Remembering
Jawaharlal Nehru
Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru was born on 14th November
1889 in Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj). His passing away which happened on 27th May 1964
came as a big shock not only to India but to the whole world. Shantivan in Delhi is now his resting
place. His birthday used to be celebrated
as Children’s Day even during his life time because of his love for children
whom he regarded as the future of India.
An Independence activist who spent almost 11 years in jail, Pt.
Nehru was more or less a staunch follower of Gandhiji. At the end of the
British rule, he became the first Prime Minister of free India on 15th
August 1947 and remained a central figure in Indian politics till the last
moment of his life.
Most of the biographers agree that Pt. Nehru had a vision of
India in which getting the British out of it was merely the preliminary stage.
What he was concerned with was a modernised India, with an industrial economy
and an egalitarian society. Nationalist leader though he was, he hated many of the things which most Hindus
hold dear --- cow worship, subordinate status for women, temples, sadhus,
astrology and caste. He was an all out believer in democracy and secularism. While
finding a good deal valuable in the cultural heritage of India, he worked for the
synthesis of the East and the West.
In foreign affairs, he introduced the neutral policy of Non-Alignment.
As regards relationship between neighbouring countries, he offered the policy of Panchsheel ----- the Five Principles of peaceful coexistence,
non-interference in others’ internal affairs and respect for each other’s
territorial unity and sovereignty,
It was during his imprisonment that Pt. Nehru wrote three
remarkable books, Glimpses of World
History (1934) An Autobiography (1936), The Discovery of India (1946).
According to Syed Mahmud, his old friend and associate of the
family, Pt. Nehru disciplined himself by a regime of physical exercise, mental
control and hard study. He “shepherded his fellow prisoners, nursed them,
cooked for them, taught them to fend for themselves, and kept their spirits up.”
In his book on Nehru W.R.Crocker observes: Nehru’s writings
illustrate a cerebral life, and a power of self-discipline, altogether out of
the ordinary. Words by the million bubbled up out of his fullness of mind and
spirit. Had he never been Prime Minister
of India, he would have been famous as the author of the Autobiography and the autobiographical parts of The Discovery of India.
About his occupation of reading and writing in prison, Nehru himself
reveals in his Autobiography: “I occupied myself with my books, going from one
type of reading to another, but usually sticking to ‘heavy’ books. Novels made me feel mentally slack, and I did
no read many of them. Sometimes I would weary of too much reading, and then I
would take to writing. My historical series
of letters to my daughter kept me occupied right through my two-year term, and they
helped me very greatly to keep mentally fit. To some extent I lived through the
past I was writing about and almost forgot about my gaol surroundings.” (Extract
from Prison Humours),
The extract that follows is from ‘The Discovery of India’. Nehru wrote it during his imprisonment in
Ahmadnagar Fort, 13th April 1944.
It sheds light on his love for natural beauty here that of the moon:
“The moon, ever a companion to me in prison, has grown more
friendly with closer acquaintance, a reminder of the loveliness of this world,
of the waxing and waning of life, of
light following darkness, of death and resurrection following each other in
success. Ever changing, yet ever the same, I have watched it in its different phases
and its many moods in the evening, as the shadows lengthen, in still hours of
the night, and when the breath and whisper of dawn bring promise of the coming
day. How helpful is the moon in counting
the days and the months, for the size and shape of the moon, when it is
visible, indicate the day of the month with a fair measure of exactitude.”
The extract that
follows is also from the ‘The Discovery of India’ and is part of Nehru’s
philosophy of life. It goes like this: “Essentially,
I am interested in this world, in this life, not in some other world or a
future life. Whether there is such a
thing as a soul, or whether there is survival after death or not, I do not
know; and, important as these questions are, they do not trouble me in the least. The environment in which I have grown up
takes the soul (or rather the atma)
and a future life, the Karma theory of cause and effect, and reincarnation for granted. I have been affected by this and so, in a
sense, I am favourably disposed towards these assumptions. There might be a soul which survives physical
death of the body, and a theory of cause and effect governing life’s actions
seems reasonable, though it leads to obvious difficulties when one thinks of
the ultimate cause. Presuming a soul, there appears to be some logic also in
the theory of reincarnation.”
Finally, let me add what Durga Das, a son of Gandhiji, wrote
about Pt. Nehru in his book “INDIA from Curzon to Nehru & After: “The
Indian people made a hero of Nehru. For
ten years, he made them feel as the chosen people whose leader was the moral leader
of the world. Indeed, they began to
think that India had come full circle to the Vedic age, in which all wisdom was
the privilege of the seers of India.
Much of the charisma had worn thin towards the closing years of his
life. The Chinese attack rudely awakened
the people to the harsh reality that they had been living in a world of
make-believe. Nevertheless when Nehru
passed away, he still, enjoyed in the minds and hearts of the Indian people a
place which few before him have had ---and few ever will.”
14TH November 2019 ------G. R. Kanwal
