Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru (14 November 1889 – 27 May 1964) was an Indian independence activist and, subsequently, the first Prime Minister of India. He emerged as an eminent leader of the Indian independence movement, serving India as Prime Minister from its establishment in 1947 as an independent nation, until his death in 1964. He was also known as Pandit Nehru due to his roots with the Kashmiri Pandit community, while Indian children knew him better as Chacha Nehru.

About Jawaharlal Nehru in brief

Summary Jawaharlal NehruJawaharlal Nehru (14 November 1889 – 27 May 1964) was an Indian independence activist and, subsequently, the first Prime Minister of India. He emerged as an eminent leader of the Indian independence movement, serving India as Prime Minister from its establishment in 1947 as an independent nation, until his death in 1964. He was also known as Pandit Nehru due to his roots with the Kashmiri Pandit community, while Indian children knew him better as Chacha Nehru. The son of Swarup Rani and MotilalNehru, a prominent lawyer and nationalist statesman, Nehru was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge and the Inner Temple, where he trained to be a barrister. He became a rising figure in Indian politics during the upheavals of the 1910s. As Congress President in 1929, he called for complete independence from the British Raj. He instigated the Congress’s decisive shift towards the left. He oversaw India’s transition from a colony to a republic, while nurturing a plural, multi-party system. In foreign policy, he took a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement while projecting India as a regional hegemon in South Asia. He remained popular with the people of India in spite of political troubles in his final years and failure of leadership during the 1962 Sino-Indian War. In India, his birthday is celebrated as Bal Diwas. In the UK, he is remembered as the ‘father of the modern Indian state’ He was the eldest of three children, two of whom were girls.

The elder sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Lakshmi, later became the first female president of the United Nations General Assembly. His youngest sister, Krishna Hutheesing, became a noted writer and authored several books on her brother. He described his childhood as a uneventful one as a result of a wealthy atmosphere of privilege at his home in Allahabad. His father had educated him at private tutors and he was tutored by Ferdinand T. Brooks for nearly three years. He wrote: ‘For many years in many ways with me and many people in India, I was a very different person.’ He was subsequently initiated into the Theosophy Society at age 13 by family friend Annie Besant. He died of a heart attack in 1964, aged 82. He is buried in the Rajpath Cemetery in New Delhi, near his family home in the city of Kolkata. He had a son, Rajinder Nehru, who was a well-known Indian politician and a former member of the Bombay High Court. He also had a daughter, Shri Ravi Rani, who served as a Member of Parliament for the state of Uttar Pradesh and later as a member of India’s National Council of the Union of India, and was married to former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. Nehru is survived by his son Rajinder and two daughters, Rani Rani Lakshmi and Shri Rajni Lakshmi.