a demand for further participation in government, Indians’ membership
of the ICS might well be seen as a step in the right direction. In the mean
time, the ICS was a good career.
In July 1907, Joe left Harrow, bound for Trinity College, Cambridge
in October, having passed the necessary entrance examinations. He spent
the summer between school and university travelling through Britain
and Europe. His father, meanwhile, already had a list of instructions for
him for Cambridge – a world he knew of only second-hand, but he knew
the things that would be important: join the Union Society; row –
Jawaharlal said he was too light to be anything but cox, which he didn’t
fancy (he was, eventually, cox of one of the Trinity boats); and buy a horse
- Jawaharlal said it would be too expensive.
Meanwhile, Jawaharlal was, from a long-distance perspective, begin-
ning to encounter Indian politics. The political scene was beginning
to warm up in the year he began school at Harrow. The Swadeshi– which
translates roughly as ‘of our own country’ – movement had its immediate
cause in the partition of the province of Bengal, seen by the British as
an uncomfortable seat of rising nationalism. Bengal had been the first
region of India to be brought under effective colonial control, and also the
first to develop a coherent anti-colonial movement centred on the city of
Calcutta, then the administrative capital of British India. The division
of the province, ostensibly an administrative measure, was widely felt
to be an attempt to reduce the importance of Calcutta as a political centre,
and to create a counter-balance to the organised power of the Calcutta
bhadralok, the middle-class ‘respectable people’. To this end, the govern-
ment created a new administrative and political centre in eastern Bengal
in Dacca (Dhaka) and encouraged the founding of a new political group,
the Muslim League (historically to become very important), under the
patronage and leadership of the Nawab of Dacca, an important Muslim
zamindar.^12 This was to encourage Muslims to organise separately from
the Hindu-dominated, and allegedly anti-Muslim, mainstream of a rising
nationalist movement.
The resultant anti-partition agitation was the most widespread and
effective anti-government movement that British India had hitherto seen.
The Calcutta-based bhadralokagitators stressed the brotherhood of Hindus
and Muslims, and accused the government of deliberately pursuing a
policy of divide and rule. The movement foreshadowed the later more
effective boycott and burning of British-made goods under Gandhi’s
THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL 19