Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru was born in Allahabad on November 14, 1889. He received his early education at home under private tutors. At the age of fifteen, he went to England and after two years at Harrow, joined Cambridge University where he took his tripos in Natural Sciences. He was later called to the Bar from Inner Temple. He returned to India in 1912 and plunged straight into politics. Even as a student, he had been interested in the struggle of all nations who suffered under foreign domination. He took keen interest in the Sinn Fein Movement in Ireland. In India, he was inevitably drawn into the struggle for independence.
In 1912, he attended the Bankipore Congress as a delegate, and became Secretary of the Home Rule League, Allahabad in 1919. In 1916 he had his first meeting with Mahatma Gandhi and felt immensely inspired by him. He organised the first Kisan March in Pratapgarh District of Uttar Pradesh in 1920. He was twice imprisoned in connection with the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-22.
Pt. Nehru became the General Secretary of the All India Congress Committee in September 1923. He toured Italy, Switzerland, England, Belgium, Germany and Russia in 1926. In Belgium, he attended the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Brussels as an official delegate of the Indian National Congress. He also attended the tenth anniversary celebrations of the October Socialist Revolution in Moscow in 1927. Earlier, in 1926, at the Madras Congress, Nehru had been instrumental in committing the Congress to the goal of Independence. While leading a procession against the Simon commission, he was lathi-charged in Lucknow in 1928. On August 29, 1928 he attended the All-Party Congress and was one of the signatories to the Nehru Report on Indian Constitutional Reform, named after his father Shri Motilal Nehru. The same year, he also founded the ‘Independence for India League’, which advocated complete severance of the British connection with India, and became its General Secretary.
In 1929, Pt. Nehru was elected President of the Lahore Session of the Indian National Congress, where complete independence for the country was adopted as the goal. He was imprisoned several times during 1930-35 in connection with the Salt Satyagraha and other movements launched by the Congress. He completed his ‘Autobiography’ in Almora Jail on February 14, 1935. After release, he flew to Switzerland to see his ailing wife and visited London in February-March, 1936. He also visited Spain in July 1938, when the country was in the throws of Civil War. Just before the court-break of the Second World War, he visited China too.
On October 31, 1940 Pt. Nehru was arrested for offering individual Satyagraha to protest against India’s forced participation in war. He was released along with the other leaders in December 1941. On August 7, 1942 Pt. Nehru moved the historic ‘Quit India’ resolution at the A.I.C.C. session in Bombay. On August 8,1942 he was arrested along with other leaders and taken to Ahmednagar Fort. This was his longest and also his last detention. In all, he suffered imprisonment nine times. After his release in January 1945, he organized legal defence for those officers and men of the INA charged with treason. In March 1946, Pt. Nehru toured South East Asia. He was elected President of the Congress for the fourth time on July 6, 1946 and again for three more terms from 1951 to 1954.
History And Early Life
Nehru was born on Nov. 14, 1889, at Allahabad, India. His name Jawaharlal mea»s “red jewel,” a name he once said he found “odious.” His father, Motilal Nehru, was a wealthy lawyer from the state of Kashmir. Both he and Nehru’s mother, Swarup Bani Nehru, were Brahmans, the highest caste in India. Jawaharlal had two younger sisters: Swarup, born in 1900, and Krishna, born in 1907. They grew up in a palatial home called Anand Bhawan, meaning Abode of Happiness.
India was a part of the British Empire, and many of Motilal’s friends were English. Until Nehru was 15, he was educated at home by British tutors. He also studied the Hindi and Sanskrit languages with a Brahman teacher who, according to Nehru, managed to impart “extraordinarily little.” The only one of his tutors who impressed the boy was a French-Irish philosopher named Ferdinand T. Brooks. Brooks imbued Jawaharlal with an enthusiasm for reading and for science.
He introduced the youth to theosophy, a mystical system of thought that claims to explain the universe on the basis of direct revelations. The doctrine fascinated Nehru, and at the age of 13 he joined the theosophical society. But his interest in theosophy soon waned.
Student in England. In 1905, Nehru’s father took him to England to enroll at Harrow, a leading English public school. Nehru’s housemaster, the Bev. Edgar Stogdon, remembered him later as “a very nice boy, quiet and very refined. He was not demonstrative but one felt there was great strength of character. I should doubt if he told many boys what his opinions were. . . .”
Jawaharlal entered Trinity College at Cambridge University in 1907. There he studied chemistry, geology, and botany. He displayed little intellectual interest or ambition. He attended meetings of a debating society, but seldom found courage to speak himself. Nonetheless, the society’s political discussions stirred his interest in the growing Indian nationalist movement. He also became sensitive to discrimination against Indians. After completing his studies at Cambridge University, Nehru studied law in London, where he passed his bar examination in 1912.
REFERENCES : 8sa.net, pmindia.gov.in
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