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1889-1964
Pt. Jawahar Lal Nehru, The Prime Minister of India, was the true
builder of modern India. He was also a well known writer. His famous books
are ‘The Discovery of India’, ‘Glimpes of The World History’ and
‘Autobiography’. He was a man of international repute.
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Pt. Jawahar Lal Nehru
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About this lesson
‘The Ganga’ is an extract from the last will and testament of
pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru. He expresses his gratitude to the people of India for
their love and affection. He is also grateful to his colleagues who were his
fellow partners. Nehru wants that his body should be cremated after his death.
He wishes that a handful of his ashes be immersed in the Ganga and the major
portion of them be scattered over the fields.
[1]
I
have received so much love and affection from the Indian people that nothing
that I to 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 received, but the affection of all classes of the Indian people has
come to me in such abundant measure that I have been overwhelmed by it. I can
only express the hope that in the remaining years I may live, I shall not be
unworthy of my people and their affection.
To
my innumerable company trades and colleagues, I owe an even deeper debt of
gratitude. We have been joint partners
in great undertakings and have shared
the triumph and sorrows which inevitably accompany them.
When
I die, I should like my body to be cremated, if I die in a foreign country, my
body should be cremated there and my ashes sent to Allahabad. A small handful
of these ashes should be thrown in 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.
[2]
My desire to have a handful of my ashes thrown in 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 the 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 story that have
become attached to them through the long ages and become part of their flowing
waters.
[3]
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 civilization, 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.
[4]
Smiling and dancing in the morning sunlight, and dark
and gloomy and full of mystery as the evening shadows fall; a narrow, show and
graceful stream in winter and a vast roaring thing during the 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 memory of the of the past of India,
running into the present and flowing on to the great ocean of the future.
[5]
And
though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom and an anxious that
India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain her and divide
her people and suppress vast numbers of them and prevent the free development
of the body and the spirit. Though I seek t I do not wish to cut myself off
from that past completely. I am proud of that great inheritance that has been,
and is, ours, and I am conscious that I
too, like all of us, am a link in the unbroken chain which goes back to the
dawn of history in the immemorial past of India. And, as 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 shores.
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