India Wins Freedom - pg. 215

As soon as Sardar Patel had been convinced, Lord Mountbatten turned his attention to Jawaharlal. Jawaharlal was not at first at all willing and reacted violently against the very idea of partition, but Lord Mountbatten persisted till step by step Jawaharlal's opposition was worn down. Within a month of Lord Mountbatten's arrival in India, Jawaharlal, the firm opponent of partition, had become, if not a supporter, at least acquiescent towards the idea.
I have often wondered how Jawaharlal was won over by Lord Mountbatten. Jawaharlal is a man of principle, but he is also impulsive and amenable to personal influence. The arguments of Sardar Patel must have had some effect, but could not have been decisive. Jawaharlal was also greatly impressed by Lord Mountbatten, but perhaps even greater was the influence of Lady Mountbatten. She is not only extremely intelligent, but had a most attractive and friendly temperament. She admired her husband greatly and in many cases tried to interpret his thought to those who would not at first agree with him.

India Wins Freedom - pg. 198

In the latter half of October, Jawaharlal took a step which was unnecessary and which I opposed. His nature is, however, such that he often acts on impulse. As a rule he is open to persuasion, but sometimes he makes up his mind without taking all the facts into consideration. Once he has done so, he tends to go ahead regardless of what the consequences may be.

India Wins Freedom - pg. 187

Jawaharlal is one of my dearest friends and his contribution to India's national life is second to none. He has worked and suffered for Indian freedom and, since the attainment of independence, he has become the symbol of our national unity and progress. I have nevertheless to say with regret that he is at times apt to be carried away by his feelings. Not only so, but sometimes he is so impressed by theoretical considerations that he is apt to underestimate the realities of a situation.

India Wins Freedom - pg. 105

The quadrangle was quite bare when we came. Jawaharlal proposed that we should prepare a flower garden as this would keep us occupied and also beautify the place. We welcomed the idea and asked the superintendent to write to Poona for seeds. We then prepared the ground for flower beds. Jawaharlal took the leading role in this. We planted some thirty or forty kinds of seeds, watered them every day and cleaned the beds. As the plants began to sprout, we watched their growth with fascinated interest. When the flowers started to bloom, the compound became a place of beauty and joy.

India Wins Freedom - pg. 89

Apart from Jawaharlal, who often agreed with me, the other members were generally content to follow Gandhiji's lead. Sardar Patel, Dr. Rajendra Prasad and Acharya Kirpilani had no clear idea about the war. They rarely tried to judge things on their own, and in any case they were accustomed to subordinate their judgment to Gandhiji. As such, discussion with them was almost useless. After all our discussions, the only thing they could day was that we must have faith in Gandhiji. They held that if we trusted him he would find some way out. They cited the example of the Salt Satyagraha Movement in 1930.

India Wins Freedom - pg. 79

Jawaharlal's nature is such that, when there is some tension in his mind, he talks even in his sleep. The day's preoccupations come to him as dreams. When I came out, Shrimati Rameshwari Nehru told me that for the last two nights Jawaharlal had been talking in his sleep. He was carrying on a debate and was sometimes muttering and sometimes speaking loudly. She had heard Cripps's name, sometimes references to Gandhiji and sometimes my name. This was added proof of how great was the strain under which his mind was working.

India Wins Freedom - pg. 77

I may also mention that Jawaharlal has always been more moved by international considerations than most Indians. He has looked at all questions from an international rather than a national point of view. I also shared his concern for the international issues, but to me the question of India's independence was paramount. I preferred the democracies to the fascist powers but I could not forget that, unless the democratic principle was applied to India's case, all professions of democracy sounded hollow and insincere. I also remembered the course of events since the First World War. Britain had then declared that she was fighting German imperialism to protect the rights of the smaller nations. When the United States entered the War, President Wilson formulated his Fourteen Points and pleaded for the self-determination of all nations. Nevertheless the rights of India were not respected. Nor were the Fourteen Points ever applied to India's case. I, therefore, felt that all talk about the democratic camp was meaningless unless India's case was seriously considered. I made all these points in an interview I gave to the News Chronicle about a week later in Calcutta.

India Wins Freedom - Opening

CHAPTER 1

Background

MY forefathers came to India from Herat [a city in Afghanistan]in Babar's days. They first settled in Agra and later moved to Delhi. It was a scholarly family and, in Akbar's time, Maulana [or Moslem scholar] Jamaluddin became famous as a religious divine. After him, the family became more inclined to worldly affairs and several members occupied important civil positions. In Shahjehan's days, Mohammad Hadi was appointed Governor of the Agra Fort.

For

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU

Friend and Comrade

INDIA WINS FREEDOM

COPYRIGHT 1959

BY ORIENT LONGMANS PRIVATE LTD.

COPYRIGHT 1960

BY LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., INC.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK, OR ANY PORTION THEREOF, IN ANY FORM

PUBLISHED SIMULTANEOUSLY IN THE DOMINION OF CANADA BY

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., TORONTO

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

Printed in the United States of America

India After Gandhi - pg. 239

In the Provisional Parliament, orthodox members claimed that the Hindu laws had stayed unchanged from time immemorial. "The rules of conduct and duties of men in our country are determined by the Vedas," said Ramnarayan Singh. Despite the challenges down the ages -- posed by Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity -- "the Vedic religion did not perish ... [the] Vedic religion is still there." But now, "we have Pandit Nehru's administration whose representative Dr. Ambedkar wants to abrogate with a single stroke all those rules which have existed since the beginning of the world."

India After Gandhi - pg. 20

The resolution to mark the last Sunday of January as Independence Day was passed in the city of Lahore, where the Congress was holding its annual session. It was here that Jawaharlal Nehru was chosen president of the Congress, in confirmation of his rapidly rising status within the Indian national movement. 

The Discovery Of India - pg. 173

Shah Jehan was a contemporary of Louis XIV of France, the grand monarch, and the Thirty Years' War was ravaging central Europe then. As Versailles took shape, the Taj Mahal and the Pearl Mosque grew up in Agra, and the Jame Masjid of Delhi and the Diwan-i-Aam and the Diwan-i-Khas in the imperial palace. These lovely buildings with a fairy-like beauty represent the height of Mughal splendor. The Delhi court, with its Peacock Throne, was more magnificent and luxurious than Versailles, but, like Versailles, it rested on a poverty-stricken and exploited people. There was a terrible famine in Gujrat and Deccan.

The Discovery Of India - pg. 169

In Kashmir a long-continued process of conversion to Islam had rescued in 95 per cent of the population becoming Moslems, though they retained many of their old Hindu customs. In the middle nineteenth century the Hindu ruler of the state found that very large numbers of these people were anxious or willing to return en bloc to Hinduism. He sent a deputation to the pundits of Benares inquiring if this could be done. The pundits refused to countenance any such change of faith, and there the matter ended.

The Discovery Of India - pg. 149

The breakup of a huge and long-standing social organization may well lead to a complete disruption of social life, resulting in absence of cohesion, mass suffering, and the development on a vast scale of abnormalities in individual behaviour, unless some other social structure, more suited to the times and to the genius of the people, takes its place. Perhaps disruption is inevitable during the transition period; there is enough of this disruption all over the world today. Perhaps it is only through pain and suffering that accompany such disruption that a people grow and learn the lessons of life and adapt themselves anew to changing conditions.

[On the Caste System]

The Discovery Of India - pg. 121

Ramanujan's brief life and death are symbolic of conditions in India. Of our millions how few get any education at all, how many live on the verge of starvation; of even those who get some education, how many have nothing to look forward to but a clerkship in some office on pay that is usually far less than the unemployment dole in England. If life opened its gates to them and offered them food and healthy conditions of living and education and opportunities of growth, how many among these millions would be eminent scientist, educationists, technicians, industrialists, writers and artists, helping to build a new India and a new-world?

The Discovery Of India - pg. 57

There is a question in the Upanishads to which a very curious and yet significant answer is given. "The question is: 'What is this universe? From what does it arise? Into what does it go?' And the answer is: 'In freedom it rises, in freedom it rests, and into freedom it melts away.; " what exactly this means I am unable to understand, except that the authors of the Upanishads were passionately attached to the idea of freedom and wanted to see everything in terms of it. Swami Vivekenanda was always emphasizing this aspect.

The Discovery Of India - pg. 46

So we find in India, as elsewhere, these two streams of thought and action - the acceptance of life and the abstention from it - developing side by side, with the emphasis on the one or the other varying in different periods. Yet the basic background of that culture was not one of otherworldliness or world-worthlessness. Even when, in philosophical language, it discussed the world as maya, or what is popularly believed to be illusion, that very conception was not an absolute one but relative to what was thought of as ultimate reality (something like Plato's shadow of reality), and it took the world as it is and tried to live its life and enjoy its manifold beauty.

The Discovery Of India - pg. 43

These Vedic hymns have been described by Rabindarnath Tagore "as a poetic testament of a people's collective reaction to the wonder and awe of existence. A people of vigorous and unsophisticated imagination awakened at the very dawn of civilization to a sense of the inexhaustible mystery that is implicit in life. It was a simple faith of theirs that attributed divinity to every element and force of Nature, but it was a brave and joyous one, in which the sense of mystery only gave enhancement to life without weighing it down with bafflement - the faith of a race unburdened with intellectual brooding on the conflicting diversity of the objective universe, though now and again illumined by intuitive experience as: 'Truth is one: [though] the wise call it by various names.'"

The Discovery Of India - pg. 43

The Rig Veda, the first of the Vedas, is probably the earliest book that humanity possesses. In it we can find the first outpourings of the human mind, the glow of poetry, the rapture at nature's loveliness and mystery. And in these early hymns there are, as Dr. Manicol says, the beginnings of "the brave adventures, made so long ago annd recorded here, of those who seek to discover the significance of our world and of man's life within it... India here set out on a quest which she has never ceased to follow."

The Discovery Of India - pg. 39

It is odd to think of India with her caste system and exclusiveness having this astonishing inclusive capacity to absorb foreign races and cultures. Perhaps it was due to this that she retained her vitality and rejuvenated herself from time to time. The Moslems, when they came, were also powerfully affected by her.

The Discovery Of India - pg. 31

It is fascinating to find how the Bengalese, the Marathas, the Gujratis, the Tamils, the Andhras, the Oriyas, the Assamese, the Canarese, the Malayalis, the Sindhis, the Punjabis, the Pathans, the Kashmiris, the Rajputs, and the great central bloc comprising the Hindustani-speaking people, have retained their peculiar characteristics for hundreds of years, have still more or less the same virtues and failings of which old tradition or record tells us, and yet have been throughout these ages distinctively Indian, with the same national heritage and the same set of moral and mental qualities. There was something living and dynamic about this heritage which showed itself in ways of living and a philosophical attitude to life and its problems. Ancient India, like ancient China, was a world in itself, a culture and a civilization whcih gave shape to all things.