Jawaharlal Nehru in his Will wrote these words and was quoted by some anonymous person who inserted a small correction to it by way of a harmless parenthesis which raised some shackles :
I am proud of that great inheritance that has been and is ours, and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India. That chain I would not break, for I treasure it and seek inspiration from it. And as witness of this desire of mine and as my last homage to India’s cultural inheritance, I am making this request that a handful of my ashes be thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad (now Prayagraj) to be carried to the great ocean that washes India’s shore.
The major portion of my ashes should, however, be disposed of otherwise. I want these to be carried high up into the air in an airplane and scattered from that height over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India.
~ Jawaharlal Nehru in his will
A good friend of mine — a fine Parsi gentleman— reacted to above in the following words in an email to me :
We all have read Nehru’s will at sometime or the other but I am sure Nehru never said what is in parenthesis so what was the need of the person posting this to mention it ?
my ashes be thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad(now Prayagraj)
And my reply to him was this email below :
Please don’t think of me as any kind of Hindu fundamentalist or “Sanghi” fanatic when I say this :
Prayag is the confluence of 3 sacred rivers very dear to the Hindus — Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswathi (subterranean). The belief is that when a soul’s mortal remains are immersed as ashes at this confluence it is enabled to find eternal liberation.
Prayag is thus the appointed place in the Hindu religion for one’s ashes to be immersed. To instead say the ashes be immersed in Allahabad (the abode of Allah!) is a complete and repugnant misnomer.
Nehru the celebrated author of the “The Discovery of India” ought to have known that his deep, heartfelt wish to have his ashes immersed after his death in the holy confluence of the 3 sacred rivers was the expression of a soul’s essentially spiritual Hindu aspiration. Nehru ought to have known — and of course he did know — that long before the Muslim invasion of the Doab , and their renaming of Prayag as Allahabad, billions of Hindu souls had similarly wished for their mortal remains to melt away into the pristine waters of this ancient, sacred confluence. Nehru in his will writes this :”I am proud of that great inheritance that has been and is ours, and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India.”
It’s therefore quite strange that he does not take care to refer to Allahabad as Prayag!
There really is no insult to Nehru that I see being intended by interpolating in parenthesis of Prayagraj after Allahabad. The interpolation merely shows a literary lapse … a rare faux pas … on the part of Nehru, the historian. Yes, but it does however also highlight the gross incongruity of juxtaposing Allahabad with the Hindu custom of ashes being immersed at Prayag .
Regards,
Sudarshan Madabushi