In my inbox yesterday sat a dispatch from Miranj marking their fifteenth birthday, and in that email, among sundry updates, I found a link to The Nehru Archive, one of their recent projects. Since last morning I have been reading our first prime minister’s correspondence.
As a child, I had loved Letters from a Father to his Daughter. Mine was an old, somewhat battered copy, and I think it may have belonged to my own father when he was a boy (or was it simply from my grandfather’s library?). That book shaped my worldview in more ways than one, and Nehru’s enthusiasm about the world mirrored my father’s. Now that I am much older, conversations with friends and peers more easily make me see just how wonderful my childhood was. My parents treated me with a respect that isn’t often accorded to children: respect for my opinions and autonomy, but also for my curiosity and flights of fancy. Funnily enough, Letters from a Father to his Daughter, made me believe that this is what all parents did.
Anyway, coming back to this archive, today. A passage from a letter Nehru wrote to his now-adult daughter in 1940 put into words what I’ve been feeling for months. Not that I am suggesting that I’ve been working remotely as hard as he would have been.
❝For the last year or two I have avoided engagements and only those I cannot refuse have been accepted — responsibilities I have undertaken must be discharged. The responsibilities grow in spite of me and the coils of fate bind me. Not that I have any desire to shirk them but the future is so uncertain that the urge to activity lessens. Activity to what end? 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. Sometimes a foolish desire to be ill and to lie in bed — but this illness should not be serious — comes to me. How pleasant it must be, I think, to laze and not be forced to do this and that when the mind is unwilling and rebellious.❞
It was inexplicably comforting to think of Nehru merely as a man tired of work and longing for rest, just as it was amusing to see his notes and sketches from The Bandung Conference of 1955.