ABSTRACT
Jawaharlal Nehru with his cosmopolitan outlook and deep historical consciousness shines like a blazing star in the political firmament of twentieth-century India. Despite prevailing cynicism about the Nehruvian model of development, to define modern India is to define Jawaharlal Nehru. In difficult times, he looked into history and learned from it. Hence, the present attempt is to delineate Jawaharlal Nehru’s conception of history. For Jawaharlal Nehru, history was both “a voyage of discovery and a guide to action.” History both formed him and reflected his formation as a political leader and thinker. Jawaharlal Nehru based his thinking on his reading of the world history and the Indian history. Nehru’s theory of history combines three strands: the nineteenth-century belief in perpetual progress; a stress on the role of “the great man” and sociological analysis with a strong infusion of Marxist method.
