“She was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. All of these had existed in our conscious or subconscious selves, though we may not have been aware of them. And they have gone to build up the complex mysterious personality of India.”
The meaning of this saying is that Nehru wanted to imply the idea of a complex yet so unified India in which everything from culture, living style to artistic structures was created in an unending process of both preservation and evolution at the same time. The way the Indian created their flourished culture has deeply showed the Indian personality who always try to maintain the traditional beauty in the evolution progress. They had built up the whole Indian culture based on the traditional values from thousands years ago without once trying to get rid of the old fundamental values of their grand and grand fathers, yet they known how to achieved the new things and balanced them between the old and the new so that now we can trace back the trail of the thousands years old civilizations through everything in Indian people’s daily life. After thousands years, India culture has now become richer in range wise and structure wise. We can see the richness in cultural values and the Indian has done a good job in advancing the India culture to be so