It is all the more astonishing that much of his writing took place amid the privations of imprisonment, the only periods of his life that afforded him the sustained quiet needed to produce memorable prose. In eight terms of imprisonment between 1922 and 1945, Nehru spent a grand total of 3,262 days in eight different jails. Nearly ten years of his life were to be wasted behind bars—though not entirely wasted, since they allowed him to produce several remarkable books of reflection, nationalist awakening, and autobiography.

He used his time in jail to read widely—his first stint in prison featured the Quran, the Bible, and the Bhagavad Gita, a history of the Holy Roman Empire, Ernest Binfield Havell’s The History of Aryan Rule in India from the Earliest Times to the Death of Akbar with its paeans to India’s glorious past, and the memoirs of the Mughal emperor Babur, and the French traveller François Bernier. In 1926, he wrote that ‘what is required in India most is a course of study of Bertrand Russell’s books’. During another stint in jail in 1930, he devoured Russell, Nikolai Bukharin, and Oswald Spengler, read André Maurois and Romain Rolland in French, and even threw in Lloyd George’s speeches and Shakespeare’s sonnets. He was allowed to take notes, though he rarely needed to consult them; once he had finished a book it found a place in his mental reference library.

It was from this well-furnished intellect that Nehru produced his own work, emerging from a mind that remained intensely curious and ready to engage with the new. After a decade at the feet of his father, Motilal, and the awe-inspiring Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru spent most

of 1926–27 in Europe. These twenty months were a hiatus in Nehru’s

political career but not in the development of his political thought.

Jawaharlal kept up his writing, publishing a letter in the Journal de

Genève and numerous articles in the Indian press. He boarded his ship

in Bombay a committed Gandhian, his worldview shaped almost wholly

by the inspirational teachings of the Mahatma. When he returned in

December 1927, having spent the interim discovering the intellectual

currents of Europe and rethinking his own assumptions, he briefly refused

to meet his old mentor. The rebellion was short-lived and did not derive

from any fundamental differences over the national question, but it was

revealing, nonetheless. Jawaharlal left India as Motilal Nehru’s son and

Mahatma Gandhi’s acolyte, but he returned his own man.

His four-day visit to the USSR in 1927, supplemented by extensive

reading about Russia in English, prompted a series of articles on the USSR

in the Indian papers which were compiled in one volume in December

1928 under the unimaginative title Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches

and Impressions. The USSR’s progress in such diverse areas as agriculture

and literacy, its eradication of class and gender discrimination, its

treatment of minorities, and the combination of professionalism and

zeal that marked the Leninist revolutionaries, all made a deeply positive

impression on the Indian nationalist. Jawaharlal Nehru’s first book was,

therefore, a paean to the Soviet Union. Yet those critics who saw him

as ‘pro-Soviet’ overlooked his independence of mind, always his most

attractive feature.

His insights into world affairs revealed both intelligence and acuity.

He wrote as early as 1927! that ‘England, in order to save herself

from extinction, will become a satellite of the United States and incite the

imperialism and capitalism of America to fight by her side.’ He suggested

that a communist victory in China would not necessarily mean that

the country would be ruled by the principles of Marx; the role of the

‘small peasant’ would ensure a departure from ‘pure communism’. At the

same time, he found it difficult to escape the prism of the anti-colonial

freedom fighter; while taking a benign view of Russian and Chinese

communism, he thought that ‘the great problem of the near future will

be American imperialism, even more than British imperialism. Or it may

be…that the two will join together to create a powerful Anglo-Saxon