Dissatisfied with private tuition, and in particular with Brooks, in May 1905 Motilal took his family to Britain and secured admission for his son at ‘Harrow’. Jawaharlal was now a boy of 15. He was good at his school work and impressed his teachers. Dr. Wood, Headmaster of Harrow, was fully satisfied with him in everyway and sent reports to Motilal. The school report in October 1906 read, “Inaccurate in French grammar, Latin poor, but he prepares well. English subjects excellent. Progress good—has brains.” In fact Jawaharlal was clever and diligent and this was his best academic phase. Jawaharlal’s interests were wider and he read books and newspapers more than most of his fellow-students. Jawaharlal used to write about his school activities regularly to his father. He wrote how dull most of the English boys were as they could talk about nothing but their games. He carried out his fagging duties, joined the chess club, played football and cricket, ran in the half-mile and mile races and in the cross-country steeplechase and was often in the Gymnasium and on the ice-rink.
Jawaharlal was not unhappy at Harrow and when he left after two years, on the last night, he tells us, his pillow was covered with tears. Jawaharlal was a quiet and somewhat lonely boy, and though, free he had settled down, he was not particularly homesick, he never quite fitted in nor felt at ease with his school fellows. The English boys he found mostly immature and childish, while the few Indians, belonging to the princely families, who were there, he heartily disliked.
Jawaharlal’s arrival at Harrow coincided with startling events in India and outside, and it was now that he began, for the first time, to take an interest in politics and world affairs. Throughout 1906 and 1907, news from India was exciting, of the deportation of Lajpat Rai, later to be known as the lion of the Punjab and of Ajit Singh, to return like on aged lion to free India, of unrest in Bengal, of the protests of Tilak, and of the Swadeshi movement and boycott of foreign cloth. In the British press, there was sparse news of these happenings and there was no one in Harrow to whom he could talk about them.
Motilal used to write about every political development to Jawaharlal. He had written, “We are passing through the most critical period of British Indian History. If this movement only continues you will on your return find an India quite different to the India you left.”
The course of the agitation against Bengal’s partition accentuated division of opinion within the Congress, between the extremists who believed in methods of agitation and the moderates who were committed to constitutional processes. There was no disagreement between their objectives. The extremists under Tilak were not revolutionaries who sought a violent end to British rule. All that they wanted immediately was to impress on public opinion in England that all was not well in India, and this purpose was shared by the moderates. The only difference was as to the way that this should be done. Jawaharlal found himself in sympathy with the extremists, and Tilak seemed to him the embodiment of Indian nationalism struggling for freedom.
Bored with Harrow, Jawaharlal left for Cambridge in 1907, before completing the full period with tears in his eyes. At Trinity College, Cambridge, when he was approaching 18, he had a wider view of the world, spending three quiet years but they were pleasant years, with many friends and some work. Jawaharlal did not plunge into the student politics of Cambridge. Work, games and amusements filled his life; only the political struggle in India disturbed him. At the Indian Majlis where more effort was spent in copying the university union style and mannerisms than in grappling with the subject, he could not get over his shyness and diffidence. In his college debating society, ‘The Magpie and Stump’ there was a rule that a member not speaking for a whole term had to pay a fine; he paid the fine. Jawaharlal was wincingly shy, and public speaking must have seemed to him a nightmare.
Jawaharlal was 20 when he took his second class honours degree at Cambridge and though the Indian Civil Services was considered as a career, it was rejected since the age limit for the ICS in those days was 22 to 24. Motilal felt that he himself had five or six years work left in him, but in that period he intended to merge his own professional existence in that of Jawaharlal, have no clients of his own but pass them on to his son and place Jawaharlal well on the road to success. He had failed to realize that Jawaharlal had no enthusiasm for the law and joining the inner temple was merely part of his general policy at this time of drift. He was bored with Cambridge and wanted a change; but it was Oxford rather than London that he had preferred. When Motilal opposed this because he wanted Jawaharlal, in addition to qualifying for the Bar, to work in the Chambers of a senior lawyer and attend the law courts, he at last had an inkling into his son’s mind.
As usual Jawaharlal gave way to his father’s wishes and moved to London. The only sop given him was permission to join the London School of Economics. Once he had nearly succeeded in killing himself—On a holiday in Norway with a friend, while trekking somewhere north of Bergen, he plunged into an ice-cold fjord for a bath and became numb. His foot slipped and he was swept away by the current. His companion pulled him out on the brink of a waterfall. But Jawaharlal was always a man of physical courage and proximity to death pleased rather than sobered him.
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