During the freedom struggle, Nehru had a companion who had a strong personality and stood with him like a rock. He was lucky to have a wife who was brave and had a purpose in life.
She was never overshadowed by him and neither did he ever try to steal her thunder. In fact, it was she who brought his life on track. Kamala Nehru was born in a traditional Kashmiri Pandit family and was homeschooled.
She could not speak English which was totally opposite to Jawaharlal Nehru when they got married. She later gave birth to a daughter named Indira Priyadarshini. She also had a son but he died just a few days after birth. Kamal Nehru was the driving force for her husband. She broke all stereotypes as her husband as well as of an open-minded nature. She joined her husband to fight for India's independence. In fact, Kamala Nehru was at the forefront of the Non-cooperation movement of It was Kamala, someone Nehru was proud to be the husband of, as she was a gutsy woman.
It was she along with other women leaders who had launched a massive protest against the shops that sold foreign cloth and liquor in Allahabad. She took the center stage and she was the one who delivered the same speech on his behalf. Though he found himself interested in the philosophy but repelled by some of its methods, from then on the backdrop of Nehru's economic thinking was Marxist, adjusted as necessary to Indian conditions. In , after years of struggle on behalf of Indian emancipation, Nehru was named president of the Indian National Congress.
In fact, hoping that Nehru would attract India's youth to the party, Gandhi had engineered Nehru's rise. The next year, Nehru led the historic session at Lahore that proclaimed complete independence as India's political goal. November saw the start of the Round Table Conferences, which convened in London and hosted British and Indian officials working toward a plan of eventual independence.
After his father's death in , Nehru became more embedded in the workings of the Congress Party and became closer to Gandhi, attending the signing of the Gandhi-Irwin pact.
Signed in March by Gandhi and the British viceroy Lord Irwin, the pact declared a truce between the British and India's independence movement. The British agreed to free all political prisoners and Gandhi agreed to end the civil disobedience movement he had been coordinating for years. Unfortunately, the pact did not instantly usher in a peaceful climate in British-controlled India, and both Nehru and Gandhi were jailed in early on charges of attempting to mount another civil disobedience movement.
Neither man attended the third Round Table Conference. Gandhi was jailed soon after his return as the sole Indian representative attending the second Round Table Conference.
The third and final conference did, however, result in the Government of India Act of , giving the Indian provinces a system of autonomous government in which elections would be held to name provincial leaders. Gandhi said in January , "[Jawaharlal Nehru and I] had differences from the time we became co-workers and yet I have said for some years and say so now that Jawaharlal will be my successor. At the outbreak of World War II in September , British viceroy Lord Linlithgow committed India to the war effort without consulting the now-autonomous provincial ministries.
In response, the Congress Party withdrew its representatives from the provinces and Gandhi staged a limited civil disobedience movement in which he and Nehru were jailed yet again. Nehru spent a little over a year in jail and was released with other Congress prisoners three days before Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese. When Japanese troops soon moved near the borders of India in the spring of , the British government decided to enlist India to combat this new threat, but Gandhi, who still essentially had the reins of the movement, would accept nothing less than independence and called on the British to leave India.
Nehru reluctantly joined Gandhi in his hardline stance and the pair were again arrested and jailed, this time for nearly three years. By , within two years of Nehru's release, simmering animosity had reached a fever pitch between the Congress Party and the Muslim League, who had always wanted more power in a free India. The last British viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, was charged with finalizing the British roadmap for withdrawal with a plan for a unified India. Despite his reservations, Nehru acquiesced to Mountbatten and the Muslim League's plan to divide India, and in August , Pakistan was created—the new country Muslim and India predominantly Hindu.
The importance of Nehru in the context of Indian history can be distilled to the following points: he imparted modern values and thought, stressed secularism, insisted upon the basic unity of India, and, in the face of ethnic and religious diversity, carried India into the modern age of scientific innovation and technological progress.
It can and does overcome divisions — even in the most horrendous times. Tsang agrees that in retrospect, a lot gets distorted, people are dehumanised, and eventually the politics of the present takes over whatever little ounce of humanness a passage of history has to offer. Tsang may be the first one to fictionalise the life of Edwina Mountbatten into a novel, but she certainly won't be the last to have considered the relationship the vicereine had with Nehru.
The relationship has been part of popular films, television and even theatre. In the same context, proved to be somewhat definitive when Lady Pamela Hicks, younger daughter of Mountbatten in Daughter of Empire: Life as a Mountbatten accepted most theories surrounding her mother and Nehru , but rejected some. Since her presumed tell-all, not everything is available for public view. She refers here to the fact that the personal correspondence of the Mountbattens has never been made public and probably never will.
Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten wrote to each other till the day Edwina died in and a foregrounding of those letters would only do harm.
Depending on who you are read or watch, the relationship between Nehru and Edwina is even seen differently by people on either side of international borders.
0コメント