The mystique about Nehru

 

The mystique about Nehru

Pandit Motilal Nehru, one of the most successful and the richest layers of his time, was earning more than hundred rupees a day at the end of 19th century. He had hundred servants looking after Swaraj Bhavan and Anand Bhavan.  He led a very lavish and royal life and gave up everything to join the freedom movement. Swaraj Bhavan, which became the Head Quarters of the Indian National Congress during the freedom struggle, was dedicated to the nation. His imprisonment in Naini prison  and the discomfort of prison life and the extreme heat of the plains led to a rapid deterioration in his health, precipitating his death on  6 February 1931.

There is a mystique about Jawaharlal Nehru. Immediately after his marriage in 1916, he gave up the legal practice and plunged into the freedom struggle. In 1921, following the non cooperation movement, he was convicted and imprisoned for the first time. As Michael Brecher described, subsequently “prison becomes a habit’ with him, convicted and imprisoned nine times. He wrote in his Autobiography: “I became wholly absorbed and wrapt in the movement...I gave up all my other associations and contacts...I almost forgot my family, my wife, my daughter. It was only afterwards that I realised what a burden and trial I must have been to them ... and what amazing patience and tolerance my wife had shown towards me.”  His entire family was imprisoned during the freedom struggle, even his mother was lathi charged and imprisoned during the salt satyagraha. And when his wife Kamala was fighting for her life in 1935, he refused to be released on parole from the prison, forcing the British Government to release him unconditionally  from the Almora district jail to enable him to join her at a sanatorium in  the Black Forest in Germany. He spent 10 years in jail- which no other leader had.  We do not find any parallel in history of a family sacrificing everything, going through the ordeal of prison life, for the cause of one’s country.

Nehru was adored by the Indian masses – a sort of a hero-worship. Those days Anand Bhavan would attract huge crowds of pilgrims, and endless stream of visitors from dawn to dusk. He recorded in his Autobiography: “My very popularity and the brave addresses that came my way...of choice and flowery language...became subjects for raillery in the circle of my family and intimate friends. The high-sounding and pompous words and titles...Bharat Bhushan-‘Jewel of India’; Tyagamurti-‘O Embodiment of Sacrifice’ were picked out by my wife and sisters and others... all these touched me on the surface only...My real conflict lay within me, conflict of ideas, desires and loyalties, of subconscious depths struggling with outer circumstances, of an inner hunger unsatisfied.” 

On his wife's death Gurudev Rabindranath  Tagore, in his Viswa Bharati Ashram,  had observed 8th March 1936 as the Mourning Day in memory  of Kamala Nehru. His  glowing tribute sums up why Nehru  was a class apart:

"Today we have gathered here  to pay our tribute to the  memory of one with whom we chanced to come into close relationship...At the time when  her husband was in prison and her own health was threatened by a fatal malady...the atmosphere of serenity and heroic fortitude that she carried round her...The reticent dignity that she had maintained all through the vicissitudes of her noble life finds its voice today that overwhelms us by its truth.

Jawaharlal has his undoubted right to the throne of Young India. His is a majestic character. Unflinching in his patient  determination and indomitable his courage, but what raises him far above his fellows is his unwavering adherence to moral integrity and intellectual honesty.  He has kept unusually high the standard of purity in the midst of political turmoils, where deceptions of all kinds, including that of one's self, run rampant.  He has never fought shy of truth when it was dangerous, nor made alliance with falsehood when it would be convenient...This lofty ideal of truth is Jawaharlal's greatest contribution in his fight for freedom...is the Rithuraj representing the season of youth and triumphant joy, of an invincible spirit of fight and uncompromising loyalty to the cause of freedom."

Nehru was as an atheist. And yet he was very spiritual. He was a karmayogi, who believed in service  to the humanity, promoting peace and security in the much  troubled world that he inherited, and dedicated his  life ‘to build the noble mansion of free India.’

His Will and Testament dated 21 June 1954 is very fascinating. It makes us to understand why he was so proud of the great Indian inheritance.It explains the mystique about Nehru.The excerpts are reproduced:

“I have received so much love and affection from the Indian people that nothing that I can do can repay even a small fraction of it,and indeed there can be no repayment of so precious a thing as affection. Many have been admired, some have been revered, but the affection of all classes of Indian people has come to me in such abundant measure that I have been overwhelmed by it. I can only express hope that in the remaining years I may live, I shall not be unworthy of my people and their affection.

To my innumerable comrades and colleagues,I owe an even deeper debt of gratitude. We have been joint partners in great undertakings and have shared triumphs and sorrows which inevitably accompany them.

I wish to declare with all earnestness that I do not want any religious ceremonies performed for me after my death. I do not believe in any such ceremonies and to submit to them, even as a matter of form would be hypocrisy and an attempt to delude ourselves and others.

When I die, I should like my body to be cremated...A small handful of these ashes should be thrown into the Ganga and the major portion of them disposed of in the manner indicated below. No part of these ashes should be retained or preserved.

My desire to have a handful of my ashes thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad has no religious significance,so far as I am concerned. I have no religious sentiment in the matter. I have been attached to the Ganga and Jamuna rivers in Allahabad ever since my childhood and, as I have grown older,this attachment has also grown. I have watched their varying moods as the seasons changed, and have often thought of the history and myth and tradition and song and story that have become attached to them through the long ages and become part of their flowing waters. The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats.

She has been a symbol of India's age‐long culture and civilisatiton, ever changing, ever flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the snow‐covered peaks and the deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below, where my life and work have been cast. Smiling and dancing in the morning sunlight, and dark and gloomy and full of mystery as evening shadows fall; a narrow, slow and graceful stream in winter, and a vast roaring thing during monsoon, broad‐bosomed almost as the sea, and with something of the sea's power to destroy, the Ganga has been to me a symbol and a memory of the past of India, running into the present, and flowing on to the great ocean of the future.

And though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain and divide her people, and suppress vast numbers of them, and prevent free development of body and spirit; though I seek all this, yet I do not wish to cut myself off from the past completely.

I am proud of the great inheritance that has been, and is, ours, and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India. That chain I would not break, for I treasure it and seek inspiration from it. And as witness of this desire of mine and as my last homage to India's cultural inheritance, I am making this request that a handful of my ashes be thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad to be carried to the great ocean that washes India's shore.

The major portion of my ashes should, however, be disposed of otherwise. I want these to be carried high up into the air in an airplane and scattered from that height over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India..”

Nehru was one of the most ideal and finest minds that India had produced.