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The Enduring Marks. At 15, Nehru was sent to Harrow. "I well remember," he wrote in his autobiography, "that when the time came to part [from Harrow], tears came to my eyes." Moving on to Cambridge, where he specialized in chemistry, botany and geology, Nehru along with many of his British contemporaries acquired a faith in science as the universal nostrum. "Those were the days," recalls one of Nehru's English friends, "when Socialism was a pretty vague thing. Earnest young men at Oxford and Cambridge talked ethics, politics and economics in the same breath, without knowing exactly what they wanted."
This schoolboy's vision of scientifically organized socialist society, based essentially on an esthetic distaste for poverty and an aristocratic contempt for "shopkeepers." was made to order for a Harrovian Brahman, and it was one of the enduring marks which Nehru bore when he returned to India in 1912. "Do what I will," he admitted years later, "I cannot get out of the habits of mind and the standards and ways of judging other countries, as well as life generally, which I acquired in school and college in England."
Nehru's English patina, however, was deceptive. "Behind me," he wrote years after his return from Britain, "lie somewhere the subconscious racial memories of a hundred generations of Brahmans." Behind him, too, were conscious memories of hearing since childhood of the "overbearing character and insulting manner of English people . . . toward Indians." Those memories made him a champion of the underdog and filled him with his own intense brand of racial prejudice. "I try to be impartial and objective," he noted in his autobiography, "but the Asiatic in me influences my judgment whenever an Asiatic people are concerned."
The Discovery of India. For a few years after his return to India, the rebel in Nehru was submerged in the English gentleman. He settled down in Allahabad, married a suitable Kashmiri Brahman girl (chosen by his father) and practiced law in desultory fashion. But before long, boredom and the rising tide of Indian nationalism swept him into the revolutionary politics of the Indian National Congress Party. And once he met Gandhi, the die was cast. Two men more diverse than Nehru and the frail little Mahatma could hardly be imagined. Devoted to the scientific socialism of the tractor and the big machine, Nehru could scarcely comprehend the distrust of machine civilization which Gandhi symbolized with his home spinning wheel, and he was outraged when Gandhi proclaimed a disastrous earthquake to be divine punishment for India's moral imperfections.
Following Gandhi cost Nehru dear. He spent 14 years in British prisons. His wife Kamala and his father, both of whom joined the independence movement under his influence, died after repeated imprisonments. Nonetheless, it was the fight for independence that focused Nehru's talents and made him a man of destiny. Through it, he discovered peasant India and the fact that, somehow or other, he could manipulate its soul. And it was primarily for this skill that Gandhi, who may have been a saint but was above all a shrewd politician, named Nehru heir to the leadership of India.