10 Interesting Facts About Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru was a prominent figure in India’s freedom struggle against British rule and played a major role in implementing notions such as secularism in the country.
Here are 10 interesting facts about the great Jawaharlal Nehru
1. Jawaharlal Nehru’s first fee as a young lawyer was the then-princessly amount of five hundred rupees, offered by the wealthy Rao Maharajsingh.
2. Motilal Nehru, the father of Jawaharlal Nehru, was the owner of Allahabad’s (Prayagraj) first car, which the senior Nehru imported in 1904.
3. Nehru met Mahatma Gandhi for the first time during Christmas week, 1916, at the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress in Lucknow. At that time, Pandit Nehru was 27 years old.
4. A socialist by belief, Nehru’s ideologies were vastly inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and his visit to the USSR in 1927. When he became India’s first Prime Minister after independence, he modeled the country as a ‘mixed economy’, taking inspiration from his Soviet trip.
5. On his desk, Pandit Nehru kept two totems: a gold statuette of Mahatma Gandhi and a bronze cast of the hand of Abraham Lincoln.
6. Nehru finished his nearly 1000-page autobiography, titled An Autobiography, within nine months. And when it was published in 1936, he dedicated it to his deceased wife, Kamala.
7. Pandit Nehru spent his longest spell in prison—a total of 1040 days, or over 34 months—from 8 August 1942 to 15 June 1945.
8. Nehru survived four recorded assassination attempts — in 1947, 1955, 1956, and 1961.
9. Nehru wrote several books, including ‘The Discovery of India’, ‘Glimpses of World History’, and his autobiography, ‘Toward Freedom’. A collection of letters he had written to his daughter Indira Gandhi was published as a book: ‘Letters from a Father to His Daughter’.
10. Nehru passed away after a massive heart attack on May 27, 1964. It is said that his deteriorating health was an aftermath of the 1962 Sino-India war which shocked him greatly. 1.5 million people gathered in the streets of Delhi on the following day to mourn Nehru.
