By 1911, Motilal had selected a suitable Kashmiri Brahmin girl for
him to marry. The girl was to be trained in the social skills required of her
in the Nehru family, including the English language and the use of the
correct cutlery at the dining table. She had time; she was not yet thirteen
and they would not be married for some years. Jawaharlal protested:
he did not know the girl and would at least wish for his father to put off
the engagement until he had seen the girl. ‘My only fault is that I do not
wish to marry a total stranger,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘Would you
like me to marry a girl who I may not like for the rest of my life?’^28 But
his betrothal was by now a fait accompli; her premarital training complete,
he finally married Kamala Kaul, ten years his junior, on February 8, 1916.
He regarded the marriage as a personal defeat, although he did his duty
by his wife. Late in her life, towards the time of her very early death, he
seems to have acquired a genuine affection for her, and this late love was
greatly mixed with guilt when she died in 1936. His autobiography,
published shortly afterwards, was dedicated ‘to Kamala, who is no more’.
In the autumn of 1912, Jawaharlal returned home, after seven years
in England. He was 22 years old, already losing his hair, as he noted
ruefully, and destined to join his father’s practice. Law interested him to
a certain extent; it was not exactly fascinating. He was too accustomed
to being a self-sufficient individual agent (taking financial comfort
for granted, of course) to enjoy working under someone, least of all his
father.
Jawaharlal was later to want to draw a line under the early phase of
his life: he had been, he wrote, ‘a bit of a prig, with little to commend
me’.^29 Perhaps this was being a trifle unfair to himself. He was beginning
to find his own political understanding; and for a man of his class position,
at the pinnacle of the British Indian social hierarchy, he could have
afforded the luxury of political disengagement. He had the added benefit
of a metropolitan education, of immense importance in colonial India.
Doors would inevitably open for him; but he had to decide which doors
these were to be.28 THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL