Nehru: A Political Life

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Judith Brown's study of Nehru is designed to enable the reader to see through his life many of the issues facing his generation, and many of the influences at work in a historical period of rapid and momentous change. It also uses his life as a window into Indian politics and shows how his work and concerns, his ambitions and failures can help the analysis of some of the deeper forces operating within the Indian polity. This study is structured in five major sections, each one of which deals with a distinctive phase in Nehru's life, which also coincides with a particular phase in the development of India's polity and politics. It begins with Nehru's formative years as he was brought up and educated under the British Raj. It proceeds to his years of political apprenticeship under the leadership of Gandhi, and then to the period when Nehru emerged as a major political leader in the period of British withdrawal from the subcontinent, thepartition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan that led to mass migrations and violence, and the assassination of Gandhi. The final section analyses the frustration of Nehru s vision of a new India and a new world order based on non-alignment and peaceful coexistence. It places the frustration of so much he had dreamed of and worked for in the context of deep-rooted aspects of India's society and politics, and relating it to the nature of the role Nehru had carved out for himself.

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Judith M. Brown Beit Professor of Commonwealth History and Professorial Fellow of Balliol College, University of Oxford. An authority on South Asian history, she has worked extensively on nineteenth and twentieth-century South Asian history and politics, South Asian migration, and South Asian diaspora. She is the author of a number of books, including Nehru: A Political Life (OUP 2004).