplomacy thus go
much beyond colonial preoccupations, it was in fact, an assault on an older
imagination of the world, one moored in the idea of Empire.
The futurity sought by Nehru became more tangible as Indian diplomats
took up posts and established diplomatic missions across the world.22 Drawing
from the defense forces, the Indian Political Service, the Indian Civil Service,
even from Subhash Chandra Bose’s erstwhile Indian National Army, the For-
eign Office was refashioned, and the Ministry of External Affairs set up. In New
Delhi, Sir Girija Shankar Bajpai gave shape to the Ministry of External Affairs,
bringing in Subimal Dutt as India’s first Foreign Secretary and building the
ministry thereon.23 Subsequently, R.K. Nehru, S. Dutt, M.J. Desai, Y.D. Gunde-
via, C.S. Jha, Rajeshwar Dayal, T.N. Kaul, Kewal Singh and Jagat Mehta all be-
came Foreign Secretaries one after the other.24
Asaf Ali was sent to Washington D.C., Krishna Menon to London, K.M. Pan-
nikar to Peking followed by N. Raghavan, Sri Prakasa was sent to Karachi, B.N.
Rau was made Permanent Representative to the UN, a post he was succeeded
in by Rajeshwar Dayal, Arthur Lall, C.S. Jha and B.N. Chakravarty. Abdur Raouf
was sent to Rangoon, C.P.N. Singh to Kathmandu, Diwan Chaman Lall to
­Ankara, Minoo Masani was sent to Brazil, Ali Zaheer to Tehran, Apa Pant to
Kenya where he became quite close to Kenyatta, Ali Yawar Jung to Argentina,

20 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (A), New Delhi, No-
vember 2014.
21 Ibid.
22 For extensive studies of the relationship between Nehru, the Ministry of External Affairs
and the Foreign Service officers, see Srinivasan, K. Diplomatic Channels (New Delhi:
Manohar, 2012).
23 G.S. Bajpai, Knight Commander of the Order of Star of India and Knight Commander of
the British Empire, first Secretary-General of the Ministry of External Affairs, bestowed
upon with the Order of the Star of India, King’s scholar at Oxford, knighted in 1939, and
Nehru’s principal adviser on foreign affairs, he also entertained an enthusiasm for scout-
ing. Subimal Dutt was India’s longest serving Foreign Secretary, and amongst his many
other significant postings, he was also India’s representative on the Political Committee at
the Bandung Conference.
24 Rasgotra, M.K. A Life in Diplomacy (London: Penguin UK, 2016), 12–20.

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108 Nayudu

Niranjan Singh Gill an ina hero successively to Ethiopia, Thailand and Mexico
Kesava Menon was sent to Colombo, where he was succeeded by V.V. Giri. B.R.
Rau, G.L. Mehta and M.C. Chagla all went to Washington and B.G. Kher and J.N.
Mehta became High Commissioners in London after Krishna Menon.25
Some insight into the institutional history of the Indian Foreign Service has
recently become available, and has been published in the form of memoirs and
detailed studies about “those who made history and others who only made
mischief.”26 Along with interviews conducted for the purpose of writing this
article, three main themes are evident in studies of that time: first, most of the
early recruits to the service had come for Nehru, and had stayed so they could
see this world that had been opened up to them. The first half of that century
had been dominated by the idea that “England was a lodestar.”27 The freedom
generation, they had come of age in what was “a great moment for India” when
they “had a cause, a leader.”28 As far as the restless travelers of that generation
were concerned, it was Nehru who was “superhuman,”29 a “magnetic name.”30
Whether it was “the timber of his voice,”31 or his “irresistible charm”,32 all inter-
viewees agreed, “the source of authority was not the office,”33 emphasizing
that “while Gandhi made a dent on our heart and soul, Nehru went straight to
our innate urges.”34
An erstwhile diplomat, while recollecting the first meeting with Nehru at
Teen Murti Bhavan, reminisced about how the entire first batch of the Foreign
Service had taken a ride in a bus from Metcalfe House, where they were being
trained, up to the Prime Minister’s residence for tea, and had brought with
them their copies of Nehru’s books to have them signed. The diplomat, who

25 Ibid; Interviews with senior officials from the Indian Foreign Service, New Delhi, Novem-
ber, December 2014.
26 D.N. Chatterji’s phrase, in Storm Over Congo, (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd.,
1980) inside flap.
27 Ibid.
28 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (B), New Delhi,
­December 2014.
29 Ibid.
30 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (C), New Delhi,
­December 2014.
31 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (B), New Delhi,
­December 2014.­
32 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (A), New Delhi,
­November 2014.
33 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (B), New Delhi,
­December 2014.
34 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (A), New Delhi,
­November 2014.

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went on to represent India in ambassadorial posts, remembered the meeting

clearly, saying “I can hear the footsteps coming down the steps,” that once a
sprightly Nehru had arrived amidst the young recruits, he spoke to them of the
changes that science was bringing. Others recall this modern and internation-
alist tenor too, while referring to the language learning programs that Foreign
Service recruits were sent away to – Tours in France for French, Beijing for Chi-
nese, Cairo for Arabic, and to Madrid for Spanish.
Interviewees remember this time as “heady days,” when it was thought that
India “could go to any place,” that “all India needed was independence.”35
When asked where this vision of a new and modern India came from, all inter-
viewees agreed that “Nehru’s projection of India was quite clear” and so it was
a “matter of great honor and prestige” to become a part of that larger vision
and the ensuing project.36 This was “a time of great idealism,” the idea that “to
serve the country was important” and the belief that Nehru’s approach, which
was to repose confidence in each individual member of the service,37 and to
encourage “people to want to have their hands on the issues,”38 would make
the foreign service a compelling force. Along with the “lure of the unknown,”
this was reason enough for many young men to want to join the Foreign
Service.39
Yet, from interviews conducted with former officers of the Indian Foreign
Service, it is evident that although Nehru was very much at the center of the
diplomatic machinery, the foreign service was also growing independent of
him. This brings out the second theme in the writings and the interviews – the
autonomy with which people other than Nehru operated within the foreign
ministry and shaped the service over the years. As one interviewee put it, the
service was “sensitive to what he want(ed) but was not invented by him.”40
Even though it is quite clear that Nehru’s vision of India’s place in the world
drove the ambitions of the ifs, the interviewee refereed to the “genius we have
in India for autonomy” in the context of the relationship between founder and

35 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (D), New Delhi,
­December 2014.
36 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (D), New Delhi,
­December 2014.
37 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (B), New Delhi,
­December 2014.
38 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (A), New Delhi,
­November 2014.
39 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (E), New Delhi,
­December 2014.
40 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (B), New Delhi,
­December 2014.

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110 Nayudu

institution.41 Michael Brecher, who most widely catalogued the history of the
ifs has referred to this idea held by diplomats as early as in the 1960s, that
­India had to liberate itself from the past and that this was only possible if it
became a voice that could be heard above the din of superpower rivalry, be-
coming in time, an “important quantity in world affairs.”42 To use Krishna
­Menon’s language, Indian diplomats realized that there was “a limit to the use-
fulness of the past.”43
The rapid growth of the institution was evident also in the struggles it faced
during its formation. An unlikely issue surfaced from within the institutional
structure on the question of allowing women into the service. From Savitri
Kunnadi to Chokila Iyer, the Indian Foreign Service had women in leading
roles. Yet, at its inception, Sir Hugh Weightman, who had stayed on as Foreign
Secretary till 1947 had counselled against the inclusion of women at all, but
Nehru, in a note in his own handwriting, concluded quite emphatically that
women should be allowed in.44 Nehru thought that it was in keeping with “the
general sentiment of the age” that women not be excluded.45 This didn’t mean,
of course, that women’s recruitment was not bound by conservative rules. As
Rasgotra notes, “prejudice against women’s recruitment in the diplomatic ser-
vice prevailed even in the democratic societies of the United States, Britain
and other European countries,” and so India was no exception when it came to
obsolete marriage rules, the status of women within the service, etc.46
One of the ex-diplomats interviewed highlighted this discrimination, saying
that the fact that women could not marry without permission and that they
could not marry foreign nationals seemed particularly unfair, given the other-
wise progressive nature of the service.47 An early feminist pioneer, C.B. Muthu-
amma, fought and won a case against the Government of India on the grounds
of gender discrimination within the Foreign Service, paving the way for later

41 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (B), New Delhi,
­December 2014.
42 Brecher, M. India and World Politics: Krishna Menon’s View of the World (Toronto: Oxford
University Press, 1968).
43 Krishna Menon quote from “Longines Chronoscope with Vengalil Krishna Menon.”
Longines Chronoscope. cbs Television. Accessible at https://archive.org/details/gov.ar-
chives.arc.95933.
44 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (E), New Delhi,
­December 2014.
45 Nehru, J. “Note.” 26 February 1947, The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (swjn), 2nd Ser.,
vol. 2, ed. S. Gopal (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund), 67.
46 Rasgotra, M.K. A Life in Diplomacy, 127.
47 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (F), New Delhi,
­December 2014.

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generations of women diplomats to have greater autonomy within their jobs.48

The most prominent amongst these pioneering women, of course, was Vijaya
Lakshmi Pandit. Madame Pandit, as she was known internationally, elevated
India’s stature on the world stage furthermost by becoming elected President
of the United Nations General Assembly in 1953. A “natural master of the art of
diplomacy,” she was also Nehru’s sister, and in their substantial correspon-
dence, they often asked each other about their wishes for India and what kind
of India they wanted.49
New Delhi often had problems with envoys picked from public life, with
many of them serving only one term as “they were so bad that out they went.”50
Nehru was not satisfied with them all, but had “great regard” for the “star quar-
tet” Krishna Menon, S. Radhakrishnan, K.M. Pannikar and Vijaya Lakshmi Pan-
dit.51 Clearly, Nehru regarded them more as interlocutors than simply as his
subordinates tasked with carrying out India’s external affairs. In fact, the cor-
respondence amongst all these diplomats is evidence of the cautious ambition
with which they approached issues, and their tempering effect on each other.
Krishna Menon once remarked, “We are the architects of history; we make it.
Therefore, we can’t say, It has been so and therefore it will be so.”52 Indeed,
while it was true that India had committed itself to an energized diplomacy, it
is also interesting to note Nehru’s circumspection at being zealous. He often
reflected on this need to be cautious, writing in 1949, “We are apt to be too sure
of our stability, internal and external. Taking that for granted we proceed to
endeavor to remodel the world.”53 He also appealed to diplomats to remain
true to their roots – “Our Ambassadors,” said Nehru, “will represent a great
country and it is right that they should make others feel that they do so. But
they also represent a poor country where millions live on the verge of ­starvation.

48 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (E), New Delhi,
­December 2014.
49 Rasgotra, M.K. A Life in Diplomacy, 28; an interviewee endorsed this view, saying that if
Nehru and Mrs. Pandit decided to be charming, “no one could resist them.” Interview with
erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (A), New Delhi, November 2014.
50 Interview with erstwhile senior officer of the Indian Foreign Service (C), New Delhi,
­December 2014.
51 Rasgotra, M.K. A Life in Diplomacy, 39; on Krishna Menon, see S. Khilnani, Incarnations:
A History of India in Fifty Lives (New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2016), 342–49.
52 Longines Chronoscope. Accessible at https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.95933.
53 Note to Jayaprakash Narayan, 14 May 1949, Nehru Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum &
­Library (nmml), quoted in Gopal, S. Imperialists, Nationalists, Democrats: The Collected
Essays (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014); Gopal, S. The Mind of Jawaharlal Nehru
­(Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1980).

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112 Nayudu

They cannot forget this nor indeed should they do anything which seems in
violent conflict with it.”54
That they were toeing this line meant that over time, the diplomacy grew
sharper. Great strides were made in this direction fairly early on, with India
dominating anticolonial imagination in the 1950s, often taking center stage at
the UN. On American primetime television, Larry LeSueur of the cbs once
exclaimed, “When Mr. Krishna Menon speaks, the world now listens.”55 This
could very well have been said about India diplomats in general. What this
meant was that Indian diplomats were uniquely placed to play a significant
role in mediation efforts – the third theme that emerges from the interviews
conducted with them. The success or failure of these negotiations was often a
secondary objective; primarily, they were concerned with stalling war, and
bringing conflicting parties to the table. As Krishna Menon put it in the con-
text of the Indochina settlement, “The real question is not whether it was a
good settlement. I think it’s a good settlement. But a settlement itself is a good
thing to achieve.”56
At the height of the Cold War, this was incredibly difficult to achieve but also
quite impossible to attempt given the limited resources India had for diplo-
macy. Yet, key personalities played crucial roles in opening doors. The embassy
in Moscow had been India’s first diplomatic mission to be opened and even
though both Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Y.D. Gundevia wrote Dickensian ac-
counts of their time there (complaining of the weather, the food, the lack of
friendliness), this was in fact, an exceedingly bold move, and one that finally
yielded results when the famously reclusive Stalin decided to meet S. Rad-
hakrishnan, who had succeeded Madame Pandit, giving him an audience not
once but twice. Stalin’s opening up to India, first with Radhakrishnan, and
then with K.P.S. Menon, sparked the Nehru-Khrushchev relationship and the
eventual building of strong relations between India and the Soviet Union. This,
in turn, allowed India to keep a line open with the Soviets when crisis after
crisis emerged in the 1950s across Korea, Hungary and Egypt.
India had become acquainted with, and adept at making and remaking di-
plomacy in the public and private spheres. The two spheres had merged
through what Henry Fairlie calls “the pertinacity of these relationships,” the
idea that individuals are able to assert their principled positions, negotiate re-
lations and indeed, even lead a moral appeal more successfully than states

54 Menon, K.P.S. Many Worlds, 229.

55 Longines Chronoscope. Accessible at https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.95933.
56 Ibid.

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could ever do.57 A powerful statesman, Nehru led a centralized bureaucracy

at home, but it was overseas that he encouraged Indian diplomats to animate
the ways in which India was building relations with the world. The structure
of  the institution became more concrete over those initial decades, but the
foundations of the organization were laid in such a manner that diplomats
gave it form as they went along. On all the major issues of that period, be it the
negotiations over Indo-China, Korea, Suez, Hungary, Congo or South Africa,
Indian diplomats were frontrunners. When faced with a crisis of relations, they
were unhesitating in their disagreement with Nehru, who in turn, trusted his
men on the ground. This is most evident in the cables sent from Budapest at
the height of the Hungarian Revolution in the mid-1950s by M.A. Rahman, and
also in the cables sent from Leopoldville during the Congo Crisis by D.N. Chat-
terji, both of whom went on to write detailed theses about their experiences
there, offering further insight into the workings of the ifs.

4 Conclusion

In the last few years, with the opening up of archives in India and a new wave
of historical work, some attention has been paid to India’s early diplomatic
activity. There exist two key problems in this literature. First, histories of Indi-
an diplomacy are exclusively focused on its purported origins in British colo-
nial institutions, whether from the metropole in the form of the British Foreign
Service, or in the colony in the form of the Indian Political Service. These his-
tories focus on what they claim was “inherited institutional thinking” in the
lack of an “overarching ideological framework.”58 These studies are primarily
concerned with the simultaneity of Indian independence with that of the par-
tition of undivided India, and with the effects of the partition on state building
in both states, and India’s external relations towards Pakistan. Thus, it is under-
standable that colonial continuities are significant markers for such history,
because they point to the significance of writing about modern India, without
negating the provenance of its institutions. If additionally, we could talk about
the regenerative possibilities presented by India’s diplomacy in the 1940s, it
might become possible to talk about such possibilities for diplomacy per se.

57 Fairlie uses this phrase in the context of journalism, particularly on Fleet Street. Fairlie, H.
Bite the Hand that Feeds You: Essays and Provocations (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009).
58 Raghavan, P. “Establishing the Ministry of External Affairs,” 80–91.

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114 Nayudu

Second, in explaining India’s political choices, histories of Indian diplomacy

lapse into the language of International Relations theory more generally, and
Strategic Studies vocabulary more specifically. Often concerned more with
demonstrating whether an actor was strategic, historians use both diplomatic
and military history to explain these processes. That is in itself an immensely
valuable exercise, as there are very few full-length studies of milestones in In-
dia’s military and diplomatic history.59 Yet, this evaluative approach is often
reductive too. An actor such as Nehru, for instance, is assessed on his foreign
policy goals, without foregrounding them in his much more sophisticated po-
litical thought. When the tools to evaluate a foundational figure of Indian di-
plomacy are so limited, it should come as no surprise that the theorization of
Indian diplomacy is so negligible.
This is by no means a uniquely Indian problem. In the case of Indian diplo-
macy, however, it becomes even more difficult to neglect when historians are
seduced by the idea that Indian diplomacy was normative, that it somehow
championed this normativity and therefore in time, “on a number of other
­important, even if normative, issues, Indians increasingly determined the
agenda.”60 Indeed, it cannot be denied that Indian accomplishment on a num-
ber of such questions was enormous and yet again, histories of these move-
ments need to be written, and where they have been written, are riveting in the
archive they uncover.61 Yet, in fact, when one is looking to theorize Indian di-
plomacy, it might be so much more useful to wonder why India thought that
the espousal of a norms-based narrative would be in its interest.
It would be interesting to think of norms and interests as concepts with
some degree of agency. That would complicate this otherwise simplified story
of India as a normative actor, which in fact, diminishes the radicality of its
project to decolonize diplomacy. A newly independent postcolonial state, still
quite nervous about its external borders and internal cohesion, decided at
some point to take each issue that came its way and evaluate a response, only

59 For an exceptional account, see Raghavan, S. War and Peace in Modern India, (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). The field is now opening up – see for instance, Raghavan, S.
India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia 1939–1945 (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan,
2013), 359; Blarel, N. The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continuity, Change and Compro-
mise since 1922 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014); Miller, M.C. Wronged by ­Empire:
Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2013); Kennedy, A.B. The International Ambitions of Mao and Nehru: National Effi-
cacy Beliefs and the Making of Foreign Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
60 Emphasis mine. Thakur, V. “The Colonial Origins of Indian Foreign Policymaking.” Eco-
nomic and Political Weekly, 49 (32) (2014), 58–64.
61 See Bhagavan, M. The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World (New Delhi: Harp-
erCollins Publishers India, 2012), 256.

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to find that on most issues (decolonization and disarmament, for instance), it

would pursue norms, not goals. Its foreign policy was then tailored to reflect
this accent on norms, and its diplomacy reflected this approach.
Yet, the story most often told about India’s perusal of a norm-sensitive world
order is in fact, to return to a distinction drawn earlier in this article, a story
about the gains this action was supposed to achieve, but not a story about the
action itself. Diplomatic histories of India often confuse the two, claiming that
a study of the process of achieving a gain is a study of the action required in
that process. In fact, such a study still holds as its object the gain in question,
and does not reflect on the action as a phenomenon alive to its historical con-
tingencies, a complete object of study in itself. This void exists even more so in
the study of Indian diplomacy because International Relations theory is large-
ly negligent of the Indian historic experience, specifically if we look for litera-
ture outside of the “area studies,” “rising powers” and “foreign policy analysis”
literature.
A study of the political action would first and foremost be a narrative about
the intellectual underpinnings of such action and can in fact, be situated in
narratives of nineteenth and twentieth century Indian political thought. This
would also make it possible to create a continuum between experience, history
and theory for the study of Indian diplomacy, using it as an object of study
but also as a source to make that study possible. Treating diplomacy as simul-
taneously constituted of action and consequence, and going back and forth
between them would also rid us of the pervasive problem of teleological expla-
nations for all diplomatic action. After all, India’s international affairs in the
Nehru period have, to borrow from a Soviet joke, an unpredictable past.
Nehru, and through him, Indian diplomacy was acutely responsive to the
rhythms of that time. Speaking of the birth of the Indian nation, Nehru once
said, “Time was in our favour.”62 In this writing between the 1940s and his death
in 1964, and particularly to Indian envoys across the world, a striking trope
presents itself – Nehru’s repeated iterations that what was happening was also
possible, drawing attention to the idea that the theoretical distance between
what was a possibility and what was an actuality had been covered success-
fully, and that this could happen again, and again. This realm of endless possi-
bility also stretched the idea of time and space outside of their confines, and
officers of the Indian Foreign Service were able to surmount any difficulties,
real and perceived, at being seated at the high tables of international af-
fairs alongside past colonizers, the two superpowers and others. Evidently, the

62 Nehru, J. Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (New York: The John
Day Company, Inc., 1942), 362–63.

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116 Nayudu

history of Indian diplomacy is significant because it represents this continuing

decolonization of India.
The independent Indian state was slowly devised by fusing together many
elements from its past along with the celebration of Indian difference. The
new identity of India was that of a state committed to ideological minimalism
and self-conscious progressivism. This belief that a state could be critical to-
wards its own statism, that it could be anti-ideology while espousing progres-
sivism was new and radical for its time. India was critical of the dominant
­ideologies of the time, which is clear in its non-aligned stand. India offered a
critique of the world it saw, split into opposing divisions, but it also offered
a  defense of the politics of those divisions to the others. This approach in
which the “door is kept open” was in fact the key to its negotiation and settle-
ment strategies and refined its non-alignment to mean more than neutrality,
bequeathing it with the power of persuasion, in time grudgingly acknowledged
by the great powers. Thus, for Indian diplomats, the initial contest over space
happened within the realm of diplomacy, not within the realm of foreign af-
fairs. It was the method that was held up to scrutiny, because the objectives
had already been worked out.
The promise of early Indian diplomacy, therefore, was in its ability not to
preserve, but to disrupt. This has remained a key motif, as India’s interest in
regimes has been primarily in their circumvention. Yet, as discussed earlier
in this article, without foregrounding this “anomalous” state behavior in the
intellectual origins of its radicalism, its analysis remains superficial, as its re-
volt is evacuated of any substance. Instead, India’s international relations
are  equated with a simplistic reading of non-alignment, which is analyzed
through a lens of unyielding literalism and Nehru as a political figure is impli-
cated in spreading a version of his ideas very different from his own under-
standing of them. With respect to both the British tradition, and a perceived
Indian one, post-independence Indian diplomacy is treated as a contamina-
tion of or variations on other lineages rather than possessing a pioneering
quality of its own.
A particular casualty of this approach is that there is little to no attention
paid to the caution and the skepticism with which India approached each
event as it took place in the Nehru period. The caution too, although it might
seem less heroic, was an indictment of the actions of other states, but without
theoretical insight, it is difficult to ascertain whether India was disagreeing
with the means used or the ends achieved. In 1953, at the height of the diplo-
macy around the Korean War and the resulting armistice, Nehru wrote to all
Indian heads of missions reminding them of this distinction, “Whatever the

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wider policy might be, a great deal depends upon the manner in which we give
effect to it… Even right ends do not justify wrong means.”63
Given the intellectual traditions that underscored this time in modern In-
dian history, it is shocking the lack of attention that Indian diplomacy has
­received in terms of the history of the ideas behind its making. Intellectual
historians are now asking the question “why is it still important” to recover the
lost meaning of concepts. But what if a concept has been treated as being ahis-
torical or indeed as possessing a history not its own. The historical method
applied to such objects of study could in fact, lead not to history alone but to
theory too. A particular anguish shared by those International Relations theo-
rists who study the Global South is that even though theory emanates from, in
this case, India, it is often either a call to revive nativist thought or an effort to
see whether International Relations theory fits with the Indian case study or
not. International Relations literature on India is possessed of the idea that it
must be policy relevant, and even historical studies feel tempted to draw on
the past to illuminate the present, often without having managed to adequate-
ly illuminate the past.
There exists a sort of discomfort with writing histories of minor events and
peoples and their stories as part of the larger narrative of the making of the
nation. These are often relegated to the realm of memoir, which is a tragic
place for it to occupy, first because memoirs are not considered policy-­relevant,
and second, because the realm of the memoir represents a definite chasm be-
tween the past and the present. Commentators then find it necessary to say
something about the veracity of the record of events, or the likeability of the
story they are hearing, or the amusement they have derived from reading it,
while orbiting the issue of the value of this archive, which is immense. The
writing of India’s diplomatic history, in this manner, becomes a narrative of
how Indian diplomats were handed positions and how they were able or un-
able to arrive at them, without discussing the astonishing ambition of those
journeys, often both literal and metaphorical, and the temerity with which
they built an institution.

63 Nehru, J. “To Heads of Indian Missions.” 22 November 1953, The Selected Works of Jawaha-
rlal Nehru (swjn), 2nd Ser., vol. 24, ed. S. Gopal (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial
Fund), 557–58.

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