g this role. He was born, and educated, to be a leader among the people. His family was well to do, with his father Motilal a wealthy Allahbad lawyer involved in Indian politics, but still quite Anglicized until after meeting Gandhi.
Nehru himself was educated in England, attending both Harrow and Cambridge. He was the picture of the meeting of Western elites and Eastern elites, being both Brahmin and intellectual. The people of India were used to responding to people like him as leaders; they had the model of the Kashmiri Pandit and the British governors. Both were deemed to be superior and both were expected to serve as the authorities for the people as a whole. Yet, Nehru himself was a democrat, or supported the concept of democracy, even though he was not particularly suited to it by birth, education, or temperament. Nehru himself stated at one point that: "I am a typical bourgeois, brought up in bourgeois surroundings with all the early prejudice that this training has given me" (Ghose, 1975, 337).
In looking at Nehru's life, one can see the beginnings of that synthesis of dualities that was to characterize his thought and his career. He was born into a family that was upper caste Kashmiri Brahmin, but of mixed heritage. As Pandey (1976) noted, the family culture of his father included elements of both Hindu and Muslim culture. The family held Hindu beliefs and social values, but adopted Persian speech, dress, and diet, among other things.
His father moved even further toward a multicultural perspective during his lifetime, although it would not have been termed that at the time. Nonetheless, Motilal Nehru was the founder of a financial and political dynasty that was to dominate India until the early 1980s. He was actually the first to adopt the Nehru surname and he became increasingly Anglicized and attached to European values and culture (Pandey, 1976).
However, the house that Nehru grew up in actually ...