had then acquired English and proceeded to the British-run Muir Central
College in Allahabad, where he was taught to admire English values,
English culture and English institutions, embodying, he was told, the
principles of liberty and progress. Introduced to this highly idealised
picture of the rulers’ culture without the experiences to question it,
Motilal took time to achieve disillusionment.
His son Jawaharlal, one generation further into British rule, was
educated into European cultural norms, and was quite comfortable in
them. He was consequently not quite as comfortable in the North Indian
elite tradition, though he could read and write Urdu (the Persianised and
more literary version of the North Indian lingua franca, Hindustani,
written in the Arabic script) as well as Hindi (the more Sanskritised
version, written in the Devanagari script). The best and most useful
education, according to Motilal, was one that would empower his son
to conduct his affairs efficiently in the language of power: English.
Accordingly, a few Sanskrit lessons from a pandit^2 gave way to two English
governesses in succession, to teach him English and basic arithmetic,
and then an Irish-French private tutor to teach English literature and the
sciences, whose Theosophical leanings – of which more shall be said –
briefly influenced the young Jawaharlal before his sceptical sense reasserted
itself.
Jawaharlal’s contact with the older cultural traditions of his family
came mainly through its women, who were not expected to adopt the
new values: the English-dominated world was the public domain of men.
As a child, he heard mythological tales and stories from the Ramayana
and Mahabharata from his mother and aunts. But the women of the
time were not particularly well-educated; therefore Jawaharlal’s literary
and intellectual upbringing could not altogether draw upon elements
that were undervalued by the old as well as the new society. Women were
assigned definite roles in the old society and the new; folk tales and
religious myths, for a self-consciously rationalist elite, were old wives’
tales, pleasant, but not to be taken too seriously: religion was ‘a women’s
affair’.^3 His other contact with the society that his generation would come
to call ‘traditional’ came through the family’s old servant, Mubarak Ali.
From him, Jawaharlal heard stories of the great Revolt of 1857, the events
of which had significantly affected both his own and Mubarak Ali’s
families. Later in his life, he was to return to these themes and to try to
make sense of them.
THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL 13