Abstract: 

Much has been said about Jawaharlal Nehru in recent years especially by his critics. But Nehru has not been silent either. He continues to speak through his writings and through the memory of India’s state building activities that took place during the Nehru era. In Nehru’s First Recruits which relied on among others Nehru’s own writings and his speeches in India and abroad, Kallol Bhattacherjee has tried to rebuild the history of the early years of the Indian Foreign Service, the dedicated diplomatic service that provided some of the key decision makers and influencers in the first several decades of independent India’s history. The IFS was a brand new service of the post-colonial Indian state and it became the voice of the Indian state at a crucial moment in history. Born in the backdrop of famine, war,   conflicts and decolonization, the IFS represented the requirements of India and the world that it came to inhabit as a young independent nation state with deep historical and civilisational roots. The inclusive building of the bureaucratic apparatus for diplomacy was the first message that India delivered to the world that the future of India was not going to be tied down by the horrors that accompanied its birth and that India would be led by a progressive and capacious state. Nehru’s First Recruits attempts to broaden the Nehru narrative by bringing in the characters who were inducted personally by Prime Minister Nehru into the foreign service of the state and then went on to leave their imprint on the narrative of the modern Indian state.

Speaker: Kallol Bhattacherjee hails from Tripura and has been a journalist for the past two decades. He is the author of The Great Game in Afghanistan: Rajiv Gandhi, General Zia and the Unending War (HarperCollins India, 2017), Nehru’s First Recruits: The Diplomats Who Built Independent India’s Foreign Policy (HarperCollins India 2024) and A Singular Spy: The Untold Story of Coomar Narain (Bloomsbury India, 2024). He has worked with the Iranian News Agency, and The Week in the past and is currently employed as a  diplomatic correspondent with The Hindu.