Jawaharlal Nehru is represented by three selections from The Dis-
covery of India which he allowed his publisher, Richard Walsh of
the John Day Company, to select for him. This book, by the man
who later became the Prime Minister of India, was written by
Nehru in Ahmadnagar Fort prison from April to September, 1944.
That confinement like those during nine other years of his life re-
sulted from his Ghandi-associated activities against the British in
the long struggle for a free India. Of The Discovery of India as a
whole, Mr. Nehru has said, "I do not know how other authors 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 when the writing has been done in the close
and abnormal atmosphere of prison and the subsequent reading has
taken place outside. I recognize it, of course, but not wholly; it seems
almost as if I am reading some familiar piece written by another,
who is near to me and yet who is different. Perhaps that is the
measure of the change that has taken place in me."So I have felt 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 long succession of other selves
that existed for a while and faded away, leaving only a memory
behind."
TIME seems to change its nature in prison. The present hardly exists, for there is an absence of feeling and sensation which might separate it from the dead past. Even news of the active, living and dying world outside has a certain dreamlike unreality, an immobility and an unchangeableness as of the past. The outer objective time ceases
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