Nehru Born: Architect of Independent India

Jawaharlal Nehru spent nine years in British prisons across his career, reading voraciously between arrests. He wrote The Discovery of India in Ahmednagar Fort jail in 1944, a 550-page history of the subcontinent composed without access to a library. Born in Allahabad in 1889, the son of Motilal Nehru, a wealthy Kashmiri Brahmin lawyer who was himself a leader of the Indian independence movement, he was educated at Harrow and Cambridge before studying law at the Inner Temple in London. He returned to India and joined the Indian National Congress under the mentorship of Mahatma Gandhi, gradually emerging as the younger generation's most articulate voice for independence. His political philosophy blended Western socialism with Indian nationalist sentiment, and he spent the 1930s and 1940s alternating between prison terms and leadership of the Congress movement. He was India's first prime minister from independence on August 15, 1947, until his death on May 27, 1964, a continuous tenure of seventeen years. He built the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Space Research Organisation, and the Planning Commission, establishing the mixed-economy model that governed India's development for decades. His foreign policy of non-alignment kept India out of Cold War military alliances while maintaining relationships with both the United States and the Soviet Union. The Sino-Indian War of 1962, in which China inflicted a humiliating defeat on Indian forces along the disputed Himalayan border, shattered his confidence and his health. He died less than two years later. His daughter Indira Gandhi and grandson Rajiv Gandhi both became prime ministers, establishing the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has dominated Indian politics ever since.