From The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru
This book was written by me in Ahmadnagar Fort prison during the five months. April to September 1944. some of my colleagues in prison were good enough to read the manuscript and make a number of valuable suggestions. On revising the book in prison I took advantage of these suggestions and made some additions. No one, I need hardly add, is responsible for what I have written or necessarily agrees with it. But I must express my deep gratitude to my fellow-prisoners in Ahmadnagar Fort for the innumerable talks and discussions we had, which helped me greatly to clear my own mind about various aspects of Indian history and culture. Prison is not a pleasant place to live in even for a short period, much less for long year. But it was a privilege for me to live in close contact with men of outstanding ability and culture and a wide human outlook which even the passion of the moment did not obscure.
My eleven companions in Ahmadnagar Fort were an interesting cross section of India and represented in there several ways not only politics but Indian scholarship, old and new, and
Various aspects of present-day India. Nearly all the principal living Indian languages, as well as the classical languages which have powerfully influenced India in the past and present, were represented abd the standard was often that of high scholarship. Among the classical language were Sanskrit and Pali, Arabic and Persian; the modern languages were Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Sindhi and Oriya. I had all this wealthto draw upon and the only limitation was my own capacity to profit by it. Though I am grateful to all my companions, I should like to mention especially Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, whose vast erudition invariably delighted me but sometimes also rather overwhelmed me, Govind Ballabh Pant, Narendra Dev and M. Asaf Ali.
It is a year and quarter since I finished writing this book and some parts of it are already somewhat out of date, and much has happened since I wrote it. I have left temped to add and revise, but I have resisted the temptation. Indeed I could not have done otherwise for life outside prison is of a different texture and there is no leisure for though or writing. It has been difficult enough for me to read again what I have written. I wrote originally in long-hand; this was typed after my release. I was unable to find time to read the typescript and the publication of the book was being delayed when my daughter, Indra , came to my rescue and look this burden off my shoulders. The book remains as written in prison with no additions or changes, except for the postscript at the end.
I do not know how others feel about their writings, but always I have a strange sensation when I read something that I had written some time previously. That sensation is heightened where the writing has been done in the close and abnormal atmosphere of prison and the subsequent has taken place outside. I recognize it of course, but not wholly;
it seems almost that I was reading some familiar piece written by another, who was near to me and yet was different. Perhaps that is the measure of the change that has taken place in me.
So I have left about this book also. It is mine and not wholly mine, as I am constituted today; it represents rather some past self of mine which has already joined that along succession of other selves that existed for a while and faded away, leaving only a memory behind.
Anand Bhawan, Alahbad
Jawaharlal Nehru
December 29,1945
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