Nehru, Jawaharlal (1889-1964), nationalist leader and the first prime minister of India (1947-1964), was born at Allahabad on 14 November 1889. The only son of Motilal Nehru, he was educated at Harrow and Cambridge and called to the bar in London. The seven years he spent in England were a formative period in which he acquired a rational and skeptical outlook and sampled Fabian socialism and Irish nationalism, which added to his own patriotic dedication. He returned to India in 1912. Legal work and a comfortable life failed to satisfy his restless spirit: it was not law but politics that called him. He joined the Home Rule movement in 1917, but his real initiation into militant politics came two years later when Mohandas Gandhi launched his campaign against the Rowlatt Bills. There was much about Gandhi that puzzled and baffled young Nehru, but he saw in Gandhi's satyagraha and effective alternative to armchair politics and sporadic terrorism, between which Indian politics was oscillating. At first Nehru's father did not like the idea of his twenty-nine-year-old son plunging into an unconstitutional agitation, but both father and son cast in their lot with Gandhi at the crucial session of the Indian National Congress held in Calcutta in September 1920. A year later they were jailed for six months. This was Jawaharlal's first prison term; in all he was to spend nine years in jail.

Despite intellectual and temperamental differences, Jawaharlal became a trusted lieutenant of Gandhi. He served as general secretary of the All India Congress Committee, whose office was located in the family house at Allahabad. While he was in Europe for the treatment of his ailing wife, Kamala in 1926-1927, Nehru attended the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities Against Imperialism in Brussels and paid a brief visit to Moscow, which gave a radical edge to his politics. In December 1928, at the Calcutta session, he clashed with the Congress old guard on the issue of dominion status for India. A year later, he presided over the Lahore session, which declared complete independence and civil disobedience under Gandhi's leadership. Nehru was elected to the Congress presidency again in 1936, 1937, and 1946, and he came to occupy a position in the nationalist movement second only to that of Gandhi.

Passionately opposed to fascism, Nehru was eager for nationalist India to throw its full weight behind the Allied war effort. But he insisted that the British government recognize India's right to freedom. After the abortive Cripps Mission, he reluctantly fell in line with Gandhi's plans for the "Quit India" campaign and was imprisoned in August 1942. Released in 1945, he took a leading part in the negotiations that culminated in the emergence of the dominions of India and Pakistan in August 1947.

Nehru was fifty-seven when he assumed office as prime minister of India. Although his entire life had been spent in opposition, he made an effortless transition from a political agitator to a statesman. His government coped successfully with formidable challenges: the disorders and mass exodus of minorities across the new border with Pakistan, the integration of 500-odd princely states into the Indian Union, the framing of a new constitution, and the establishment of the political and administrative infrastructure for a parliamentary democracy.

Nehru's position in the Congress Party and the government was unchallenged throughout his seventeen years of power, except perhaps during the first three years of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel's term as the deputy prime minister. Nehru's aim, in his own words, was to convert India's economy into that of a modern state. He set up a Planning Commission, encouraged development of science and technology, and launched three successive five-year plans. His policies led to a sizable growth in agricultural and industrial production, but it was somewhat offset by an unprecedented increase in population.

Important as Nehru's influence was on domestic policy, it was decisive on foreign affairs. Long years of association with the nationalist movement under Gandhi's leadership had conditioned him against colonialism and militarism. He was also acutely conscious of the hazards of war in the thermonuclear age and refused to align India with either of the power blocs. Initially his independent stance put him out of court with both the United States and the Soviet Union. However, over time both countries increasingly appreciated his motives and aims. He played a constructive, mediatory role in bringing the Korean War to an end and in resolving other international crises, such as those over the Suez Canal and the Congo, offering India's services for conciliation and international policing. He contributed behind the scenes toward the solution of several other explosive issues, such as those of West Berlin, Austria, and Laos.

Nehru was unable to achieve a satisfactory equation with India's two major immediate neighbors, Pakistan and China. The Kashmir issue proved a stumbling block in reaching an accord with Pakistan, and the border dispute prevented a resolution with China. The Chinese invasion in 1962, which Nehru failed to anticipate, came as a great blow to him and probably hastened his death.

Nehru had the prescience to foresee the possibilities of liberalization in the post-Stalin Soviet Union and of the rift between the Soviet Union and China. He persevered, in the face of much skepticism and criticism, in his pleas for the admission of China to the United Nations, for détente between the United States and the Soviet Union, and for a more equitable economic relationship between the developing and the developed countries. He called for liquidation of colonialism in Asia and Africa and, with Tito and Nasser, was one of the chief architects of the nonaligned movement.

Nehru was also a writer of distinction. His writings were a by-product of his intense involvement in the Indian nationalist movement, and his major works, Glimpses of World History (1934), his Autobiography (1936), and The Discovery of India (1946), were actually written in prison.