Nehru’s Word: Travelling amongst our farmers is invigorating

Jawaharlal Nehru wrote many letters to his daughter, several of them from prison. A selection of these is contained in Two Alone Two Together: Letters Between Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1940-1964, edited by Sonia Gandhi.

This week we bring to you extracts from his letters written in early 1940, within four months of the outbreak of the Second World War, to Indira, who had to interrupt her studies at Oxford due to illness and go to Switzerland for treatment. These extracts are very relevant today as they reveal his acute perception of the life and culture of the peasants, and particularly of those of Western UP. They also speak to us about how he maintained his equilibrium during the long and lonely periods in jail, his love for children, and his longing for a period of quiet repose, when he could be just with himself, his books and Indira.

“I have not written to you for about ten days. For nearly all this time I have been touring intensively in some of our north-western districts of the U.P. [United Provinces] of Aligarh, Bulandshahr, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, Moradabad. It was a tour after the old style, going from town to town and village to village, addressing huge gatherings, being stopped at numerous wayside places by peasant groups. The day’s work began early and went far into the night, sometimes till after two a.m.

“I was tired out and could not summon enough energy to write letters there. So, I could not write to you. I returned yesterday and got your letter of the 2nd January. I wanted to write to you immediately but a stream of visitors kept me occupied and I went to bed early to recover somewhat from the fatigue of the tour.

“Such tours are of course tiring. But they are invigorating also, at any rate I find them so. Our peasant masses depress me with their poverty but their enthusiasm is catching. More and more I feel in tune with them rather than with the listless and argumentative folk of the cities. I have even begun to appreciate just a wee bit the peasant’s attachment to the soil.

“The good earth has something solid, substantial and permanent about it, which is comforting in these days when everything else seems to be fleeting. Wars may rage and decimate humanity, but the seasons follow each other in regular succession, and the flowers bloom, and the soil produces food, and the fields look peaceful and gay. I felt the call of the good earth and the joy of seeing things grow out of this soil.

“The districts I visited are relatively prosperous and compare very favourably with our eastern districts like Gorakhpur and Ballia, where the poverty is extreme and the multitudes that gather are semi-naked. This poverty is oppressive and tragic, especially in these winter months when there is no covering except a cotton sheet. But in our northern districts, as in the Punjab, standards are a little higher and people are properly clothed.

“Many of the peasants who came had fat razais with them to wrap themselves in. They were healthier looking. Often, they came on their bullock-carts from many miles around, bringing their wives and children with them. Hundreds of these bullock-carts used to surround our meetings, giving the place the look of an encampment or fair.

“The Jats are strong in these areas. They are perhaps more passionately attached to the soil than any other group. Hefty, weather-beaten and healthy looking, they are almost parts of the country landscape. Always when I go to these rural areas, I am pleasantly surprised by the handsome types of humanity that I see.

“There are ever so many attractive-looking young women and the children are very bonny. In spite of my heavy programmes, I manage to spend a few minutes at almost every meeting with the children. I get [a] large number of garlands and I take these to the children and distribute them. Sometimes there is a petty riot as the children gather round me, each one demanding a garland. But unfortunately, there are never enough to go round….

I can quite understand how boring it must be for you to keep in bed most of the time. But I suppose that after the initial months you will gradually be getting up more and more…. I have not had much illness myself and have not been tied up to bed for long. But I have lived for long periods in isolation, confined to a small space, so I have sufficient experience of this kind of thing.

“The only way to keep normal and sane in prison is to live in the mind, intellectually, as well as manually with some handicraft. One must find mental and physical equilibrium in oneself and then it does not matter. Indeed, I think this is excellent training for one and it helps one greatly in life afterwards. Modern conditions are very upsetting as they provide excitements and sensations in quick succession and prevent an equilibrium from developing. Hence the great value of restful and uneventful periods….”

“I wish often enough that I could retire for a while in some remote far-away place where I could read and write and there is no engagement, no visitors, no letters, no newspapers - preferably somewhere near to you so that your presence and company might fill the emptiness within me....”

(Selected and edited by Mridula Mukherjee, former Professor of History at JNU and former Director of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library)