The 1930s and early '40s were tumultous years for both the nation as well as the Indian National Congress. At the forefront of the leadership was Jawaharlal Nehru, who along with Mahatma Gandhi took several important decisions at this time. In this excerpt from Mushirul Hasan's The Nehrus: Personal Histories

(Roli Books), we take a look at the movements during this period and Nehru's personal life

On 14 November 1939, Jawaharlal turned fifty. He had progresses, stated Mahadev Desai, Gandhi's personal secretary, 'geometrically rather than arithmeti­cally'. Gandhi, then in Sevagram (Wardha), hoped that he would complete the other half 'retaining the same vigour, frankness and robust humanity'. Jawaharlal felt old, tired, mentally weary, and 'something apart from the world I live in: He added: 'Life is a curious affair and puzzles and perplexes me far more than it used to do when I was younger and had more assurance. That assurance fades out. What do I know, what do I understand?'

For the Nehrus, there was no time to cele­brate. In September 1939, the war clouds had broken out. And when the Viceroy simply declared India to be at war after Britain's own declaration of war on Germany, the Congress demanded both an immediate definition of war aims and an immediate declaration of Independence. The provincial ministries resigned. Beat­rice Webb, whom Jawaharlal admired, wrote in her diary on 5 October 1939, 'Nehru has called the British bluff, the pretence of fighting for political democracy and rights of man: The fact is that he did not want to take advantage of Britain's distress. He said: 'yeh baat Hindustan ki shaan ke khilaaf hae, ke who England kee kamzoree se faida uthaa kar iss waqt Satyagraha shuroo kar dey'. (It is against India's dignity to take advantage of England's weakness and launch satyagraha.) Many tall leaders in the Congress leadership disagreed. Azad was one of them. 'We cannot grope in the dark,' he told Jawaharlal, 'like blind men. We should adopt a way with open eyes:

In mid-November, the campaign's second phase began with the arrests of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) and AICC members, and of the Congress representa­tives in the central and provincial legisla­tures. The third phase, opened in January 1941, was renewed in April. It was marked by a sharp increase in the number of Satyagrahis. In the meantime, Gandhi had planned his move with meticulous care, and lifted the struggle to a high moral plane, above the entanglements and local factions and priorities that had dogged the Congress as a party in power.

Jawaharlal's release on 4 December 1941, along with other political prison­ers who had courted imprisonment, did not lead to any significant reap­praisal of his stand - that India would join the War only if Britain granted assurance for its constitutional advance. His negotiations with Cripps, who arrived in India on 22 March 1942, failed. This led him to endorse Gandhi's plan of giving the British an ultimatum to quit India. On 8 August, he moved and Patel seconded the 'quit India' resolution at the AICC meeting. Earlier, on 27 July, he informed the peasants in Allahabad of an impending mass movement in the country. In other speeches he made it clear that there was no question of Congressmen deliberately choosing to go to jail, that the Congress might perish in the terrible ordeal ahead of it, but that a free India would emerge out of its ashes.

On 9 August, the CWC members were arrest­ed in Bombay. Gandhi landed up in the Aga Khan's palace, and Jawaharlal in the Ahmadna­gar fort to begin his sentence of 1041 days. Sit­ting in Ahmadnagar Fort as a 'prisoner perforce inactive when a fierce activity consumes the world', Jawaharlal fretted a little and thought of 'the big things and brave ventures' that had filled his mind. The only solace was that he could read, write and look at the world in the face, as Gandhi had suggested on that fateful evening of 8 August 1942, 'with calm and clear eyes even though the eyes of the world are blood-shot today'.

The twenty-first month of my imprisonment is well on its way; the moon waxes and wanes and soon two years will have been completed. Another birthday will come round to remind me that I am getting older; my last four birthdays I have spent in prison, here [Ahmadnagar Fort Prison] and in Dehra Dun Jail and many others in the course of my previous terms of imprisonment. I have lost count of their number.
The Discovery of India

The most vivid part of Jawaharlal's existence was lived quite apart from the family, while the part of his life spent in the company of friends was in jail. Quoting Auguste Comte, he noted in the Discovery of India, 'We live dead men's lives, encased in our pasts, but this is especially so in prison where we try to find some sustenance for our starved and locked up emotion in memory of the past of fancies of the future: To Indira, he wrote on 16 April 1943, 'Prison is the true home of that dreadful thing ennui, and yet, oddly enough, it teaches us to triumph over it.'

During those years, spread as they were across an agonizingly long period, Jawaharlal continued to write with his usual prodigality. The superimposed loneliness, commented Halide Edib, gave him 'the power to turn to himself for fellowship and guidance, and arrange his thoughts and evolve his political creed undisturbed by external influences'. He did not have the time to access his library in Anand Bhawan, but the accumulated mass of notes, to which he kept making additions, became the main source of his writings.

Even though he cast his net wide, the breadth of view and the patient learning revealed in Glimpses of World History, An Autobiography and the Discovery of India is indeed astonishing. These books reflect the changes in his interests that had taken place in his public life, his heightened concerns with social affairs, with politics, and with the libera­tion struggles in India and overseas. His other writings were, in their own ways, solid achieve­ments. They reflect an attitude to science and religion, an attitude that accounts for the immense popularity of his works, particularly among the young. In old age, Bertrand Russell, whom Jawaharlal admired, took to writing fic­tion, which was, he says in his Autobiography, 'a great release of my hitherto unexpressed feel­ings'. Jawaharlal's An Autobiography, probably the most revealing thing he ever wrote, did just that. It came in 1936, offering readers an objec­tive scrutiny and analysis both of self and of events. The writer Rafiq Zakaria, then in school, read it from cover to cover. 'There was some­thing so moving about the narration of the story: he wrote later, 'of our hopes and aspira­tions in its pages that no Indian who read it could escape its magical effects. There was something so regal about the personality of the author who emerged out of its pages with such power and grace that the spell it cast was over­whelming. It drew the readers to the author as a duck to the water’