While travelling from Ahmedabad to Lucknow to attend the Congress annual meet, Gandhi made a stopover in Allahabad. He delivered a lecture on economics and moral progress at the Moore College on December 22, while Madan Mohan Malaviya chaired the session. He addressed a public meeting in the city the next day and then moved on to Lucknow.⁣

On December 26th and 27th1916, he attended the Congress session. This is where Mahatma Gandhi met Jawaharlal Nehru for the first time. That same year Jawaharlal Nehru was married to Kamala.⁣

Nehru recalls his meeting with Gandhi in his autobiography as:⁣
“My first meeting with Gandhiji was about the time of the Lucknow Congress during Christmas, 1916. All of us admired him for his heroic fight in South Africa, but he seemed very distant and different and unpolitical to many of us young men. He refused to take part in Congress or national politics then and confined himself to the South African Indian question. Soon afterward his adventures and victory in Champaran, on behalf of the tenants of the planters, filled us with enthusiasm. We saw that he was prepared to apply his methods in India also, and they promised success.”⁣

This meeting was enough to impress Nehru regarding Gandhi. In the years to come, this unique relationship – friends, mentor-disciple, colleagues, and fellow leaders – faced many trials and tribulations. However their relationship flourished with passing time.⁣


P.S. Display picture shown here is for illustration purpose only. It doesn’t represent actual event.⁣