I can’t think of any appropriate one.’^10 The need for his intervention
passed with the death of the infant just over two weeks after its birth, the
second child lost by his mother – a son had been born before Jawaharlal
but had also not survived.
HARROW AND TRINITY, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF
A POLITICAL ORIENTATION
Harrow did indeed agree with ‘Joe’, as he came to be called there. He
was a dutiful and competent student; he did well in French and mathe-
matics, reasonably well in Latin, and studied German, though not with
quite as much success. At sports, participation was obligatory, and his
father insisted he participate, wishing his son to attain the full range of
skills required of a gentleman in the making – although he regretfully
noted that his son was ‘backward in games’.^11 Joe had had tennis lessons
at home in Allahabad; now he was to play football and cricket, for which
he had no particular talent (in later years, when the two houses of
Parliament, the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, played their annual cricket
match against each other, the prime minister was nonetheless to be a
desired member of the Lok Sabha team). His father was particularly keen
on cricket and football – team sports built character, he felt – and also
shooting. As a member of the Boy Scouts, that imperial character-building
organisation, Joe got a certain amount of training in shooting. His father
advised him never to ride a bicycle, but gave him permission to buy a horse
instead (he did not buy one). More to his own taste, he went skating and
swimming, and enjoyed running. He was not, however, a particularly
sociable student, and acquired a reputation for studious detachment
among his schoolmasters, reading a great deal, but not sharing his
opinions freely. Although he made some connections with other students
at Harrow, his social and intellectual contacts, holidays allowing, were
mainly with his older cousins, Brijlal, son of his uncle Nandlal, study-
ing at Oxford, and Shridhar, son of his uncle Bansidhar, studying at
Cambridge. One of the books he notes as having influenced his thinking
in this period was the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan’s book on
Garibaldi. Having read it, he began to think about nationalism in general
and about Italian and Indian nationalism in particular (a generation
earlier, Indians had read and been influenced by Giuseppe Mazzini’s
writings on nationalism – Gandhi being among these readers).
THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL 17