Indian · 1889–1964
Jawaharlal Nehru was born in Allahabad to a wealthy Kashmiri Pandit lawyer, educated at Harrow and Trinity College Cambridge, and called to the bar in London before returning to a country he had to learn from scratch. He joined Gandhi's movement in 1920 and spent roughly nine years of his life in British prisons, where he did most of his writing. Glimpses of World History began as letters to his daughter Indira; The Discovery of India was written in five months at Ahmednagar Fort in 1944. He became India's first prime minister in 1947 and held the office until his death in 1964, building the country's planning commission, its scientific institutions, and its policy of non-alignment between the Cold War blocs. His prose is patrician, discursive, and unusually candid about his own doubts. He is read now both as the architect of the Indian state and as its most articulate self-critic.