His Education

When he was 15 years old, Jawaharlal was taken to England and admitted to the Harrow Public School. Later, he joined the Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied Chemistry, Geology and Botany. He hugely like the subjects and, in the tranquil atmosphere of the university assiduously studied his test-books as also the works of famous thinkers. He heard visiting Indian speakers and discussed with them thus widening his vision every day. After three years, he left Cambridge with a second class honors degree in the National Sciences Tripos. It was then determined that he should follow his father's profession. For the next two years, he studied law in the Inner Temple, London. But the seed of dissatisfaction with his environment had begun to take root in the mind of the young graduate.


"I have become," he said many years later, "a queer mixture of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere."

As a Politician

In 1912, he returned to India, a full-fledged lawyer, ready to take his place at the side of his father in the Alahabad High Court. His education in England, the contact with liberal politicians and philosophers and the miserable contrast between conditions in India and England had produced a deep excitement in his mind. The background for a patriotic role had been prepared already; when time came, he made a head-on jump into politics. Barely six years after joining the Alahabad Bar, had he become the Secretary of the Home Rule League, Alahabad branch. Home Rule was a movement started by Mrs. Annie Besant for the liberation of India. But this did not satisfy him and he sought a more active, countrywide movement for the freedom of the country. It was, therefore, natural that when Mahatma Gandhi determined to launch his Satyagraha, Jawaharlal was inspired by the campaign, which he felt was a way out of intertwine, a method of action which was straight and open and possibly effective. The Satyagraha on April 6, 1919, was a big triumph. The unity and strength of the Indian people sent the British rulers into fright and they let loose a reign of terror. At Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, 379 Indians were killed and about 12 hundred wounded when one General Dyer ordered machine-gun fire on a peaceful meeting of unarmed people. These heartbreaking incidents strengthened the resolve of Jawaharlal that the country must attain independence within the shortest possible time; it also transformed Motilal to the beliefs of his son and Gandhiji.
As a Freedom Fighter

Jawaharlal experienced his first imprisonment while organizing strikes and hartals during the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1922-23. His father, mother and sister followed suit and the whole family droved in to prison from their palatial residence, Ananda Bhavan, in 1923, Jawaharlal was elected Secretary of the All India Congress Committee. He also became a member of the Allahabad Municipal Board and later, it Chairman. The young man with a western outlook, who had emerged from Trinity College, Cambridge, attired in a lawyer's gown, had changed into a energetic freedom fighter within ten years. But the process of growth had only begun. New responsibilities brought new experiences and every new suffering in the following years added to the passion of the young man to stake everything for his country and its people.

The year 1929 marked a turning point, both for Jawaharlal and for the Congress. He presided over the Lahore session of the Congress at which the famous independence resolution was passed. So far, the Congress was only fighting for Dominion Status. But the word "Swaraj" was now to mean complete independence. Jawaharlal was re-elected President of the Congress in 1930. The following year, he was arrested as one of the leaders of the Civil Disobedience Movement, which Gandhiji had started. From the Central Prison, where he was under arrest several times, he wrote long and interesting letters to his daughter Indira, later Indira Gandhi, on the history of the people of the world, of the bright past of India, and of the brighter future which awaited the country. He never experienced defeated in prison and the perpetual hope that India would be free sustained him through moments of sorrow and twinge.