When Jawaharlal Nehru was 21 and studying at Cambridge, his mother Swarup Rani asked him if he would treat her with respect when he returned to India. He replied, “If an illiterate man does not respect his mother, people have a very low opinion of him. So if I, who have a little education, behave so badly, it would be still worse. What is the use of a man being educated if he does not know how to behave towards his parents?”

In 1931, in a letter to Mahatma Gandhi, he mentioned MA Jinnah in exasperation, “Jinnah, just before he left, gave an interview on the communal question… It was an amazing farrago of nonsense and narrow-minded communalism.”

These and many other things about Nehru are now available at a click on the phone, on The Nehru Archive, a digitised and easy-to-search colle

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