‘Speaking with Nature’ excerpt: When an Englishwoman took exception with Nehru

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In January-February 1952, India held its first general elections.

The Congress won a comfortable majority, and Jawaharlal Nehru, himself a votary of rapid industrialization and mechanization, consolidated his position as prime minister. Among the minority of writers who did not share his views was his fellow former freedom-fighter, Mira [Madeleine Slade].

She wrote in private to Nehru about her disenchantment with the political and economic path free India was following. Meanwhile, in a printed article in Harijan, Mira advocated a radical return to Gandhian principles.

She outlined a charter of 18 points to this effect, these including a simplification of the government machinery, a closer association of peasants and workers in the administrative process, a new electoral system emphasizing local councils rather than a national Parliament, competed for by non-party candidates, a moratorium on development schemes such as large dams and chemical farming until their benefits and costs were properly assessed, an education system based not on Western models but on Gandhi’s template of ‘Basic Education’. Mira wrote of her utopian Gandhian charter that it was ‘merely an outline’.

It was drafted in her new ashram in the interior hills, in a remote part of what was once the princely state of Tehri Garhwal. ‘Far away in these vast mountains,’ she wrote, ‘I have no one to consult but the Himalayan forests and Eternal Snows (for fundamentals indeed the best advisers), and naturally the points adumbrated here will undergo additions and embellishments when discussed and worked out in consultation with others….’ Among the hallmarks of Mira’s thinking was her deep appreciation of the role played by