had their lives inextricably intertwined, and in which so many of their
memories and personal experiences were deeply embedded, left little time
for a personal life, all personal events being experienced through the
political. From the 1920s, the Congress’s Gandhian training required that
the personal was theatrically proclaimed to the outside world as the
political. Gandhi’s exhibitionism of the soul required that he present his
personal development as political progress; Jawaharlal’s autobiography did
not take this quite as far.
In September 1935, Jawaharlal found himself released from prison:
Kamala was ill again and had been for some time in Europe for treatment.
On 2 September, her doctor had informed Jawaharlal and the government
of India that she would not live long. The government’s generosity had
been pushed strongly from behind the scenes by powerful forces.
From November 1934, Labour Party Members of Parliament, including
Clement Attlee, had interceded with the Secretary of State for India to
allow Nehru to take his sick wife to Europe. But Nehru had refused special
treatment that was denied to other, lesser, prisoners. The seriousness
of Kamala’s condition made him change his mind. What was indicated
by these moves, however, was that some sections of British official opinion
already saw in Nehru the future leader of independent India, and many
of them were building bridges in order better to deal with him later.
The Labour Party’s famous ‘weekend at Filkins’ in 1938, at which they
discussed with Nehru the terms on which a Labour government would be
willing to transfer power to India, was the logical continuation of these
early overtures.
Nehru (he could now, after his father’s death, legitimately claim
that name alone) took a plane to Germany to join Kamala in Badenweiler,
in the Black Forest, on the understanding that he could not return to India
before his sentence expired in February 1936. The Nehrus then moved to
Lausanne in Switzerland. In Lausanne, coincidentally, Nehru met Rajani
Palme Dutt, who was visiting a fellow CPGB member, Ben Bradley,
at the same spa; they spent three days together discussing politics. Nehru
also found time to visit Britain in November 1935, and again in January
1936, resuming old contacts and making new ones: he met, for instance,
Paul Robeson through the good offices of Cedric Dover, an active member
of the Congress Socialist Party then in London.^18 Dover encouraged
Nehru to read more about Soviet policies towards the ‘nationalities’, and
promised ‘the creation of a Eurasian alliance in the anti-imperialist76 ‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39