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follow Gandhi’s call first appalled, then moved, his father: Motilal, who thought the very idea of going to jail was “preposterous,” decided to join his son if he could not dissuade him, and secretly slept on the floor to prepare himself for the rigors of the imprisonment he knew would follow. But as ever, Motilal did not give up easily. As a wise father, he had one last trump up his sleeve. He invited Mahatma Gandhi to visit him in Allahabad in March 1919. After long conversations between the two older men at Anand Bhavan, Gandhi advised Jawaharlal to put his love for and duty toward his father ahead of his commitment to satyagraha. The shrewd Mahatma had perhaps realized that the Indian nationalist movement would need both Nehrus, and sought to avoid alienating the father by winning over his son too soon.
    So the younger Nehru did not get to follow the Mahatma to jail, or even to his ashram. Jawaharlal was increasingly spending time on journalistic pursuits, first for the Leader , a newspaper controlled by his father, and then for the Independent , founded by Motilal when the Leader ’s editor won a boardroom battle over his opposition to the increasingly confrontationist line Motilal wished him to follow. Jawaharlal even edited the Independent for a while, before surrendering the reins to the fiery (and, as it turned out, irresponsible) Bipin Chandra Pal. Though the paper lost a great deal of Motilal’s money and would eventually have to be closed, it gave Jawaharlal an opportunity to hone his skills as an essayist and polemicist. At last the English education was put to good use; the experience shaped a gift for words which would leave the world with some of the finest political writing to emerge from India in the twentieth century.
    The event that sealed the fate of the British Raj in India, that underlined Gandhi’s leadership of the national movement, and that irrevocably brought Jawaharlal and Motilal Nehru to the conviction that nothing short of independence was acceptable, occurred on April 13, 1919, in the town of Amritsar in the province of Punjab. It was Baisakhi, the major spring holiday, and more than ten thousand people had gathered in a walled open area, the Jallianwalla Bagh, for a peaceful gathering of satyagrahis protesting British iniquities. Brigadier General R. E. H. Dyer, the newly arrived local military commander, saw the meeting as an affront and the crowd of unarmed men and women, some with their families, as an incipient mob. He ordered his troops to take up positions around the enclosure, from which there was only a single narrow exit. And though there is no record of any act by the crowd, any provocation that could be cited as triggering his decision, Dyer ordered his men, standing behind the brick walls surrounding the Bagh, to level their rifles at the assembled men, women, and children barely 150 yards away and fire.
    There was no warning, no announcement that the gathering was illegal and had to disperse, no instruction to leave peacefully: nothing. Dyer did not order his men to fire in the air, or at the feet of their targets. They fired, at his orders, into the chests, the faces, and the wombs of the unarmed and defenseless crowd.
    History knows the event as the Amritsar Massacre. The label connotes the heat and fire of slaughter, the butchery by bloodthirsty fighters of an outgunned opposition. But there was nothing of this at Jallianwalla Bagh. Dyer’s soldiers were lined up calmly, almost routinely; they were neither threatened nor attacked by the crowd; it was just another day’s work, but one unlike any other. They loaded and fired their rifles coldly, clinically, without haste or passion or sweat or anger, emptying their magazines into the shrieking, wailing, then stampeding crowd with trained precision. As people sought to flee the horror toward the single exit, they were trapped in a murderous fusillade. Sixteen hundred bullets were fired that day