When Reading + Writing the World = Building a Nation
Why Voracious Reading and Writing are the True Hallmarks of Visionary Leadership
#OnHisBirthdayToday
Today marks the birth anniversary of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India.
Well, Jawaharlal Nehru stands out in modern history as a leader with a very rare combination: he was not only a visionary architect but also a reflective intellectual who was known for his voracious reading and writing, which helped him immensely in shaping our newly independent nation, back then!
This blogpost puts forth the proposition that great leaders of the Indian subcontinent, including Pt. Nehru, were able to cultivate a global perspective on life and hence were able to think far ahead of their times precisely because of their consistent reading and writing habits, that made them architects and visionaries of the Nation par excellence!
As such, this post underscores the importance of voracious reading and writing the world as a necessary prerequisite for nation building, and that, cultivating a global outlook is the very foundation of local governance.
So what makes Nehru unique amongst the gamut of Indian politicians?
Well, while the immediate instinct of most newly independent nations was mere survival, Nehru possessed the foresight to imagine India decades into the future.
And this helped young India march ahead of her rivals on many fronts.
First and foremost, Pt. Nehru cultivated the spirit of scientific enquiry. In this regard, he brought the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) directly under his control. Under his and Director-General Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar’s leadership, CSIR expanded rapidly into a nationwide network, inaugurating 12 national laboratories by 1954.
Secondly, he was instrumental in envisioning premier institutions of the nation. The Indian Institutes of Technology (starting with IIT Kharagpur in 1951), IIMs, and AIIMS were established under his leadership to make India self-reliant in technology, management, and medicine.
Thirdly, he gave a lot of emphasis on Space and Atomic Energy. He strongly believed that a developing nation could not afford to ignore advanced research, and with this in mind, he set up INCOSPAR in 1962 (which later became ISRO) under Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, and the Department of Atomic Energy under Dr. Homi Bhabha.
Fourthly, through the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), he carved out a uniquely independent foreign policy for India, refusing to join either the US or Soviet blocs during the peak of the Cold War.
Finally, what makes Nehru truly unique among 20th-century statesmen is that he was a voracious reader and a consistent writer. His most profound intellectual works were produced entirely in British prisons. Over his lifetime, he spent around 3,259 days (nearly nine years) incarcerated.
His masterpiece titled, The Discovery of India (1946), is exceptional because it was written during his imprisonment in the Ahmednagar Fort, without having access to any of the libraries. Drawing on his knowledge of the Upanishads, the Vedas, and ancient history, Nehru traced the socio-political development of India from the Indus Valley Civilisation, through successive foreign invasions, up to the British Raj. Similarly, his book on Glimpses of World History (1934) - a collection of 196 letters written from various prisons to his teenage daughter, Indira - beautifully presents a comprehensive history of humankind.
He was well-read in Fabian socialism, European literature, and Indian philosophy. Moreover, his vast reading allowed him to write prose that was politically astute, poetically insightful, and deeply appealing to the layperson.
While Pt. Nehru’s literary contributions are widely celebrated, he was not the only Indian politician to look beyond the nation for fresh insights.
Across generations, a vibrant array of Indian politicians, ministers, parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers and chief ministers have cultivated a profoundly global perspective - not only by their voracious reading but also by authoring extensive works and vernacular translations on world history, world literature and world cultures!
In fact, cultivating this voracious reading and writing especially in the domain of world history and world literature is a vital survival tool kit for politicians and rulers of the land! It would help them have those visionary insights that are needed to understand the local socio-economic and cultural challenges much better!
Now let’s go ahead and celebrate a bevy of such leaders from across India, in chronological order, who had such a firm grasp of world literature and world history!
Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928), was an Indian nationalist revolutionary, popularly known as Punjab Kesari, who wrote biographies of Italian revolutionaries Mazzini and Garibaldi to inspire the Indian masses.
His political exile and global travels transformed him into a comparative historian who read widely from world history and world literature to find practical blueprints for India’s liberation.
During his exile in the US, Rai voraciously read about the American Civil War, abolitionism, and the education of marginalised groups. He was highly conversant with the works of Booker T. Washington (specifically Up from Slavery) and W.E.B. Du Bois. In his 1916 book, The United States of America: A Hindu’s Impressions and a Study, he drew direct sociological parallels between the racial subjugation of Black Americans and the plight of the Oppressed Classes in India.
Moreover, he was profoundly influenced by Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 masterpiece titled, The French Revolution: A History. He viewed it as a global document on mass uprising and the overthrow of entrenched tyranny. He was also well-read in British political philosophy, critically engaging with John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, using their own theoretical frameworks of liberty and utilitarianism to dismantle the moral justifications for British imperialism.
In addition, Rai spent time in Japan in 1915 and closely studied its rapid industrial and educational modernisation. He viewed the Meiji Restoration not just as history, but as an immediate Asian blueprint for challenging Western hegemony. He authored the book The Evolution of Japan and Other Papers, analysing how the Japanese state utilised compulsory education and technological adaptation to build national sovereignty.
Though he was not a Marxist, Rai read extensively on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. His engagement with Marxist literature and global labour history heavily influenced his economic outlook. This international perspective led him to become the founding president of the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) in 1920, firmly connecting the Indian anti-colonial struggle with global working-class movements.
One important point to be noted here is that, Rai studied voraciously from American race relations, Japanese education, or Italian unification, purely to extract political technologies and institutional models that could be reverse-engineered for the Indian context.
Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975), an esteemed MCC alumnus, philosopher, and former President of India has authored several profound books, including Eastern Religions and Western Thought, mapping the global transmission of philosophical ideas.
His reading list seems to have been quite epical in its scope. He read the Greeks (Plato, Plotinus, and Neoplatonism) and modern European giants with a highly critical eye. He deeply studied British Idealists like F.H. Bradley and T.H. Green, and German philosophers including Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. He also engaged closely with the contemporary evolutionary philosophy of Henri Bergson, whom he later met in France.
Dr. Radhakrishnan also had a great passion for English literature. He frequently quoted Shakespeare, Dante, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, T.S. Eliot, and Walt Whitman in his lectures and treatises. He viewed these writers not merely as literary figures, but as spiritual “seers” whose intuitive grasp of human nature paralleled the ancient Indian rishis.
In short, Radhakrishnan read the West to explain the East. He absorbed Western literature, history, and philosophy to acquire the exact intellectual vocabulary necessary to elevate Indian thought from what the West dismissed as “mysticism” into a formalised, globally respected philosophical system.
Dr. Sampurnanand (1891–1969), the second Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh wrote the 1936 Hindi work Samajvad, tracing the global history of socialism and the Russian Revolution.
As a Sanskrit polymath, astronomer, and a founding pillar of the Congress Socialist Party, his global reading was rigorously comparative.
During the 1920s and 30s, Sampurnanand voraciously read Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. This reading directly informed his monumental 1936 Hindi treatise Samajvad (Socialism), which served as a foundational blueprint for the Congress Socialist Party. He analysed the Russian Revolution and concluded that while Marxist economic analysis was largely correct, orthodox Communism’s reliance on totalitarian statecraft and strict atheistic materialism was fundamentally incompatible with human liberty.
Moreover, unlike many of his peers who read the West purely for political theory, Sampurnanand studied Western administrative sociology and global penal reform. He read extensively on the Reformative Theory of Punishment - the Western sociological concept that justice should rehabilitate rather than merely punish. He translated this global reading directly into statecraft - as Governor of Rajasthan in 1963, he pioneered the Shri Sampurnanand Khula Bandi Shivir (India’s largest and longest-functioning open-air prison), an experimental system allowing convicts to live with their families and work, reflecting progressive global prison models.
In short, Dr. Sampurnanand did not read Western philosophy to imitate it, but to correct it!
Sardar K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963), again an MCC alumnus, diplomat, and historian was one of India’s most respected polymaths. As a historian, diplomat, and the founding president of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi, his reading and writing systematically dismantled Eurocentric worldviews while deeply indigenising Western literature for Indian readers.
Panikkar’s magnum opus titled, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498-1945, was a massive paradigm shift. Before Panikkar, global maritime history was predominantly written by Europeans as the inevitable expansion of civilisation.
Panikkar inverted this gaze, analysing extensive European maritime records and Asian histories to write a monumental critique of how Western Sea power, mercantilism, and racial dogmas destabilised the land-based empires of India, China, and Japan. He redefined world history by framing European colonialism not as a triumphant endpoint, but as a specific, temporary epoch that ended with the withdrawal of Western navies.
While he read Western literature rigorously at Oxford, Panikkar actively worked to localise it. In 1959, he translated Shakespeare’s King Lear (Lear Rajavu) into Malayalam. Rather than producing a dry, literal prose translation, he adapted the work using the local keka poetic meter (a traditional Dravidian prosody). By doing so, he engaged with world literature not as a passive recipient, but by forcing the English canon to adapt to the aesthetic and linguistic rhythms of Kerala.
Hence, Panikkar’s engagement with the world was deeply strategic. His ultimate goal was to de-centre Europe and assert a self-confident, culturally rooted Asian worldview on the global stage.
Let’s now have a quick look at the other major readerly-writerly politicians who have contributed immensely to the growth and prosperity of the nation with the nutritious feeds of their reading and writing!
Dr. Zakir Husain (1897–1969), the former President of India, translated Plato’s Republic into Urdu as Riyasat, wrote on European educational systems, and translated foundational economic texts by Friedrich List and Edwin Cannan.
Minoo Masani (1905–1998), was a three-time Member of Parliament who wrote Our Growing Human Family, tracing the worldwide evolution of human civilisations.
[On an aside, K. Kamaraj (1903 – 1975), popularly known as Kamarajar, was a statesman, and former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. Although he did not have a formal educational degree, he was an avid reader and a self-taught intellectual who could read and write fluently in both Tamil and English.
The popular title “Padikkatha Methai” (Uneducated Genius) was given to him because he lacked a formal educational degree, and through this massive knowledge base through self-education.
Especially during his years in British jails, Kamaraj spent his time educating himself through books and literature from across the world. He kept up with world politics by reading international magazines like Time and Newsweek, as well as political books like John Gunther’s Inside Africa and Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means. He was a regular reader of newspapers and political editorials, particularly those by Kalki in Ananda Vikatan.
Although he did not have a formal education, his profound reading of world history and world literature gave him such a sharp grasp and understanding of global affairs and governance, that proved instrumental in the implementation of the free education and midday meal schemes that he later pioneered in Tamil Nadu]
Coming back –
C. N. Annadurai (1909–1969), the former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu penned Tamil works like Romapuri Ranigal to draw political lessons from Roman history for the Dravidian movement.
Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia (1910–1967), deeply influenced by his doctoral studies in Germany during the rise of Nazism, the political activist authored Wheel of History, (1955) providing a cyclical analysis of global civilisations.
C. Achutha Menon (1913–1991), the former Chief Minister of Kerala translated H. G. Wells’ A Short History of the World into Malayalam.
Inder Kumar Gujral (1919–2012), the former Prime Minister analysed Cold War geopolitics and 20th-century world power dynamics in his writings and his memoir, Matters of Discretion.
Dr. Karan Singh (Born 1931), the parliamentarian’s scholarly writings explore India’s spiritual heritage within the broader canvas of Asian religious history.
Jaswant Singh (1938–2020), the former External Affairs Minister authored Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence, a major analytical work on modern Asian history and British colonial strategies.
Dr. M. V. Ramana Reddy (1943–2021), the former Andhra Pradesh MLA authored a massive four-volume A Brief History of the World (Tookiga Prapancha Charitra) in Telugu.
M. J. Akbar (Born 1951), the journalist and former Minister of State authored The Shade of Swords and Tinderbox, extensively covering Middle Eastern and South Asian history.
Daggubati Venkateswara Rao (Born 1953), the founder-member of TDP and former Minister authored the comprehensive Telugu book Prapancha Charitra on global historical events.
Jairam Ramesh (Born 1954), former Central Minister and Member of Parliament authored The Light of Asia, mapping the historical spread and global influence of Buddhist narratives.
Shashi Tharoor (Born 1956), the parliamentarian and diplomat has extensively examined global imperial history and British colonial extraction in his works like Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India.
To conclude then -
This scholarly bevy of leaders were of the firm opinion that –
To build a nation, one must first read and write… the world!
This, then is the core takeaway from this blogpost – that, for politicians to double up as nation builders and visionary architects, the nation’s architecture is ‘first-draft’ed in the consistent and committed habits of reading and writing!
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