Hindu-Muslim Relations in British India

The young Jawaharlal Nehru freely applied irony to nearly every subject, including himself. It distinguished his approach to the subject of religion from that of most of his contemporary countrymen. His ironic tone gave him the appearance of being a comfortable skeptic, but his basic attitude was one of ambivalence. He was attracted to religion at the rarefied level of personal visions but was put off by it at the crude level of corporate forms. In his autobiography Toward Freedom, he described "a spiritual experience" which happened to him in the autumn of 1923 and which influenced him deeply for more than two years afterward. Its immediate effect was to confer upon him a sense of being at peace and of seeing clearly the shape of events as a whole.