1

THE MAKING OF A

COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL

Jawaharlal Nehru was born in Allahabad on November 14, 1889, the
son of the lawyer Motilal Nehru and his wife Swarup Rani. By birth a
Kashmiri Brahmin, Jawaharlal was born into a family whose traditions
had more of the North Indian Persianised elite of the late Mughal Empire
than the Brahminical in it. The Nehru family had moved to Delhi from
Kashmir in the service of the Emperor Farrukhsiyyar, the same emperor
whose grant to the East India Company of the zamindariof Calcutta^1 and
the right to duty-free trade in Bengal had paved the way for British power
in India. The family had then lost its position and fortune in the aftermath
of the great Revolt of 1857, which saw the destruction of the last vestiges
of the Mughal Empire, and had had to flee Delhi for Agra.
Jawaharlal’s father, Motilal, was born in 1861 at a low point in the
family’s history. He was his father Gangadhar Nehru’s third and post-
humous son; the family had been supported by his two elder brothers,
Bansidhar and Nandlal. Motilal was largely responsible for refounding
the family fortune, rising to the highest ranks of the legal profession in
Allahabad, where the family had moved in 1886, and where Nandlal also
worked as a lawyer. Motilal’s not inconsiderable wealth, therefore, was not
so much inherited as re-earned, in the practice of a profession that had
acquired great importance in British India, and one that had contributed
greatly to the emergence of a new Indian middle class.
Motilal owed his wealth largely to his work for the old landed
aristocracy, the talukdarsof Awadh, whose property disputes and litigation