My mother paints a vivid picture...
of her father glued to the radio waiting for the daily despatches on Nehru’s health. Like countless others across the country, her father would sit beside the radio and wait for news on the dearly beloved, ailing prime minister’s health. The radio was playing .
..(Don’t cry, Mother, you have many sons.
..) Suddenly, my mother tells me, he let out a wail and began to cry like a baby.
The entire family joined in that collective outpouring of grief. A funerary gloom descended on the home. The cooking fire was not lit that day for no one could think of eating a morsel.
It was as though a family elder had passed away. Such was the grief and the profound sense of loss. In hindsight, the loss was indeed irreparable.
Nehru’s death on 27 May 1964 marked the end of an age of innocence—in life as in politics. Nehru’s India lingered on, feeble and emaciated for a while but the man who had infused the idea with vim and vigour was gone. With the passing of years, wars were won, the country developed, the closed economy opened up, nuclear tests were successfully conducted but the secular spirit that Nehru embodied through thought and deed slowly began to leach out.
The that Nehru had helped fashion began to change colours. Let us look at the spell Nehru cast over the writers and thinkers of his age and the effect he had on the Indian literary scene, especially the progressive writers’ movement. Quick to align himself with the writers’ fratern.