Toward Freedom
$4.00 By JOHN DAY
THIS is a remarkable book, whether regarded as the political testament of the most prominent leader, after Gandhi, of the Indian nationalist movement, or as the life story of one who has assimilated to a remarkable degree the culture, the thought, the political and economic patterns of the West. The style of the autobiography, which was written in English (Nehru is an Oxford graduate), is remarkably fine, lucid, sensitive, eloquent. The author is as much at home with Swinburne as with India’s classical philosophers and poets. The book fulfills the most essential requirement of an autobiography: it conveys a vivid picture of Nehru’s personality as nationalist political leader, and as a many-sided personality who can turn aside from the heat and dust of political struggle to comment on the beauty of a glacier or to discuss a general philosophical idea. Nehru, in his own words, would have ‘liked to keep the silken bonds of the spirit between India and England.’ That he is now in prison, not for the first time, is the best proof that, in his opinion, ‘that hope is shattered.’ Proud, sensitive, devoted, uncompromising, Nehru strongly suggests the heroic personalities of the Russian revolutionary movement, men and women like Kropotkin and Nicholas Tchaikovsky and Breshkovskaya. One hopes that he may be spared the familar disillusionments of the idealist if and when the Indian revolution comes to pass. w. H. O.