When a sitting head of state tells his people that a book by a foreign prime minister changed the way he understood the world, it is worth pausing to ask: what was in those pages? Following the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28 2026, a set of old social media posts and speeches resurfaced online, revealing a side of the Iranian Supreme Leader that few outside Iran had considered. He was, it turned out, a devoted reader. And among the authors he admired most, one name appeared again and again: Jawaharlal Nehru.

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The first and most discussed book is 'Glimpses of World History', published by Nehru in 1934. It is an unusual work by any measure. Written as a series of 196 letters from prison, addressed to his young daughter Indira, the book moves from ancient Greece to the brink of the Second World War, offering what scholars have since described as one of the earliest attempts at a non-Eurocentric reading of human civilisation. Nehru himself acknowledged HG Wells's 'The Outline of History' as an influence, but where Wells saw history through a largely Western lens, Nehru insisted on the story of all peoples.

It was precisely this quality that caught Khamenei's attention. In a post from August 2013 on X, then known as Twitter, he wrote that before reading Nehru's book, he had no idea how far advanced India had been before colonisation. He followed it a month later with another post, describing Nehru as a trusted and knowledgeable author who documented how British rule had deliberately arrested India's industrial growth to ensure dependence on imported English goods. In speeches to Iranian citizens, Khamenei went further, urging his audience to read the book, arguing that contemporary history, from India to Burma to Africa and Latin America, held vital lessons for any society that wished to resist foreign domination.

The second Nehru book Khamenei championed was 'The Discovery of India', written between 1942 and 1945 in Ahmadnagar Fort Jail. Where Glimpses casts its gaze across the whole of human history, 'The Discovery of India' turns inward, examining the civilisational roots, philosophies, religions and composite culture that shaped the subcontinent over millennia. According to Congress MP Imran Masood, who met Iran's India-based representative after Khamenei's death to offer condolences, the Iranian leader had read the book four times and told those around him that anyone wishing to truly understand India should begin there. Khamenei was also struck by Nehru's account of the ancient friendship between India and Iran, a relationship Khamenei described as going back three thousand years.

What is striking is that Khamenei's engagement with India's story was not merely that of an admiring reader. In 1968, long before he became Supreme Leader, a young Khamenei translated and compiled a Persian-language work titled Kafah al-Moslemin Fi Tahrir al-Hend, meaning Muslims in the Liberation Movement of India, originally written by Egyptian scholar Abdul-Monaem al-Nemr. This was scholarly labour, not casual browsing. It suggests that his interest in India's freedom struggle was intellectual and sustained, not a product of his later political career.

The pattern that emerges is coherent and, in hindsight, unsurprising. Khamenei was drawn to narratives of civilisations that had been diminished by colonial power and had found, or were seeking, ways to reclaim their agency. Nehru's books offered exactly that: a rigorous, eloquent account of how a great country had been taken apart and what it had once been. That this resonated deeply with the leader of a country which had long positioned itself in opposition to Western hegemony is not difficult to understand. The books were not read in isolation. They were read as mirrors.

There is something in this story, too, that speaks to the enduring power of Nehru as a writer. His three major works, the 'Autobiography', 'Glimpses of World History', and 'The Discovery of India', were all composed in prison. They were written without access to archives, in difficult physical circumstances, and yet they have moved readers across languages, ideologies and generations. Khamenei was not alone in his admiration; Nehru's books have shaped thinking well beyond India's borders since their publication. But it is rare to discover that a geopolitical adversary of the West found in them the same anti-colonial fire that Nehru's own contemporaries had.

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If there is a takeaway here, it is this: good books travel. They cross borders that diplomats cannot, and they find readers in places their authors never imagined. Nehru wrote his letters to a young girl in Allahabad. Nearly a century later, those same letters were being recommended from Tehran as essential reading for understanding the world. That is not a small thing. That is exactly what literature is supposed to do.

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