Life in Kenya: As it is seen from where I stand

Over the last week I had been going through the last few pages of Glimpses of World History wherein Nehru's description of erstwhile Kenya caught up my attention. Kenya too, like India, was a part of the British Empire then. Nehru portrayed a live picture of brutalities and inhumanities by the British in Kenya. This description is worth to be read in original. After describing the condition of Indians living in Kenya, Nehru writes:

The Journey from Independence Day to Republic Day

India celebrated her 61st Republic Day yesterday. This day commemorates the commencement of Constitution of India on January 26, 1950. India attained independence from the British Rule on August 15, 1947; however, she did not have her own constitution at that time and her status was still of a Dominion under the British Crown with at first Lord Mountbatten and then C. Rajgopalachari as its representatives in India. The government ran in accordance to the Government of India Act 1935 in this period. This was to be continued until India frames up and adopts her own constitution. In order to create the constitution, the Constitution Committee was set up with Dr. Rajendra Prasad as its chairman and Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar as the chairman of its Drafting Committee. The committee adopted the constitution on November 26, 1949; however, its commencement was postponed by two months until January 26, 1950.

Another New Year's Day

Thus wrote Jawaharlal Nehru, who was then imprisoned in the district gaol of Dehradun for political charges by the British Empire, on the New Year Day of 1933, to his daughter Indira:

It is New Year's Day today.  The earth has completed another cycle round the sun.  It recognizes no special days or holidays, as it rushes ceaselessly through space, caring not at all what happens on its surface to the innumerable midgets that crawl on it, and quarrel with each other, and imagine themselves--men and women--in their foolish vanity, the salt of the earth and the hub of the universe.

I was reading his Glimpses of World History earlier this morning when these words caught my attention.  Indeed, the sun and the earth know no novelty in completing one cycle and starting of another one.  But, we, as pity human beings we are, must have to stop somewhere and take a break to review the past and to plan for the future.  So, let us take this chance as an opportunity to look behind and then to take a great leap forward…

Wish all the readers of this blog a very happy new year.  Let the New Year just only be the first step of a lot more prosperity and joy to come.

The Old Civilization and Our Inheritance

To know the old civilization let us try to forget the present for a while and go back 2000 or 3000 years in Egypt and in ancient Knossos in Crete. The ancient civilization took root in these two countries as well as in what is called Iraq or Mesopotamia, and in China and India and Greece. Greece, perhaps, came a little later than the others. So that the civilization of India takes rank in age with its sister-civilizations of Egypt and China and Iraq. And even ancient Greece is a younger sister of these.

What happened to these ancient civilizations? Knossos is no more. Indeed, for nearly 3000 years it has been no more. The people of younger civilization of Greece came and destroyed it. The old civilization of Egypt, after a splendid history lasting for thousands of years, vanished and left no trace behind it, except the great Pyramids and the Sphinx, and the ruins of great temples and mummies and the like. Of course Egypt, the country, is still there and the river Nile flows through it as of old, and men and women live in it as in other countries. But there is no connecting link between these modern people and the old civilization of their country.

Iraq and Persia-- how many empires have flourished there and followed each other into oblivion! Babylonia and Assyria and Chaldea, to mention the oldest only. And the great cities of Babylon and Nineveh. The Old Testament in the Bible is full of the record of these people. Later, in this land of ancient history, other empires flourished, and them ceased to flourish. Here was Baghdad, the magic city of the Arabian Nights. But empires come and empires go, and the biggest and proudest of kings and emperors strut on the world's stage for a brief while only. But civilizations endure. In Iraq and Persia, however, the old civilization went utterly, even as the old civilization of Egypt.

Greece in her ancient days was great indeed, and people read even now of her glory with wonder. We stand awed and wonder-struck before the beauty of her marble statuary, and read the fragments of her old literature that have come down to us with reverence and amazement. It is said, and rightly, that modern Europe is in some ways the child of ancient Greece, so much has Europe been influenced by Greek thought and Greek ways. But the glory that was Greece, where is it now? For ages past, the old civilization has been no more, and other ways have taken its place, the Greece to-day is but a petty country in the south-east of Europe.

Egypt, Knossos, Iraq and Greece--they have all gone. Their old civilizations, even as Babylon and Nineveh, have ceased to exist. What, then, of the two other ancients in the company of old civilizations? What of China and India? As in other countries, they too have had empire after empire. There have been invasions and destructions and loot on a vast scale. Dynasties of kings have ruled for hundreds of years and then been replaced by others. All this has happened in India and China, as elsewhere. But nowhere else, apart from India and China, has there been a real continuity of civilization. In spite of all the changes and battles and invasions, the thread of ancient civilizations has continued to run on in both these countries. It is true that both of them have fallen greatly from their old estate, and that the ancient cultures are covered up with a heap of dust, and sometimes filth, which the long ages have accumulated.But still they endure and the old Indian civilization is the basis of Indian life even to-day. New conditions have arisen in the world now; and the coming of the steamship and the railway and the great factory has changed the face of the world. It may be, it is indeed probable, that they will change as they are already changing, the face of India also.

But it is interesting and rather wonderful to think of this long range and continuity of Indian culture civilization, right from the dawn of history, through long ages, down to us. In a sense, we in India are the heirs of these thousands of years. We are in the direct line, it may be, with the ancients, who came down through the north-western mountain passes into the smiling plains of what was to be known as Brahmavarta and Aryavarta and Bharatavarsha and Hindustan. Can you not see them trekking down the mountain passes into the unknown land below? Think of them, those distant ancestors of ours, marching on and on, and suddenly reaching the banks of noble Ganga flowing majestically down to the sea. How the sight must have filled them with joy!

It is indeed wonderful to think that we are the heirs of all these ages. But let us not become conceited, for if we are the heirs of the ages, we are the heirs of both the good and the bad. And there is a great deal of evil in our present inheritance in India, a great deal that has kept us down in the world, and reduced our noble country to great poverty, and made her a plaything in the hands of few peoples. But have we not decided that this must no longer continue?

Privacy and Secrecy

Often we may be in doubt as to what to do. It is not easy matter to decide what is right what is not. One little test I shall ask you to apply whenever you are in doubt. It may help you. Never do anything in secret or anything that you would wish to hide. For the desire to hide anything means that you are afraid, and fear is a bad thing and unworthy of you. Be brave, and all the rest follows. If you are brave, you will not fear and will not do anything of which you are ashamed. You know that in our great Freedom Movement, under Bapuji's leadership, there was no room for secrecy or hiding. We have nothing to hide. We are not afraid of what we do and what we say. We work in the sun and in the light. Even so in our private lives let us make friends with the sun and work in the light and do nothing secretly or furtively. Privacy, of course, we may have and should have, but that is a very different thing from secrecy. And if you do so, my dear, you will grow up a child of light, unafraid and serene and unruffled, whatever may happen.
This is what he has written to her about privacy and secrecy. Of course, there should be nothing to hide. Why should we afraid of anything, as the sun and the whole universe is with us? We are loving everything from the bottom of heart and soul.
How smart Arnav is!
He is the same as I saw him in the dream last night.
I am in love with him now.
Same face , same eyes, and same smile. I played a lot with him last night in the dream. Is this a co-incidence?

THE LAST LETTER

As I’ve habit of reading anything from the last page, I started reading the "Glimpses of World History" from the last page. I read first the last letter which is 196th letter written by him to his daughter. Into that, he tells he has spread out a lot of swadeshi ink on swadeshi paper to write the previous 195 letters. Was it worth while, he wonders? Will all this paper and ink convey any message to her that will interest her? But he thinks himself that she will say yes; of course she will feel that any other answer might hurt him.
In the same letter he tells her that she must not take what he has written in those letters as the final authority on any subject. A politician wants to have a say on every subject, and he always pretends to know much more than he actually does. He has to be watched carefully. He admits in the letter that there may be many errors as a prison, with no libraries or reference books at hand, is not the most suitable place to write on historical subjects.
He tells her that he has given the barest outline; this is not a history; they are just fleeting glimpses of our long past. If history interests her, if she feels some of the fascination of history, she will find her way to many books which will help her to unravel the threads of past ages. But reading books alone will not help. If she would know she must look upon it with sympathy and with understanding. To understand a person who lived long ago, you will have to understand his environment, the conditions under which he lived, the ideas that filled his mind. It is absurd for us to judge the past people as if they lived now and thought as we do. There is no one to defend slavery today and the great Pluto held that the slavery was essential. We can not judge the past from the standards of the present. Every one will willingly admit this. But every one will not admit the equally absurd habit of judging the present by the standards of the past. The various religions have especially helped in petrifying old beliefs and faiths and customs, which may have had some use in the age and the country of their birth, but which are singularly unsuitable in our present age.
If, then, you look upon past history with the eye of sympathy, the dry bones will fill up with flesh and blood, and you will see a mighty procession of living men and women and children in every age in every clime, different from us and yet very like us, with much the same human virtues and human failings. History is not a magic show, but there is plenty of magic in it for those who have eyes to see.
The past brings us many gifts; indeed, all that we have today of culture, civilization, science, or knowledge of some aspects of the truths, is a gift of distant or recent past to us. It is right that we acknowledge our obligation to the past. But the past does not exhaust our duty or obligation. We owe our duty to the future also, and perhaps that obligation is even greater than the one we owe to the past. For the past is past and done with, we cannot change it; the future is yet to come, and perhaps we may be able to shape it a little. If the past has given us some part of truth, the future also hides many aspects of the truth, and invites us to search for them.
History, it is said, has many lessons to teach us; and there is another saying that history never repeats itself. Both are true; for we cannot learn anything from it by slavishly trying to copy it, learn something from it by prying behind it and trying to discover the forces that move it. Even so, what we get is seldom a straight answer. “History,” says Karl Marx “has no other way of answering old questions than by putting new ones.”
The old days were the days of faith, blind, unquestioning faith. The wonderful temples and mosques and cathedrals of past centuries could never have been built but for the overpowering faith of the architects and builders and people generally. The very stones that they reverently put one on top of the other, or carved into beautiful designs, tell us of this faith. The old temple spire, the mosques with its slender minarets, the Gothic cathedrals—all of them pointing upward with an amazing intensity of devotion, as if offering a prayer in stone or marble to the sky above—thrill us even now, though we may be lacking in that faith of old of which they are the embodiments. But the days of that faith are gone, and gone with them is that magic touch in stone. Thousands of temples and mosques and cathedrals continue to be built, but they lack the spirit that made them live during the Middle Ages. There is little difference between them and the commercial offices which are so representative of our age.
Our age is different one; it is an age of disillusion, of doubt and uncertainty and questioning. We can no longer accept many of the ancient beliefs and customs; we have no more faith in them, in Asia or in Europe or America. So we search for new ways, new aspects of truth more in harmony with our environment. And we question each other and debate and quarrel and evolve any number of “isms” and philosophies. As in the days of Socrates, we live in an age of questioning, but that questioning is not confined to a city like Athens; it is world-wide.
In the same letter he writes, it is easy to admire the beauties of the universe to live in a world of thought and imagination. But to try to escape in this way from the unhappiness of others, caring little what happens to them, is not sign of courage or fellow-feeling. Thought, in order to justify itself, must lead to action. “Action is the end of thought.”, says Romain Rolland. “All thought which does not look towards action is an abortion and a treachery. If we are the servants of thought we must be the servants of action.”
People avoid action often because they are afraid of the consequences, for action means risk and danger. Danger seems terrible from a distance; it is not so bad if you have a close look at it. And often it is a pleasant companion, adding to the zest and delight of life. The ordinary course of life becomes dull at times, and we take too many things for granted and have no joy in them. And yet how we appreciate these common things of life when we have lived without them for a while!
And here he closes his last letter giving 35th poem or prayer from ‘Gitanjali’ by Rabindra Nath Tagore:--
“Where the mind is without fear and
The head is held high;
Where the knowledge is free;
……………………………
…………………………….
……………………………
……………………………
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”
So that’s all. We will meet very soon with a new letter.