It is strange but in spite of the homelike feeling I am constantly reminded
of the fact that I am a foreigner, an intruder here.’^23 Most of his Cambridge
connections melted away in his later life; but despite (or perhaps because
of) the desire to avoid Indian cliques, he made a number of lasting
connections in Cambridge with fellow Indian students. Among these were
J.M. Sengupta, later to be an important figure in Congress politics in
Bengal, Saifuddin Kitchlew, later to be an important leader in Punjab
politics, and Syed Mahmud, later to be a close comrade on the left wing
of the Congress and a prominent political leader in Bihar. (Several years
later, Mahmud confided to Jawaharlal that he had never met a Hindu he
truly liked before he met Jawaharlal; Mahmud even named his son
Jawaharlal after his friend, inviting the wrath of the traditionalist Muslims
in his community.) Another among his circle at Cambridge, Dr Khan
Saheb, was the brother of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan of the Khudai
Khidmatgar, a party allied to the Congress, and was in 1937 to become
premier of the North-West Frontier Province.
Meanwhile, Jawaharlal was clearly out of his depth with his academic
work for the Natural Science tripos. He had not spent enough time and
energy on academic matters; he had to admit his ignorance of many of
his chosen subjects. He was disarmingly honest about this in letters to his
father, preparing him for the worst. Motilal, as a result, abandoned
his desire that his son enter the ICS, replacing that hope with the more
realistic desire that he be called to the Bar and continue his father’s
profession. Others, Motilal rationalised the problem, were more suited
to academic work – for instance, Jawaharlal’s cousin Sridhar, who had also
been at Cambridge, completed a PhD at Heidelberg and did pass the ICS
examination. Jawaharlal eventually passed his Tripos in 1910 with a
Lower Second – he had been to see the results, looked through the list of
Thirds and, not finding his name, assumed he had failed, before finding
his name in the list of Seconds. ‘I would,’ he wrote to his father, ‘have been
very content with a third.’^24THE LEGAL PROFESSION AND THE INEVITABILITY OF
MARRIAGE
After Cambridge, Jawaharlal contemplated studying law at Oxford before
abandoning this idea for the anticipated joys of London life. He then toyed
with the idea of studying Economics at the London School of Economics26 THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL