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From his eyes there shone the bitterness brewed by the repeated jailings of himself and his family, the bruises left in his heart by the clubbings he and his aged mother suffered. He was beaten in a Lucknow demonstration against the Simon Commission in 1928. During a National Week demonstration in 1932 his mother was beaten and left unconscious on the side of the road near her home in Allahabad. She was dead now, and so were his father and his wife Kamala, all helped along to funeral pyres on the banks of the Ganges by their work in India's struggle for independence. There was cold fury in him at the Himalayan stupidity of Tory imperialists, and bitterness at the failure of the West he understood to meet the East, which at times still baffled him.
Basically, said Nehru, the Indian crisis is the result of Europe's and America's concept of Asia. "What has astounded me," said Idealist Nehru, "is the total inability of the English-speaking peoples to think of the new world-situation in terms of realism—realism being more than military realism. It is political, psychological, economic realism. . . . Their concept of us is that of a mass people fallen low, a backward people who must be lifted out from the depths by good works. . . .
"I think about it and it seems to me that there is something essential lacking in European civilization, some poison which eats into it and brings about a war every 20 years. For the average Asiatic in this war the prestige of Europe has suffered tremendously. . . . The fall of France showed up the rottenness of Western imperialism and the burden which it imposed on the people of the West. . . . Much later came the fall of Burma and Malay. This, at any rate, was a direct lesson to the British that their empire was going to pieces. But the astounding thing is that it has had little or no effect."
Even if Indians are fast joining the Indian Army as mercenaries at 16 rupees (about $5) a month, even if India's industrial effort has quadrupled since 1939, Nehru believes that India cannot be defended unless India's peoples are armed with guns and inspired by the definite knowledge that they fight for their own freedom.
Beyond that he sees at least an "Asiatic Federation of Nations," with the millions of India joined with the millions of China, to replace the broken rule of the white man in the Far East. Beyond that Nehru dreams and believes that an India, freed from "the perfect peace of the grave and the absolute safety of a cage," can take her place in a world order or world federation, welcoming the white man's science and know-how, friendly to Soviet Russia, a partner with the Anglo-American federation in bringing peace and order to the world.
Nehru & the British. The British, Nehru once wrote, seized the body of India "and possessed her, but it was the possession of violence. They did not know her or try to know her. They never looked in her eyes, for theirs were averted and hers downcast through shame and humiliation."