Jawaharlal Nehru

Delhi, India

1905–12 (and as a visitor at times thereafter)

Jawaharlal Nehru was President of the Indian National Congress (INC), 1929–30, 1936–7 and 1946; independent India’s first Prime Minister; and the author of some of its most definitive, form-giving national texts (An Autobiography (1936); The Discovery of India (1946)). Nehru’s father Motilal sent him to England for his further education. Here he spent seven largely undistinguished if privileged years, as described in the Autobiography: 1905–7 at Harrow, the public school; 1907–10 at Trinity College, Cambridge (natural sciences tripos, second class); and then ‘hovering about’ London studying for his Bar examinations (p. 25). He was called to the Bar in 1912 and returned to India, where he eventually embarked on a successful political career through Congress.

Nehru traced the reverse path to M. K. Gandhi, who came into contact with Theosophy in Britain.  Nehru was a young Theosophist, due to the influence of his teacher F. T. Brooks (and was inducted by Annie Besant) but in England abandoned this in favour of a Pateresque aestheticism and then the binding involvement of nationalist politics. At Harrow he met the son of the Gaekwad of Baroda and Paramjit Singh. Nehru read the sexologists of the time, including Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebbing. At Harrow he met Edwin Montagu and heard the guest speakers B.C. Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai and Gokhale during his student days.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Nehru’s time in Britain is the extent to which his experiences as a student, an Indian student in particular, empowered him (if silently) as a political thinker, and how his clubbing together with other Indian students fostered and sharpened his sense of India (although he was not particularly active in the Cambridge Majlis). Nehru returned to Britain a number of times after his student days, whether for political negotiations with the government or to escort his daughter, Indira, for her education in the 1930s.