Roo Borson reviews Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru

   

   

   “I do not know when or where these letters will be published, or whether they will be
   published at all, for India is a strange land to-day and it is difficult to prophesy.” Thus
   begins Glimpses of World History, a volume of collected letters written originally for a
   single reader, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, by Nehru himself. Though it is also easy,
   with a figure like Nehru, to imagine him writing intimate letters to his daughter all the
   while feeling History looking over his shoulder – just as it is hard to imagine Virginia Woolf
   setting down her neat turns of wit in the diaries without Literary History in mind.
   Nonetheless these “glimpses,” being addressed to a single reader, are in effect addressed to
   every single reader: Nehru takes you by the hand on every page as though you were his little
   daughter, and shows you the wide world bit by bit, beginning with the beginnings of life on
   Earth and ending near the ends of the earth, or at least one of its endings: the fearsome
   politics leading into World War II. The letters were written from various prisons, where Nehru
   was allowed almost no contact with his family, which accounts for some of the intimacy of the
   tone; the rest is accounted for not only by fatherly feeling but by Nehru’s situation: he was
   one of the rare figures who, by predilection, intellect and position, was able – literally in
   the world as well as in words – to compose world history and hand it on to his daughter. He
   lived, unlike most of us, in a society that he had a hand in shaping; so-called “current
   events” were intimate to him, and their being so made all of the past, and all possible
   futures, personal affairs.

               The collection of letters was revised for publication, but retains the mood of
   being spoken lovingly to one person. It is remarkable as a “history” in part because it
   presupposes no historical knowledge on the part of the reader – meant, as it was, as an
   educational introduction to the political history of the world for one who had only recently
   entered it, told in the form of true stories by a father to a daughter. The preface to the
   original English edition is dated January 1, 1934; the copy I grew up with was published in
   the US in 1942, bought used, and bears the inscription “Happy New Year, 1947” from my mother
   to my father, as my family was beginning its post-war life, when I was not yet born, and in a
   time when “to-day” was not yet written as a single word.

   

   Ondaatje, M., Redhill, M., Spalding, E. & Spalding, L. (Eds.)(2001) Lost Classics. London:
   Bloomsbury.