Roo Borson reviews Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru



(E) “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, (D) 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. (Q) 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. (E) 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: (D) 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. (Q) 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.

            (E) The collection of letters was revised for publication, but retains the mood of
being spoken lovingly to one person. (D) 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. (Q) 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.