New Delhi: India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was a self proclaimed agnostic but there were times in his life when he was deeply drawn to religious texts and ideas, Kerala Governor Arif Mohammed Khan said Tuesday while delivering a lecture on the “Life and Legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru.”
In his lecture, Khan shed light on the lesser-known facts about Nehru’s religious views.
The governor himself said that he had confined his lecture to a very specific area regarding Nehru’s religious faith, his view on religion. “People have confusion (about Nehru’s faith) and Panditji (Nehru) himself has a great role in creating the confusion,” he said in his lecture, the second in the Prime Minister’s Lecture Series started by the Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya.
Khan, a former union minister, was with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) before being appointed the governor. Earlier, he was with the Congress till he resigned over the party’s change in stance in the Shah Bano case in the Supreme Court. The then Congress government passed the Muslim Women (Protection on Divorce Act), 1986, overturning the SC verdict in the case which allowed maintenance to Shah Bano who had filed a criminal case against her husband. Khan quit the party as he defended the SC verdict.
Since he became the governor, Khan had several run-ins with the Kerala government led by CM Pinarayi Vijayan.
In his lecture, Khan read from letters that Nehru wrote to Mahatma Gandhi when he was incarcerated in Prayagraj jail in 1921-22 during the non-cooperation movement. The letters, Khan said, do not appear in the selected works of Pandit Nehru. They have not been included by biographers, or in the recent collection of Nehru-Gandhi letters published by Oxford.
“These letters may have been overlooked by scholars because they rest not in papers here in this museum but with Gandhi papers in Ahmedabad,” Khan said.
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Nehru through his letters
The first letter is dated 9 January, 1922. Khan said that Nehru had mentioned in the letter that he mostly read religious books when he was in Prayagraj jail during the non cooperation movement.
Quoting from the letter, Khan said that during that period, besides religious texts including the Bible, Nehru had started reading the Ramayana, Tulsi and Kabir’s bhajans and shlokas from Bhagwat Gita.
“Nehru wrote to Gandhi that shlokas from Bhagwat Gita served as a memory exercise,” Khan said.
He said Nehru further wrote in the same letter, “I have, as you may well have imagined, regularly done my prayers, regularly retired at the time appointed by you and been out of bed at the same hour when, as Guru Nanak says, the heavens rain nectar … the amrit kaal.”
In the same letter, Nehru wrote that his days are “passed among the saint nowadays and I should love to finish as well as I can my knowledge of the Bible, the saints including Christian saints, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata including, of course, Bhagwad Gita.”
In his hour-long lecture, Khan mentioned a second letter that Nehru had written to Gandhi on 19 February 1922. In that letter, Nehru told Gandhi that he was recently joined by some Khwaja sahab of Aligarh and “it is a privilege to learn Urdu from Khwaja.”
In return, Nehru told Gandhi, he gave Khwaja sahab something from the Upnishads and proposed to “give something from the Gita too,” Khan said, quoting from the letter.
Nehru mentioned in the letter how it was a joy to read the Ramayana every morning. “Ramayana is more a spiritual autobiography, poetic history of Ram. When these letters were written, Nehru was in his early 30s. He had lately fallen under the spell of Gandhi whose own faith was both religious and eclectic,” Khan said.
The Kerala governor also mentioned how in his last years, Nehru often visited Dehradun because he loved to view Himalayan ranges and also to spend time with a spiritual leader who lived at Rajpur Road. “Her name was Anandamayi Ma, a Bengali Hindu by birth but her faith was ecumenical,” Khan said.
Nehru’s visits to Anandmayi Ma, Khan added, were kept hidden from the public. “Much later, historian and biographer B.R. Nanda, who knew Nehru well, confirmed that towards the end of his life, the PM had developed greater interest in spirituality and had regular interactions with Ma Anandamayi,” Khan said.
He added, “Dr Radhakrishnan had also said, and I remember reading, that ‘in later years, he (Nehru) came and discussed things which were not political… which were spiritual’.”
Khan said that these episodes have further complicated “our knowledge of Nehru, a self confessed agnostic.”
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)
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