1930s, the Bengal terrorist movement, mirrored by that in the Punjab,
was far more disturbing to British officials than Gandhi’s movements:
many middle- and low-ranking British officials were killed. Gandhi later
expressed his horror at the fact that there were several women terrorists –
women were nurturing by nature, how could they possibly do something
so unnatural as kill people? But during the movement, although there was
enough violent resistance to far outweigh the violence of 1922, he made
no effort to call off the movement on the grounds of its violence.
This time around, the British government did not wait as long as in
1922 before interning the Congress leaders. For Gandhi, they selected
an obsolete law of 1827, under which no trial was necessary, thereby
avoiding giving him another public forum from which to denounce
British rule. The Nehrus were also, inevitably, imprisoned. This time, the
Nehru family’s participation in politics had been widened by Kamala
Nehru’s role in organising women to come forward in large numbers to
participate in satyagraha; she was arrested on New Year’s Day, 1931, and
awarded the dignity of a jail sentence to go with her work. Jawaharlal
found this curiously touching, and felt closer to his wife than he had ever
been able to before. For her part, Kamala was proud, as she put it, to join
her husband in his struggle and in jail – a curious route to the heart of a
man to whom she had now been married for nearly fifteen years.
Jawaharlal’s jail notebooks provide an overwhelming sense of the
slowness of life in jail, but also an indication of why anti-colonial
nationalists could afford the luxury of being intellectuals: they had much
time for books. From April 14 to October 11, 1930, and again from
October 19, 1930 to January, 1931, Jawaharlal was in prison. The tedium
of life could be relieved to some extent by self-education. Jawaharlal read
lots of Shakespeare, a number of books on China, a book on eugenics,
Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, Emil Ludwig’s historical biogra-
phies. He read Gandhi’s influences, Ruskin and Carlyle, also Bukharin’s
Historical Materialism, Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution, Trotsky,
My Life, much Bernard Shaw, Ramakrishna’s Hindu View of Life, a great
deal of history, French literature (Voltaire, Rabelais, Balzac, Proust,
Baudelaire), Sappho, James Joyce, William Morris, Henrik Ibsen,
Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise
of Capitalism. To educate his visual senses, he had books containing
reproductions of the works of Auguste Rodin and Aubrey Beardsley.^8
Apart from this, there were endless rhythms at the spinning wheel. ‘One70 ‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39