A reflection behind the wall of freedom

The Discovery of India 

Jawaharlal Nehru (3rd Edition; 1947)

© FG

In school, we as students of history were given the impression that going to prison in the name of nation and justice is noble. Amma told us of the numerous times that Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and the majority of the freedom fighters of India were imprisoned. The gaols got so packed that inmates had to be freed due to space constraints.

There must be some messages lost in translation today as we see leaders entangled in the 1MDB fiasco also try to appear heady and statesman-like under the scrutiny of the press and the glaring flash of the journalist-photographers.

We also were told that Nehru wrote his book whilst in prison. Amma was so fascinated with Gandhi and Nehru that she displayed a clay figurine of them in our living room so as to as remind her children to be useful citizens. 

Then we grew up...

Mixing with people who grew up in India and now with the access to information overload, the squeaky clean image of Gandhi, Nehru and Nehru's dynasty has lost its lustre. There is no shortage of gossips about Nehru's private life, his alleged affairs and even tertiary syphilis being the cause of his death, not cardiac arrest. Even his ancestry is questioned. The conspiracy theorists assert he is a closet Muslim and grew up in the slums of Allahabad. In real life, he was a Kashmiri Brahmin and a son of a lawyer.
In the post-truth era, another set of accusations are being hurled at him; that he was a Fabian. The Fabian movement portrays the image of being a socialist movement that tries to bring socialistic changes gradually through democracy without resorting to revolutionary overthrows. The conspiracy theorists do not buy that. Their real intention, they allege, as depicted in its coat of arms, says it all. It is an emblem representing a wolf in sheep's clothing. They are now accused of being part of the Cabal movement that tries to send the civilised as we know into one that of anarchy!

The Fabian Society

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, 

the original coat of arms.

(Wiki Commons)

In the opposite camp, accusations have arisen of late following the erection of Sardar Patel's enormous statue. It is said that it is a part of a concerted plan by the ruling party to erase Nehru's legacy from the history books.

A nonagenarian, 94 to be exact, loaned this book to me. The book, complete with watermarks and all the battle wounds of time had been in his collection for a long time. Being born in Quetta, in the state of Baluchistan when Pakistan did not exist, Partition is a distant but a harrowing memory for him. Even though he was safe under the tropical skies of Malaya then, he lost many of his family members during the 1947 bloodshed. Many of his them bear witness to India's own holocaust. Interestingly, he still reads his Hindu devotional hymns in the Urdu script. 

I cannot believe that Nehru's opus magnum was written in prison. At a time when information was scarce, especially in prison when access was limited, his knowledge on the history, religious text and the philosophy of India was phenomenal. This book was his look on the origin of a piece of land called India, how she evolved to reach great heights and her subsequent tumble to the mighty brutal forces of the Northern Muslim invaders and later the British.

When I announced that I was reading the book, somebody remarked, "Ah, a confused book written by a man whose administration was equally confused!" To be fair, this book was written by a politician, not a scholar. His outlook had to be fair in keeping with the changing of the times then. At a time when racial tensions were running high, and the support of the whole of the country was vital, he needed to appear bipartisan.

It is unfathomable that a civilisation so advanced could be brought to its knees. Members of such a race should be enslaved and be outclassed by others who were barbaric by comparison. If Ibn Khaldun's words are anything else to go by, this is precisely what he was trying to say - that a primitive tribe would yearn to be like the civilised, work to be like them, soon to be decadent like the masters and soon to be outclassed by another. 

Critics had a field day condemning Nehru's stance of the Afghan and Moghul invaders who, despite their conquests, decide to stay in India. This is in sharp contrast to the English who looted and basically relocated India's wealth. The detractors assert that the Muslim invaders were never awed by Indian's civilisation but instead were mesmerised with wisdom elsewhere, Arabic world, for instance. The British did try to bring modernity to India which by that time had slumbered off while the rest of the world was changing, technologically and economically. They too, for the first time, did unite the subcontinent under a single banner to stir their emotions to dig deep into their psyche to reassess their own culture.

The book is the reflection of Nehru's discovery of his motherland and an avenue for us as readers to discover a bit of his biography - his imprisonment, the death of his wife and his sincere desire for his country to turn up big and mighty like some of the big nations around the world (e.g. like Russia and China) which arose majestically from ashes of destruction.

I enjoyed the book indeed. The poetic yet straightforward descriptions of simple and sometimes painful things in life linger on the mind like an ear-worm. 

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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In the name of freedom

Freedom at Midnight
Authors: Larry Collins & Dominic Lapiere (1975)

Freedom, surviving the tests of time.

One look at the title, one might be forgiven to think that it might a draggy almost 600 paged slow account of the events leading to the lowering of the Union Jack and the subsequent hoisting in the full glory of the tri-coloured new flag with the emblem of Ashoka Chakra (Wheel of Righteousness). Luckily, it turns out to be one of the best accounts of the history of British India right down to the nitty-gritty account of little secrets of Indian now lost royalties. It is the result of three years of extensive research and numerous interviews.

Browsing through some of the comments online, we can see other people’s viewpoint on this book. Some lament that it is a one-sided Western view of the happenings in a helpless land of the natives. Most of the account of the event are through Louis Mountbatten’s written journals, letters and one-to-one interview with him by the authors. The authors are accused of making a saint out of whom they describe as a sex-crazed eccentric old politician. The dirty secrets of the former monarchs are laid out bare with hearsay evidence.

Be as it may, this informative book is an attention grabber. It tells about small little secrets that are quite ’new’ to me. The story, even though is supposed to be based on historical facts, is told in a narrative form rather than a descriptive one.

Every time, a colony attains independence from the British Empire, there would be bonfires, not one but two. One is started by merry making freedom fighters who cannot wait to lead the country in the direction they want and another by the Imperialist who cannot wait to erase any trace of their misdeeds and squandering of their treasures! In India, in the fire too went secrets and shreds of evidence of the power crazy and sex crazed treacherous monarchs of old India.

Mountbatten is pictured here as the last of the line of British greats trying to do something great to a nation that they should not rip apart in the first place. His job, at the time of appointment, is to give India her independence. The various dialogues with its deal seem to meet no compromise on the type of post-Independence India. The kings of Patiala, Hyderabad, Kashmir and others are scared that they might be penniless and powerless. The Muslims, under the leadership of Jinnah, insists on an Islamic state. Jinnah, even though portrays himself as the fighter for the Muslims, is pictured as a whisky-drinking, pork-eating Musalman only by name who does not grace the mosques. He has a well-kept secret; he was diagnosed with a disease that was as good as a death sentence at that time, tuberculosis. His days were numbered. Hence, the urgent push for a new nation - Pakistan (Punjab Province, Afghani frontier, Kashmir, Baluchistan, -stan).

Many arm-twisting manoeuvres led to the carving up the subcontinent. As for this tough job of breaking up families and agricultural lands, a judge, Cyril Radcliffe, who had never set foot in India, is summoned.

A significant portion of the book gives the account of the emotional and violent events of Partition. Brothers, only separated by the idea of the creator and their destiny senselessly kill each other to leave each other blind of their own absurdity. Many dreams, families and lives were shattered to prove the greatness of each other’s belief. Gandhi’s presence in Bengal, however, averted a major bloodbath that was expected there. His emotional blackmail tool was starving. Like a sulking child, he managed to get his way repeatedly by creating a hype about his abstinence from food, the last requesting for sparing of Muslim lives in India.

This gave the impression to the hardline Hindu supremacy groups that Gandhi is the cause of the division of the nation. Furthermore, he had planned for a march to Pakistan to plead for peace in Punjab, to spare for Muslim lives there.

The book gives a detailed description of the plotting, execution and subsequent investigation of Gandhi’s assassination in the garden of Birla House on the faithful Friday of 30th January 1948 by Nathuram Godse and his band of similar-minded Hindu anarchists.

I always wondered why India, the land that gave the world advances in astrology was given independence in an apparently inauspicious month of Aadi. Apparently, it was not their choosing. It turned out to be an arbitrary date plucked from thin air by Mountbatten. 15th was a lucky day for him as that was the day the Japanese surrendered in WW2. The Indian astrologers, initially unhappy with the choice of date, scrambled back to recalculate and rediscover indeed a window of subha murth (good times) around midnight of 15th August 1947. Technically, in the Indian calculation, the day breaks at dawn. So, India’s proclamation of Self Rule was made on 14th August 1947 night, by Indian standards, not 15th, like Pakistan’s.

This book was loaned to me by an 89-year-old man from Quetta, Baluchistan, which is now the hotbed of terrorist activities in Pakistan. This gentleman is an eyewitness to the actual events and lives to tell about his loss. He, being in the heat of things, during one of the man’s ugliest events, after living in harmony for generations, has unyielding opinions of the Partition. He religiously attends temple prayers on every Sunday, singing hymns of praises of the Divine Forces read from an Urdu script. The words look Arabic, but he sings in Sanskrit. Such was the blurring of cultures in India long ago.

P.S. The camaraderie among the people in the pre-Aurangzeb era can be imagined in the events happening after the passing of their first spiritual leader, Guru Nanak. He had such a following amongst the Muslims that both Muslims and Sikhs did their own ceremonies to send him off to the afterlife!

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