for evidence that could help them put him back in prison they eventually
found something useful. In his speech to the AITUC at Kanpur in
December 1933, and again in January 1934 in Calcutta, he had denounced
imperialism. For this he was arrested on February 12 in Allahabad,
brought to Calcutta, tried for sedition, and sentenced on February 16 to
two years’ simple imprisonment. ‘Individuals sometimes misbehave in this
imperfect world of ours,’ Jawaharlal noted in his statement to the court;
‘so also officials and those in power. Crowds and mobs of people also lose
control of themselves sometimes and misbehave. But it is a terrible thing
when an organised Government begins to behave like an excited mob;
when brutal and vengeful and uncivilised behaviour becomes the normal
temper of a Government.’^16
From prison, Jawaharlal attempted to fulfil his parental duties by
getting Indira into Vishwa Bharati, Rabindranath Tagore’s university at
Shantiniketan. Her education had suffered, he wrote in his statement
accompanying her application, due to political troubles that had in turn
caused domestic upheavals. Her parents had tried to find out what her own
inclinations were, but had been unable to do so. She should do something
at university that ‘would enable her to do some socially useful work in
after life efficiently, and at the same time enable her to be economically
independent. She is not likely to have an unearned income and it is
not considered desirable by her parents that she should depend for her
subsistence on a husband or others.’^17 At some point, it was envisaged
that Indira should continue her education abroad in England or on the
Continent. (Eventually, in 1937, through Harold Laski’s good offices,
Indira was able to go to Somerville College, Oxford, after failing the
entrance examination. She did not take a degree.)
Jawaharlal was let out of prison for eleven days in August 1934, when
his wife was seriously ill (she had had recurrent tuberculosis from 1920
onwards, and had never been completely healthy thereafter; it is recorded,
in a society that judged women by their fertility, that in 1925 an infant
son born to her had died, and in 1928 she had had a miscarriage). This
time she made a recovery, and Jawaharlal was put back in jail. From
June 1934 to February 1935, Jawaharlal used his time in jail to write an
autobiography (it was published in 1936 under that simple title). This was
a curious attempt at the genre: the private person does not altogether
emerge, but personal stories are told to make political points. Admittedly,
the Indian national movement, with which Jawaharlal’s generation had
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 75