father – though perhaps this was more to assuage his father’s fears than
the truth. He was fond of reading Shaw’s prefaces to his plays – very much
in keeping with the aesthetic ideal, and with his admiration for the well-
placed word, although Shaw’s usually quite explicitly political prefaces
would definitely have given the young reader some food for thought.
Jawaharlal’s own account of the period records that he had been ‘vaguely
attracted to the Fabians and socialistic ideas’.^22 A later engagement with
a gradualist and top-down socialism on his part – as prime minister
of India – could perhaps be attributed to a belated engagement with
familiar ideas – but this might be attributing too much of a reasoned
choice and too little Realpolitikto the phenomena of Nehruvian gover-
nance, and too much freedom of choice to Nehru himself. But there were
other, more radical contacts that Jawaharlal made in Cambridge. The
Cambridge Indian Majlis used to meet at the home of the Dutt family.
Upendra Krishna Dutt was a Bengali doctor who had set up his practice
in the poorer part of Cambridge. His wife, Anne Palme, was a Swedish
writer (and aunt of the future Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme); their
three children, Rajani, Clemens and Ellie, were all future Communists.
Rajani, six years Jawaharlal’s junior, was later to be the Communist Party
of Great Britain’s leading authority on colonial questions.
Both Jawaharlal and his father were wary of the formation of cliques
of Indians abroad, to which end they agreed that Indians were best
avoided. For Motilal, perhaps, it was also a principle of his educational
desires for his son that he learn the ways of the Western world first-hand;
besides which, one could not choose the sort of Indians one was likely to
meet accidentally in Britain the way one could choose the appropriate
social circles in India. And yet his son’s British and European experiences
seem to have made him more conscious of his Indian-ness than his life
in Allahabad had done. Jawaharlal encountered racial discrimination in
Britain from which his elite status in India would largely have protected
him. His skills as a horseman and with a rifle encouraged him to apply to
join the Officers’ Training Corps in Cambridge; he was told that this was
closed to Indians. He made his observations on such experiences without
explicit complaint, noting that it was part of the general environment.
Once, returning from holiday in India in 1908, to an England he had now
lived in for more than three years, he allowed himself a comment: ‘When
I arrived in England I had a feeling almost akin to that of a homecoming.
The familiar sights and sounds had quite an exhilarating effect on me...
THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL 25