Shastri was raised in a lower-middle-class family and only had two kurtas and dhotis.

Shastri dropped his birth name, Varma, and took the title of Shastri in 1925. Shastri means "one who knows the Shastras".

As the Minister of Police and Transport Control in Uttar Pradesh, Shastri was the first to use jets of water to disperse crowds instead of a lathi charge.

Shastri had a tendency to revise drafts many times. In 1964, he revised his speech for a Cairo conference so many times that it could not be typed in full by the time he spoke.

He was the first posthumous recipient of India's highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna.