Jawaharlal later noted that there had been a good deal of anti-Semitism
at Harrow. He made no mention of anti-Indian sentiment; he seems to
have taken its existence for granted. A few years later, his letters home
from Cambridge provided plenty of examples of discriminatory practices
against Indians, but they were so commonplace as not to invite particular
comment.
Jawaharlal was a dutiful son, writing home to his parents regularly- in elegant and increasingly self-confident English to his father, in
Hindi to his mother, exchanging news on politics (with his father), public
school – and later, university – life, and on the progress of his two younger
sisters – the older, Vijayalakshmi, or Nan, about five years old when Joe
started at Harrow, and a second sister, Krishna Kumari, born in 1907,
called Betty by one of her first English governesses. Motilal seemed to take
a strong vicarious pleasure in Jawaharlal’s experiences of English public
school and university life, and managed to acquire a remarkable command
of public school jargon.
Motilal had made clear plans for his son: he was to finish school,
proceed to Cambridge, complete his degree with a First, and then pass the
examinations for the Indian Civil Service (ICS). The importance of the
ICS was self-evident to the Indian middle classes. An elite administrative
corps recruited mostly from among public school-educated Oxbridge
men, and to which few Indians had been appointed by virtue of the
inaccessibility to them of this desirable route of qualification, the ICS
was nonetheless a possible route through which Indians could stake their
claim to participation in the administration of their own country. The age
limit for the examination was set particularly low, and few Indians had
completed their education early enough to qualify even to appear for the
examination, heavily weighted towards the public-school-and-Oxbridge
experience. It was considered a great achievement for an Indian to qualify
for the ICS, in large measure because of the difficulties it involved. But it
also reflected the limited goals of nationalists at the time: greater partici-
pation in government. There was a strong dichotomy between the urge for
participation and the urge to dissent: did one participate in the running
of the imperialist system, or did one oppose it? The answer seems to have
been that one did both. Every Indian entering the ICS struck a blow
against the carefully-cultivated imperialist myth of the incompetence of
Indians. Dissent was to a certain extent enabled by this participation; and
if dissent was to be confined to a reasoned economic nationalism and
18 THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL