Indeed, the Cambridge-educated Nehru was among a handful of Indian writers, among which Gandhi and Tagore were also prominent, who found a way to domesticate what for most other Indians born in the nineteenth century was an alien and colonial tongue, a language that could of course be learnt, as did many young people desirous of making good under the Raj, but could never be used with the same vigour or pliability... Although he sometimes chose a romantic and elevated tone that could grow monotonous, there is never in Nehru's work that tendency towards vagueness and bombast, the use of clichés and archaisms, that to this day disfigures so much Indian prose in English. Indeed, Nehru deserves to be seen, independently of the political man, as one of the best Indian prose writers of the twentieth century. from The Middle Stage by Chandrahas
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