accepted in Britain to criticise British rule. Steps were to be taken,
therefore, to disarm this educated class – education being, naturally,
more dangerous if it was a recognisably British form of education.
In March 1909, Jawaharlal reported to his father that Morley had been
to Cambridge to discuss and set quotas for the number of Indians who
could be admitted to Cambridge. The quota was set at three Indians per
college, for 18 Colleges, which made 54 Indians the legal limit (there were
about 90 at Cambridge at the time, over 30 of them at Downing College).
Indians would also have to sign a certificate of loyalty to the Empire. The
Masters of the Colleges generally concurred with the scheme. Christ’s
protested mildly; the Master of Downing refused to have anything to
do with it, whereupon the other colleges retaliated by agreeing to take
even fewer Indians if Downing took more than three, so that the number
would not exceed 54. Jawaharlal thought that this was not particularly
tragic; Indian students would simply go to the Continent or to other
countries. ‘They will then,’ he wrote, ‘be more fit for doing something
than if they had been to Oxford or Cambridge.’^21
Jawaharlal’s account of his own intellectual development at Cambridge
suggests that it was not particularly exhilarating. This was, perhaps,
because it was difficult for an Indian to participate fully in the life of the
university. Of the more interesting intellectual activities at Cambridge,
Jawaharlal recorded in his autobiography the discussions on sex and
morality that he participated in; none of those discussing these matters
had much experience of them, but the discussions were nonetheless
stimulating. Nietzsche, he recalled later, was ‘all the rage’ at Cambridge.
In addition, his circles were wont to refer casually to Havelock Ellis and
Kraft-Ebbing on sex and sexuality, and he himself had a weakness for
Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater. The aesthetic ideal, he noted by way of
retrospective self-criticism, took the place of religion for him and his
colleagues.
Later writers on Jawaharlal’s intellectual life stress the influence
of Fabian socialism on the Cambridge of his time, and therefore on him.
But these influences seem not to have been too direct; and if they had
been, he might just as well have encountered them through Mrs Besant at
home in Allahabad, for she had been a prominent member of the Fabians
herself. In his first year at Cambridge, Jawaharlal went to a lecture by
George Bernard Shaw on ‘Socialism and the University Man’. ‘I was more
interested in the man than in the subject of the lecture,’ he wrote to his24 THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL