Nehru Biography, Personal Life, Age 2025, Early Life, Struggle for Indian independence

Nehru Biography – Define Jawaharlal Nehru (born November 14, 1889, Allahabad, India died May 27, 1964, New Delhi) First Prime Minister of independent India (1947–64), who established a parliamentary government and became known for his neutral (nonaligned) policies in foreign affairs. He was also one of the key leaders of the Indian independence movement during the 1930s and 40s.

Profile

• Full Name: Define Jawaharlal Nehru
• Date Of Birth: Born November 14, 1889
• Family: Motilal Nehru (Father), Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (sister)
• Spouse: Kamala Kaul
• Children:Indira Priyadarshini
• Profession: Politician
• Nationality: Indian

Early life

Nehru was born into a family of Kashmiri Brahmins, noted for their administrative prowess and scholarship, who migrated to Delhi in the early 18th century. He was the son of Motilal Nehru, a famous lawyer and leader of the Indian independence movement, who became one of Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi’s leading associates.

Jawaharlal was the eldest of four children, two of whom were girls. A sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, later became the first woman president of the United Nations General Assembly. Education Until the age of 16, Nehru was educated at home by English rule and a series of tutors. Only one of them the part-Irish, part-Belgian Theosophist, Ferdinand Brooks appears to have made any impression on him. Jawaharlal also had a respected Indian teacher who taught him Hindi and Sanskrit. In 1905 he went to Harrow, a leading English school, where he stayed for two years.

Education

Nehru’s academic career was by no means outstanding. From Harrow he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he spent three years gaining an honors degree in natural science. After leaving Cambridge he qualified as a barrister at the Inner Temple in London two years later, where, in his own words, he maintained the original meaning.

The seven years Nehru spent in England left him in a dim half-world, neither in England nor in India. Some years later he wrote, “I have become a strange mixture of East and West, everywhere, nowhere at home.” He went back to India to discover India. The controversial pulls and pressures he had to apply his experience abroad to his personality were never fully resolved.

Personal life

Four years after his return to India, in March 1916, Nehru married Kamala Kaul, who also came from a Kashmiri family settled in Delhi. Their only child, Indira Priyadarshini, was born in 1917; She would later (under her married name of Indira Gandhi) also serve (1966–77 and 1980–84) as Prime Minister of India. In addition, Indira’s son Rajiv Gandhi succeeded his mother as Prime Minister (1984–89).

Chandigarh. Sculptures at the Rock Garden of Chandigarh A sculpture park in Chandigarh, India, also known as the Rock Garden of Nek Chand. Created by Indian self-taught artist Nek Chand Saini. Visionary artist, folk artist, environmental art Britannica Quiz Explore India Quiz (Read Indira Gandhi’s 1975 Britannica essay on global underprivilege.)

Political Apprenticeship

After returning to India, Nehru first tried to settle down as a lawyer. Unlike his father, however, he had only a passing interest in his profession and had no taste for the practice of law or the company of lawyers. For the time, he could be described, like many of his generation, as an instinctive nationalist who longed for the independence of his country, but, like most of his contemporaries, he did not formulate any concrete ideas about how to achieve it. Nehru’s autobiography reveals his lively interest in Indian politics during the time he was studying abroad.

His letters to his father in the same period show his similar interest in India’s independence. But until father and son met Mahatma Gandhi and persuaded him to follow in his political footsteps, neither developed any definite ideas on how to achieve independence. The quality in Gandhi that impressed the two Nehru’s was his insistence on action.

Gandhi argued that wrongdoing should not only be condemned but resisted. Earlier, Nehru and his father despised the run of contemporary Indian politicians whose nationalism, with a few notable exceptions, consisted of endless speeches and long-winded resolutions. Jawaharlal was also attracted by Gandhi’s insistence on fighting British rule in India without fear or hatred.

Struggle for Indian independence

Struggle for Indian Independence After the Lahore Session of 1929, Nehru emerged as a leader of the country’s intellectuals and youth. Gandhi shrewdly elevated him to the presidency of the Congress Party over some of his seniors, hoping that Nehru would draw India’s youth – who were then attracted to extreme leftist causes – into the mainstream of the Congress movement. Gandhi also correctly calculated that, with added responsibility, Nehru himself would tend to take a middle course. After his father’s death in 1931, Nehru moved to the inner council of the Congress Party and became close to Gandhi.

Although Gandhi did not officially designate Nehru as his political heir until 1942, the Indian public saw Nehru as Gandhi’s natural successor by the mid-1930s. The Gandhi-Irvine Pact of March 1931, signed between Gandhi and the British Viceroy, Lord Irvine (later Lord Halifax), signaled a ceasefire between the two major powers in India.

It was a culmination of Gandhi’s more effective civil disobedience movement, launched a year earlier as the Salt March, during which Nehru was arrested. Hopes that the Gandhi-Irvine Pact would herald a more relaxed period of Indo-British relations were not borne out; Lord Willingdon (who succeeded Irwin as Viceroy in 1931) imprisoned Gandhi in January 1932, shortly after his return from the Second Round Table Conference in London. He was accused of trying to mount another civil disobedience movement; Nehru was also arrested and sentenced to two years in prison.

Three Round Table Conferences held in London to further India’s progress towards self-government eventually resulted in the Government of India Act of 1935, which gave the Indian provinces a system of popular self-government. Ultimately, it provided for a federal system composed of autonomous provinces and principalities. Although the federation never came into being, provincial autonomy was enforced. In the mid-1930s Nehru was very concerned about developments in Europe, which seemed to be heading for another world war. He was in Europe in early 1936, visiting his ailing wife, shortly before dying in a sanitarium in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Even then he insisted that India’s position in the event of war was on the side of democracy, although he insisted that India could only fight as an independent country in support of Great Britain and France. When elections following the introduction of provincial autonomy brought the Congress party to power in the majority of provinces, Nehru faced a dilemma. The Muslim League under Mohammad Ali Jinnah (who was to become the creator of Pakistan) did poorly in the elections.

The Congress, therefore, imprudently rejected Jinnah’s request for the formation of coalition Congress-Muslim League governments in some provinces, a decision supported by Nehru. The clash between the Congress and the Muslim League resulted in a conflict between Hindus and Muslims that eventually led to the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan.