PATRIARCHAL LEGACY

This first volume of a projected series follows generally the pattern established in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Selected Works, which is a project of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund. This volume covers the period upto 1918 when Motilal was poised to emerge on the national scene as a close colleague of Gandhiji during the first Satyagraha Movement. He had only thirteen years more to live and was by no means the prolific or compulsive writer that his son was. Then there is the additional problem that since father and son were together most of the time except when the latter was travelling or in jail, there is not much opportunity for correspondence between the two. The most interesting part of this first volume consists of such correspondence. Other letters which Motilal Nehru wrote are interesting as reflections on current developments in the country, in his beloved city of Allahabad and in the Kashmiri Brahmincommunity.