at the same time as he studied for his barrister’s examinations, but then
settled for the easier option of doing just the one thing. In the mean time,
he enjoyed a lifestyle of leisure and travel – and, inevitably, of extravagant
spending, always running out of money and asking his father for more.
His father usually concurred, though he once asked Jawaharlal for details
of his spending – an indignant Jawaharlal offered to provide accounts of
his expenses, but made it clear that he felt this to be an unwarranted
interference with his lifestyle. After all, it had been his father who had
suggested that he live a good life, and who continued to live one himself,
ordering his stationery from London and asking his son to buy him
gramophone records: the ‘Chocolate Soldier’ waltz and the ‘Quaker Girl’
waltz.
This was Jawaharlal’s most extravagant time, fuelled perhaps by the
knowledge that it was the last flush of freedom, and the last opportunity
to live the life of leisure that had always been within his family’s financial
capabilities. The law was, fortunately, rather less demanding than the
Natural Sciences tripos. ‘I got through the Bar examinations,’ he wrote,
‘with neither glory nor ignominy. For the rest I simply drifted.’^25 In the
summer of 1912, Jawaharlal was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple.
After seven years in England, he was now to return to India to the
somewhat tedious prospect of legal practice, in the shadow of his father,
and the attendant family duties – inevitably, marriage.
While Jawaharlal was still at Harrow, his father had begun nego-
tiations to find him a suitable wife. Motilal himself had been married
in his teens, to a suitable Kashmiri Brahmin girl from Lahore, and his
apparent Anglicisation did not extend to deviation from ‘tradition’ as
far as choosing a bride from a suitable family for his son was concerned.
This was a matter of social standing as much as – or perhaps more than –
caste practices, which Motilal himself did not properly observe.
Jawaharlal, for his part, was not quite so enamoured of ‘that wretched
marriage business’.^26 He phrased his opposition first in terms of a defence
of romantic love and of the rights of individuals. Was it right to expect
people to take such an important step without knowing each other? Aware
of losing the battle against having his marriage arranged, he attempted to
open a second front. ‘In my opinion,’ he wrote to his mother in 1909, ‘it
is not essential for me that I should marry a Kashmiri... In my opinion,
everyone in India should marry outside his or her community. Then why
should not I act according to my beliefs?’^27 But it was not for him to act.
THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL 27