‘The Panorama of India’s Past’

 

‘The Panorama of India’s Past’

I was fortunate to have come under the spell of writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, much early in life, that moulded my mind, and made me to rise above petty things, and invoked a deep sense of pride about India and her civilizational heritage that spanned over six thousand years. This piece is based on Nehru’s classic The Discovery of India that he wrote in Ahmednagar Fort, during his imprisonment, following the ‘Quit India’ Resolution.  

 

Nehru gives a fascinating account of India, her glorious intellectual and spiritual tradition. The urge to action, the desire to experience life through action, had influenced all his thought and activity. As the roots of the present lay in the past, he made voyage of discovery into the past, seeking a clue to understand the present. It was this attempt to discover the past in its relation to the present that led him to write the Glimpses of World History from jail in the form of letters to his daughter Indira, when she was in her early teens. It was a similar quest that led him later to write his Autobiography.  He wrote: ‘There is only one thing that remains to us that cannot be taken away: the act with courage and dignity and to stick to the ideals that have given meaning to life.’

 

Life’s Philosophy

 

To Nehru, religion- whether it was Hinduism or Islam or Buddhism or Christianly- though associated with superstitious practices and dogmatic beliefs, had also provided some deeply felt inner need of human nature; it had produced many fine types of men and women, as well as bigoted, narrow-minded, cruel tyrants. He said, religion merges into mysticism and metaphysics and philosophy. All thinking persons, to a greater or less degree, dabble in metaphysics and philosophy. However, Nehru was ‘interested in this world, in this life, not in some other world or a future life.’  And ‘whether there is such a thing as a soul, or whether there is a survival after death or not, I do not know; and important as these questions are, they do not trouble me in the least. They are just intellectual speculations in an unknown region about which we know next to nothing. They do not affect my life, and whether they were proved right or wrong subsequently they would make little difference to me.’ An ethical approach to life had a strong appeal for him.  

 

There are people absorbed in finding an answer to the riddle of the universe. And ‘this leads them away from the individual and social problem of the day and when they are unable to solve that riddle, they despair and turn to inaction and triviality or find comfort in some dogmatic creed.’  Thus, one drifts away from the attempt to think rationally and scientifically and takes refuge in irrationalism, superstition, and unreasonable and inequitable social prejudices and practices. To Nehru, the real problems are: ‘problems of individual and social life, of harmonious living, of a proper balancing of an individua’s inner and outer life, of an adjustment of the relations between individual and between groups, of a continuous becoming something better and higher of social development, of the ceaseless adventure of man.’  A living philosophy must answer the problems of to-day.

 

He asked himself: ‘What is my inheritance? To what am I an heir? To all that humanity has achieved during tens of thousands of years, to all that it has thought and felt and suffered and taken pleasure in, to its cries of triumph and its bitter agony of defeat, to that astonishing adventure of man who began so long ago and yet continues and beckons to us. To all this and more, in common with all men. But there is a special heritage for those of us of India, not an exclusive one, for none is exclusive and all are common to the race of man, one more especially applicable to us, something that is in our flesh and blood and bones, that has gone to make us what we are and what we are likely to be. It is the thought of this particular heritage and its application to the present that has long filled my mind.’

 

The Panorama of India’s Past

  

Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India: ‘As I grew up and became engaged in activities which promised to lead to India’s freedom, I became obsessed with the thought of India. What was this India that possessed me and beckoned to me continually, urging me to action.? The initial urge came to me, through pride, both individual and national, and the desire common to all men, to resist another’s domination and have freedom to live the life of our choice.  It seems monstrous to me that a great country like India with a rich and immemorial past, should be bound hand and foot to far-away island which imposed its will upon her. It was still more monstrous that this forcible union had resulted in poverty and degradation beyond measure’. He was eager and anxious to change her outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity.

 

India could not have been, what she undoubtedly was, and could not have continued a cultured existence for thousands of years, if she had not possessed something very vital and enduring, something that was worthwhile. What was astonishing was that Indian civilization should have continuity for more than six thousand years; and not in a static unchanging sense, for India was changing and progressing all the time. She had intimate contact with the Persians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Arabs, the Central Asians, and the peoples of Mediterranean; her cultural basis was strong enough to endure.

 

Afghanistan was united with India for thousands of years.  The old Turkish and other races who inhabited Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia before the advent of Islam were largely Buddhists, and earlier, during the period of the Epics, Hindus. Ancient India was a world in itself, a culture and civilization. Those who professed a religion of non-Indian origin, coming to India, settled down there, became distinctively Indian in the course of a few generations such as Christians, Jews, Parsees, and Muslims, with India becoming a melting pot of religions and cultures. The Indian coverts to some of these religions never ceased to be Indian on account of a change in their faith.

 

And ‘the story of the Ganges, from her source to the sea, from old times to new is the story of India’s civilization and culture, of the rise and fall of empires of great and proud cities, of the adventure of man and the quest of her mind which has so occupied India’s thinkers, of the richness and fulfillment of life as well as its denial and renunciation, of ups and downs, of growth and decay, of life and death.’ What was the tremendous faith that had drawn our people for untold generations to this famous river of India?

 

At Sarnath, the Buddha preached his first sermon. Ashoka’s pillars of stone with their inscriptions would speak in their magnificent language of a man who, though an emperor, was greater than any king or emperor. At Fatehpur-Sikri, Akbar, forgetful of his empire, was seated holding converse and debate with the learned of all faiths, curious to learn something new and seeking an answer to the enteral problem of man.

 

And ‘this panorama of the past gradually merged into the unhappy present, when India, for all her past greatness and stability, was a slave country, an appendage of Britain.’ And yet, Nehru felt ‘that anything that had the power to mould hundreds of generations, without a break, must have drawn its enduring vitality from some deep well of strength, and have had the capacity to renew that vitality from age to age.’

 

The General Elections 1937

 

The general elections held in 1937 for the provincial assemblies were based on restricted franchise affecting about 12% of the population- nearly 30 million people. Nehru, as the President of the Indian National Congress, had carried whirlwind tour of India, asking ‘for votes for the Congress, and for the independence of India, and for the struggle for independence.’ Some ten million people actually attended the meetings addressed by him, while millions of people came into some kind of touch with him, and small towns often deserted and the shops closed with almost the entire population of the town, men, women and even children gathering at the meeting place, waiting for hours in cold and heat patiently to listen to him.  He discovered no ‘special qualities in a literate or slightly educated person, which would entitle his opinion to greater respect than that of a sturdy peasant, illiterate but full of a limited kind of common sense.’ The epics of India, ‘the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and other books in popular translations and paraphrases, were widely known among the mases, and every incident and story of moral in them was engraved on the popular mind and gave a richness and content to it.’

 

The Discovery of India is a treatise on Indian civilization  and history , from the ancient to the modern..