On Children’s Day: A letter from a father to his daughter

She was barely 17 years-old when Jawaharlal Nehru decided to send Indira Gandhi to Santiniketan for schooling. She was apprehensive and family friends told her horror stories about the place. The place was spartan and austere, inconvenient and the food would not agree with her. There was no fan and she would certainly fall ill. The teenager wrote to her father in jail seeking permission to stay in a cottage owned by a family friend in Santiniketan and to carry a ‘servant’ from Allahabad to look after her. In response she received a stinging reply from Nehru. Written 82 years ago, 13 years before independence, this letter continues to bring a lump to the throat of readers. Excerpts from the letter :

DEHRA DUN JAIL

June 15, 1934

Indu darling,

I was glad to receive your letter after a long time.

About Vakil’s suggestion that you might take Soniben’s cottage at Santiniketan and set up a separate establishment there with a cook etc., I am afraid I do not agree at all.

I dislike very much the idea of your keeping apart from the common herd and requiring all manner of special attention, just as the Prince of Wales does when he goes to school or college. This seems to me to savour of vulgarity and snobbery.

It is a bad beginning to make in any place to shout out to the people there that they are inferior beings and you are a superior person requiring special and particular treatment. Do you think any self-respecting boy or girl would care to make friends with you under these circumstances ? And what would the teachers & professors who run the college there, feel ? Would they not feel that they had been insulted to some extent by our having made our own arrangements over their heads ?

No, this kind of thing will never do. Wherever we go we must keep on a level with our surroundings and not imagine that we are better or superior. It is better not to go to a place than to go as a superior person.

If you even desire to work among village folk or poor factory workers, how do you think you would live with them or visit them? As a society lady with a scented handkerchief to keep off the bad smells, occasionally patronising them or doling out charity to them? That is not the way to meet your kind or do human service. This method of charity and condescension irritates me exceedingly and I have no use for it.

I think I have told you that it has long been my desire that a part of your education—and every boy’s and girl’s education –should consist of real honest work in a factory or in the fields. Unfortunately this cannot be arranged in India under present conditions but this idea of mine will give you some notion of what I think of education.

If you went to work in a factory do you think you could do so as a superior person living apart and in a much better way than the others ? The idea is absurd. The very object of going there is to learn from the sufferings, discomforts and misery which surrounds and wraps up the great majority of people, to see the drama of real life; to become akin to a small extent at least with the masses; to understand their viewpoint; and to get to know how to work so as to raise them and get them out of their misery. This cannot be done by people who live in cotton wool but by those who can face the sun and the air and hard living.

However all this does not arise at present and much will depend on what ideals in life you have. I cannot impose my ideals on you. If you want to make your life worthwhile you will have to decide for yourself what your life-philosophy should be.

Do you know what I had to put up with at Harrow ? We never had a full meal at school unless we bought it for ourselves. As junior boys we had to wait on seniors as fags, get their goods, clean their places up, sometimes clean their boots, carry messages for them etc and be continually sworn at by them and sometimes beaten.

So I think you had better go to Santiniketan without making any special arrangements… Do not be prejudiced before even you go to Santi Niketan. It has its faults but it has its good points also and I think the latter far outweigh the former…

Your loving,

Papu