How Jawaharlal Nehru’s death marked the end of an age of innocence

On Nehru’s 60th death anniversary, Rakhshanda Jalil remembers the shock and grief his demise caused the writers and thinkers of his age.

Quick to align himself with the writers’ fraternity—be it domestic or international—Jawaharlal Nehru was known to extend a hand of solidarity to a good cause. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

My mother paints a vivid picture…of her father glued to the radio waiting for the daily despatches on Nehru’s health. Like countless others across the country, her father would sit beside the radio and wait for news on the dearly beloved, ailing prime minister’s health. The radio was playing Mat ro mata, laal tere bahutere…(Don’t cry, Mother, you have many sons…) Suddenly, my mother tells me, he let out a wail and began to cry like a baby. The entire family joined in that collective outpouring of grief. A funerary gloom descended on the home. The cooking fire was not lit that day for no one could think of eating a morsel. It was as though a family elder had passed away. Such was the grief and the profound sense of loss.

In hindsight, the loss was indeed irreparable. Nehru’s death on 27 May 1964 marked the end of an age of innocence—in life as in politics. Nehru’s India lingered on, feeble and emaciated for a while but the man who had infused the idea with vim and vigour was gone. With the passing of years, wars were won, the country developed, the closed economy opened up, nuclear tests were successfully conducted but the secular spirit that Nehru embodied through thought and deed slowly began to leach out. The secular socialist republic that Nehru had helped fashion began to change colours.

Let us look at the spell Nehru cast over the writers and thinkers of his age and the effect he had on the Indian literary scene, especially the progressive writers’ movement. Quick to align himself with the writers’ fraternity—be it domestic or international—Nehru was known to extend a hand of solidarity to a good cause. As a gesture of camaraderie with the beleaguered people of Spain in their fight against fascist forces, Nehru joined the intellectual fraternity that had descended from different parts of the world. When Andre Malraux, Stephen Spender, W H Auden, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos leant their weight to the Spanish War, Nehru too visited the trenches of Spain.

In India, he was among the first to extend support to the fledgling All India Progressive Writers’ Association in April 1936. In November 1937, he addressed the PWA session in Allahabad. In an informal but heart-felt speech, he stressed the role of the progressive writer in society. He also touched upon the Hindi-Urdu debate by saying an academic discussion was more likely to find a solution than politicians who can be relied upon to generate more heat and distrust rather than genuine debate! He urged the association to include only writers and not ‘allow among yourself politicians like me’ or else the creative and artistic side of their work would suffer, Nehru warned. Emphasising his point about keeping politicians at bay, he gave the example of European and American associations of progressive writers and writers like Voltaire whose writings influenced not just the French Revolution but the whole world for over a hundred years.

Under Nehru’s personal directive, the central government set up the Sahitya Akademi with various state units under its umbrella, to look seriously into the question of translations from and into regional languages and truly make bhasha literatures intelligible to a national audience. The Sahitya Akademi was set up in 1954 with one of the staunchest Hindi progressives, Prabhakar Machwe, as its first Secretary.

The cinema of the late 1940s and all through the 1950s and the mid-60s continued to reflect the ‘idea’ of India that Nehru was at pains to imprint on the national consciousness. In this, the progressive lyricists did a yeoman’s service in spreading this idea to the nooks and crannies of the popular imagination through hugely popular film songs. In B R Chopra’s Naya Daur (New Era, 1957), Sahir Ludhianvi is exhorting his fellow countrymen and women to join hands, put their shoulder to the wheel and build a new and prosperous India:

Saathi haath badhana saathi re

Ek akela thak jayega, milkar bojh uthana

Come, my friend, extend your hand

One alone will tire, let us carry the burden together

And in Dhool ka Phool (Flower of the Dust), Sahir is again urging people to put communal ill will aside and, in true Nehruvian style, become a liberal humanist:

Tu Hindu banega na Musalman banega

Insaan kii aulad hai insaan banega

You will be neither a Hindu nor a Muslim

Born of a human you will be a human

In Naunihal (Young One), Kaifi Azmi celebrates the enduring legacy of Nehru whom he has long admired with this ode to Nehru’s liberal humanism which he believes is a balm that a country scarred from a lingering post-partition ill-will desperately needs:

Meri awaaz suno, pyaar ka saaz suno

Kyun sajaii hai yeh chandan ki chita mere liye

Mai koi jism nahiin hoon ke jala dogey mujhey

Raakh ke saath bikhar jaaoonga mai duniya mein

Tum jahaan khaaoge thokar wahiin paogey mujhey

Hear my voice, hear the musical instrument of love

Why have you set up this pyre of sandalwood for me

I am not just a body that you can burn me

I will scatter in the wind with my ashes

Every time you stumble you will find me beside you

In her new book Love in the Time of Hate: In the Mirror of Urdu, Rakshanda Jalil invokes the power of love, inclusivity, and harmony that is the trademark of poetry and literature.

When Nehru dies, the shock and grief among the Urdu writers is near-palpable. They have already come to his defence when he found himself beleaguered after the debacle of the Indo-China war. Writing about the sick and ailing Nehru in ‘Boorha Majhi’ (The Old Boatman), Anand Narain Mulla makes a plea to the young and ruthless waiting to seize power:

Mujh ko dhaare se hataane ki yeh koshish na karo

Don’t make this attempt to push me away from the current

When the terrible news comes of his death, a vast amount of poetry is written in a near-spontaneous outpouring of grief. Some among the progressives draw solace that Nehru’s tired body may have given up, but his spirit will live on. Sahir writes:

Jism ki maut koi maut nahi hoti

Jism mitt jaane se insaan nahi mar jaate

The death of the body is not death

A person does not die with the body

Excerpted with permission of Simon & Schuster India from Love in the Time of Hate: In the Mirror of Urdu by Rakhshanda Jalil.