Nehru, Jawaharlal (1889-1964), nationalist leader and the first prime minister of India (1947-1964), was born at Allahabad on 14 November 1889. The only son of Motilal Nehru, he was educated at Harrow and Cambridge and called to the bar in London. The seven years he spent in England were a formative period in which he acquired a rational and skeptical outlook and sampled Fabian socialism and Irish nationalism, which added to his own patriotic dedication. He returned to India in 1912. Legal work and a comfortable life failed to satisfy his restless spirit: it was not law but politics that called him. He joined the Home Rule movement in 1917, but his real initiation into militant politics came two years later when Mohandas Gandhi launched his campaign against the Rowlatt Bills.

There was much about Gandhi that puzzled and baffled young Nehru, but he saw in Gandhi`s satyagraha and effective alternative to armchair politics and sporadic terrorism, between which Indian politics was oscillating. At first Nehru`s father did not like the idea of his twenty-nine-year-old son plunging into an unconstitutional agitation, but both father and son cast in their lot with Gandhi at the crucial session of the Indian National Congress held in Calcutta in September 1920. A year later they were jailed for six months. This was Jawaharlal`s first prison term; in all he was to spend nine years in jail. Despite intellectual and temperamental differences, Jawaharlal became a trusted lieutenant of Gandhi. He served as general secretary of the All India Congress Committee, whose office was located in the family house at Allahabad. While he was in Europe for the treatment of his ailing wife, Kamala in 1926-1927, Nehru attended the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities Against Imperialism in Brussels and paid a brief visit to Moscow, which gave a radical edge to his politics. In December 1928, at the Calcutta session, he clashed with the Congress old guard on the issue of dominion status for India. A year later, he presided over the Lahore session, which declared complete independence and civil disobedience under Gandhi`s leadership. Nehru was elected to the Congress presidency again in 1936, 1937, and 1946, and he came to occupy a position in the nationalist movement second only to that of Gandhi.

Passionately opposed to fascism, Nehru was eager for nationalist India to throw its full weight behind the Allied war effort. But he insisted that the British government recognize India`s right to freedom. After the abortive Cripps Mission, he reluctantly fell in line with Gandhi`s plans for the "Quit India" campaign and was imprisoned in August 1942. Released in 1945, he took a leading part in the negotiations that culminated in the emergence of the dominions of India and Pakistan in August 1947.

Nehru was fifty-seven when he assumed office as prime minister of India. Although his entire life had been spent in opposition, he made an effortless transition from a political agitator to a statesman. His government coped successfully with formidable challenges: the disorders and mass exodus of minorities across the new border with Pakistan, the integration of 500-odd princely states into the Indian Union, the framing of a new constitution, and the establishment of the political and administrative infrastructure for a parliamentary democracy.

Nehru was also a writer of distinction. His writings were a by-product of his intense involvement in the Indian nationalist movement, and his major works, Glimpses of World History (1934), his Autobiography (1936), and The Discovery of India (1946), were actually written in prison.