Raj Kaul

Raj Kaul, was the son of Gangu Brahmin, who in 1706 betrayed Guru Gobind Singh’s mother and two younger sons to the Khan of Morinda and misappropriated their gold, ornaments and coins. The Subedar of Sirhind, Wazir Khan later confiscated the gold , ornaments and coins of Mata Gujri. In 1716, Moghul Emperor Farukhsiyar (1683-1719) in a major reversal of policy, admitted the wrong done to Gangu Brahmin by Subedar Wazir Khan and granted compensation to his son, Raj Kaul, in the form of land grant on a canal (nehr) at Ananda Mughal, a suburb of Delhi. As a camouflage, Raj Kaul dropped Kaul from his name and added the surname Nehru, from the Jagir on the nehr (canal) in Ananda Mughal, Delhi. Raj Kaul was also an Indian Sanskrit and Persian scholar from Kashmir. He was later noted as the earliest known member of the Nehru-Gandhi family. As a result, several Nehru member biographies generally begin with Kaul's story.

Tradition According to Braj Kumar Nehru, records of the Nehru family prior to when they fled Delhi in 1857, were either lost or destroyed. In his autobiography, Braj Kumar is told by Kashmiri history scholar, Mohammad Yousuf Taing, that Farrukhsiyar never went to Kashmir. both of which are cited from Jawaharlal Nehru's autobiography titled An Autobiography. That the name derived from the village of Naru in the Badgam part of Kashmir, according to Shashi Tharoor in his 2003 biography of Nehru, Nehru: The Invention of India, "has never been conclusively established". Tharoor recalls the traditional story, explaining that the many Kaul's that migrated from Kashmir at that time, typically did so as scholars.