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Extracts

Ch. 11: 1920: Direct contact with the poverty of India

In 1920, I was totally ignorant of labour conditions in factories or fields,
and my political outlook was entirely bourgois.
I knew, of course, that there was terrible poverty and misery... Just then, I
got entangled in the kisan movement.

Early in June 1920 (as far as I can remember), about 200 kisans marched fifty
miles from the interior of Partabgarh district to Allahabad city with the
intention of drawing the attention of the prominent politicians there to
their woebegone condition... accompanied by some friends, I went to see
them.  They told us of the crushing exactions of the talukdars, of inhuman
treatment, and that their condition had become wholly intolerable.  They
begged us to accompany them ... to protect them from the vengeance of the
talukdars, who were angry at their having come to Allahabad on this mission.

The visit was a revelation to me.  We found the whole countryside afire with
enthusiasm and full of a strange excitement.  Enormous gatherings would take
place at the briefest notice by word of mouth.  One village would communicate
with another, and the second with the third, and so on; and presently whole
villages would empty out, and all over the fields there would be men and
women and children on the march to the meeting place.

Looking at them and their misery and overflowing gratitude, I was filled with
shame and sorrow -- shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life and our
petty politics of the city which ignored this vast multitude of semi-naked
sons and daughters of India, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming
poverty of India.  ... Many of those present were landless people who had
been ejected by the landlords ...

What amazed me ... was our total ignorance in the cities of this great
agrarian movement.  No newspaper had contained a line about it; they were not
interested in the rural areas.  I realized more than ever how cut off we were
from our people and how we lived and worked and agitated in a little world
apart from them.  55

[This is a well-edited extract from:

Jawaharlal Nehru
Towards Freedom, An autobiography,
John Day / Beacon Books, Boston, 1951/1948

written in prison, June 1934 - Feb 35

Chapter X: I am externed, and the consequences

Chapter XI, "Wanderings among the Kisans" - is quite a different narrative of
this encounter. ]

Note: subtitle: 
     Presenting in His Own Words the Development of the Political Thought of
     Jawaharlal Nehru and the Background Against which it Evolved