Glimpses of World History

NO LIVING man possesses sufficient knowledge to write an authoritative history of the world. Yet this long work by India’s nationalist leader is of distinct interest and value. It is in the informal style of some two hundred letters on subjects as far removed as ancient Indian civilization and the Bolshevik Revolution, written to his young daughter from various prisons (for Nehru “finally adopted the popular and widely practiced profession of jail-going in India”). It presents reflections on the vast pageant of world history by a man who combines exceptionally the cultures of the East and of the West, who can quote with equal facility and feeling from the Bhagavad-Gita and from the poetry of Browning. And sometimes Nehru tells us something that escaped the headlines, as when he refers to “a great peasant revolt” in Burma in 1930 and 1931. He is eloquent in commending to his daughter the part which she may play in our turbulent age. One feels that in Nehru the East has given to the world a rich and many-sided personality. W.H.C.