(See Cover)
The shuffling of camel pads pounded softly near a great cream-colored mansion in Allahabad where the white, gold and green flag of the Indian National Congress party flirted with the wind. Here was dignity and beauty. Here, in the mansion built by his father, Jawaharlal Nehru knew that there was refuge from the world.
To this mansion had come many men: the lordly rulers of India, the sycophants, the rebels and the humblest peasants of the field. Here Nehru longed to return from the squalor and the wranglings in Bombay. Then came a knock at the door. Quickly Nehru's Oxford-educated daughter, Indira, ran to open it. She expected radio men setting up a microphone for a broadcast that Nehru was to make to the U.S. But the callers were not radio men. They were British police.
India & the World. It was the ninth time since 1921 that Pandit (Great Scholar) Nehru had gone to jail. Only twice has he been out for more than a year at a time. Yet for ten years he was secretary general of the Congress party, three times its president and, next to the half-naked Mahatma (Great Soul) Gandhi, the most powerful figure in India's political life. As a sensitive liberal and a world statesman, Nehru has outgrown the shadow of his overage Messiah. But Gandhi, self-willed, self-made symbol of the Hindu peasant, has clamped Nehru's feet to India. It was Nehru the disciple, not Nehru the internationalist, who returned once more to jail.
He packed his bag with four crisp white suits, gathered up his books. If there had been time, he would have made his broadcast, a final appeal to America—an appeal for understanding from the world's last great bastion of freedom. But there was not time: The British Raj, intent on crushing the second Gandhi civil-disobedience campaign in World War II, was mad and tough.
How angry the Raj can get, how tough it can be, is an old and bitter story to Nehru. Last week, having jailed Gandhi, Nehru and other Congress leaders (including Nehru's sister, Mrs. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit), the British claimed an early victory. At least 83 known killed, hundreds of others with broken skulls—this was the price Gandhi's followers paid for protest rioting in disobedience of Gandhi's policy of passive resistance. But though the first flames of riot were quenched, the fire went on underground (see p. 18).
When the monsoon (political) weather ends in September and the dry (war) season sets in, the British case will be tested.
Nehru & the World. In his last interview before returning to his "other home," Nehru told TIME Correspondent Theodore White what he might have explained in a U.S. broadcast. Above him in the reception room of the Allahabad mansion were pictures of his father, Motilal Nehru, a signed photograph of Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kaishek, a photograph of Sun Yat-sen and Madame Sun. Gone was Nehru's laughter and the jokes he had made with the Chiangs last spring when they conferred on world problems in a villa at New Delhi. Great masses of flowers had been in bloom then. Now the flowers in India were burned out in the summer heat. So was Nehru burned out, his handsome face drawn in lines of fatigue and sorrow.