Nehru, Jawaharlal;
Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru
Beacon Press, c1951/1961, 440 pages
topics: | autobiograph%y | india | history
Nehru's autobiography was written in prison, June 1934 - Feb 35. On his first contacts with rural India. Extracts from Chapter X: I am externed, and the consequences Chapter XI, "Wanderings among the Kisans" - is quite a different narrative of this encounter. In 1920, I was totally ignorant of labour conditions in factories or fields, and my political outlook was entirely bourgois.... I knew, of course, that there was terrible poverty and misery... Just then, I got entangled in the kisan movement. Early in June 1920 (as far as I can remember), about 200 kisans marched fifty miles from the interior of Partabgarh district to Allahabad city with the intention of drawing the attention of the prominent politicians there to their woebegone condition... accompanied by some friends, I went to see them. They told us of the crushing exactions of the talukdars, of inhuman treatment, and that their condition had become wholly intolerable. They begged us to accompany them ... to protect them from the vengeance of the talukdars, who were angry at their having come to Allahabad on this mission. The visit was a revelation to me. We found the whole countryside afire with enthusiasm and full of a strange excitement. Enormous gatherings would take place at the briefest notice by word of mouth. One village would communicate with another, and the second with the third, and so on; and presently whole villages would empty out, and all over the fields there would be men and women and children on the march to the meeting place. Looking at them and their misery and overflowing gratitude, I was filled with shame and sorrow -- shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life and our petty politics of the city which ignored this vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty of India. ... Many of those present were landless people who had been ejected by the landlords ... What amazed me ... was our total ignorance in the cities of this great agrarian movement. No newspaper had contained a line about it; they were not interested in the rural areas. I realized more than ever how cut off we were from our people and how we lived and worked and agitated in a little world apart from them. 55