VIEW OF MAN BY NEHRU AND SHAKESPEARE
When Indira was not a student in any school, Jawaharlal Nehru
educated her through a series of letters, last of which was written in August
1933, and later the whole lot was
published in Glimpses of World History.
In his last letter, Nehru was quite frank and even
humble. He wrote: “I am not a man of
letters and I am not prepared to say that the many years I have spent in gaol
have been the sweetest in my life, but I must say that reading and writing have
helped me wonderfully to get through them.
I am not a literary man, and I am not a historian; what indeed am I? I
find it difficult to answer that question. I have been a dabbler in many
things; I began with science at college and then took to the law, and after
developing various other interests in life, finally adopted the popular and
widely practised profession of gaol-going in India. “
The best thing in this letter was Nehru’s advice to her
daughter to have a free and open mind and not to take his words as Biblical
truth: “You must not take what I have written in these letters as the final
authority on any subject. A politician wants to have a say on every subject,
and he always pretends to know much more than he actually does.” This is the
attitude which is ideally expected of a great educator in any sphere of life.
Though Nehru did not claim to be a literary man, he was much
more than that. His knowledge was
extremely vast and his quotations from the writings of great poets and writers
show that his interest in literature was quite extensive and deep. His own writings
like The Discovery of India and An Autobiography are acknowledged
masterpieces of literary prose, which provide to the reader a rare kind of
aesthetic pleasure.
Given below are two extracts on the View of Man, one from
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the other from Mr. Nehru’s Discovery
of India.
Not only the theme of both the extracts is common, their beginning, too, is identically exclamatory.
SHAKESPEARE: “What a piece of work is man ! how noble in
reason ! how infinite in faculties ! in form and moving how express and
admirable ! in action how like an angel ! in apprehension how like a god ! to
me what is this quintessence of dust? man
delights not me; no, nor woman neither. “
MR. NEHRU: “How amazing is this spirit of man ! In spite of
innumerable failings, man, throughout the ages, has sacrificed his life and all
he held dear for an ideal, for truth, for faith, for country and
honour…..Plaything of nature’s mighty forces, less than the speck of dust
in this vast universe, he has hurled
defiance at the elemental powers, and with his mind, cradle of revolution, sought to master them. Whatever gods
there be, there is something godlike in man, as there is also something of the
devil in him.“
----------
19th
August 2020 G.
R. Kanwal
No comments:
Post a Comment