ABSTRACT
Jawaharlal Nehru was born in Allahabad on November 14, 1889, the son of the lawyer Motilal Nehru and his wife Swarup Rani. By birth a Kashmiri Brahmin, Jawaharlal was born into a family whose traditions had more of the North Indian Persianised elite of the late Mughal Empire than the Brahminical in it. The Nehru family had moved to Delhi from Kashmir in the service of the Emperor Farrukhsiyyar, the same emperor whose grant to the East India Company of the zamindari of Calcutta1 and the right to duty-free trade in Bengal had paved the way for British power in India. The family had then lost its position and fortune in the aftermath of the great Revolt of 1857, which saw the destruction of the last vestiges of the Mughal Empire, and had had to flee Delhi for Agra.
