The Unforgettable

Surajit Sanyal was born in Calcutta in 1950, and moved within three months to Allahabad, UP. His early years were spent in Allahabad and Gorakhpur, although ancestral roots were in Benaras. He spent most of his adolescence in Jaipur, Rajasthan. A product of St. Xavier’s Jaipur, Maharaja’s College, Jaipur, and St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, he went on to complete his management studies in XLRI, Jamshedpur. He started his career in advertising in Calcutta in 1975 and subsequently moved to the largest public utility company in the same city. He now leads a retired life in Salt Lake, Kolkata, with his wife Supriti and his son Sudipto.

In July 1995, the Nehru Memorial Library sent me a letter. It said, in part:

"We are publishing the selected works of Acharya Narendra Dev. In a statement Acharyaji has referred to the treatment meted out to your father, Shri Bhupendra Nath Sanyal, by the Agra jail authorities, when he was there in 1941, We want to give his bio-data in the book. Despite our best efforts we could not get his date and place of death, I enclose copy of the bio-data we have prepared, but I am not satisfied with it. His role in our freedom movement was significant."

Letter from Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi. 1995

I wrote a lengthy reply. The rest of this article is based on my letter.

I C Srivastava was born in 1943. A student of English Literature, he joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1966. During his 37 years tenure, he served as Collector/ District Magistrate of three districts, rising finally to the position of Chairman, Board of Revenue, Rajasthan. Shri Srivastava worked as Secretary/Principal Secretary of as many as 17 Rajasthan State Departments, including Revenue, Irrigation, Education, Culture, Tourism, Sports, Women &amp\; Child Development Department. He retired as the Chairman. Rajasthan State Mines and Minerals Corporation.  Shri Srivastava has authored several books on Administration &amp\; Current affairs in Hindi and English. Nowadays, he is associated with various social and cultural voluntary organisations in Jaipur.

In the aftermath of the Indo-Pak War of 1971, Rajasthan faced some unique issues as a border State. There was an influx of refugees, mostly poor Meghwalas and affluent Rajputs, from Pakistan. Barmer District Administration faced the problems of temporarily settling them close to water points but away from urban habitations, besides supplying rations to help them.

I C Srivastava was born in 1943. A student of English Literature, he joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1966. During his 37 years tenure, he was Collector/ District Magistrate of three districts, served as the Chairman, Board of Revenue, Rajasthan, and retired as Chairman, Rajasthan State Mines and Minerals Corporation. He has authored several books in Hindi and English. Nowadays, he is associated with various social and cultural activities in Jaipur.

It was a pleasant morning with the bright sun filtering through the windows of my spacious office. The date was 25th November 1971. At 11 AM, I was settling into my daily work routine as the Collector of Barmer District in Rajasthan when the telephone rang. It was the Base Commander of Utterlai, the airport on the border with Pakistan. He spoke almost in whispers.

"The VVIP is returning from the border area in 20 minutes. You and the Superintendent of Police have been called to meet her.  Please tell the SP and start immediately. Sorry, we should have mentioned this earlier."

His urgent voice did little to put me at ease.

We rushed to the airport and reached it in the nick of time.

With a pulsating heart and an anxious mind, we saw the Helicopter land. The VVIP exchanged a few words of thanks with Air Force officers and started walking briskly towards us. After formal introductions and greetings, the Union Minister of State for Home, who was accompanying the VVIP, beckoned me to walk with her towards the IAF plane waiting to fly them back to Delhi. My conversation with the VIP ran somewhat as follows:

R. C. Mody has an M.A. in Economics and is a Certificated Associate of the Indian Institute of Bankers. He studied at Raj Rishi College (Alwar), Agra College (Agra), and Forman Christian College (Lahore). For over 35 years, he worked for the Reserve Bank of India, retiring as the head of an all-India department. He was also Principal of the RBI's Staff College. Now (in 2019), in his 93rd year, he is engaged in social work, reading, and writing. He lives in New Delhi with his wife. His email address is rameshcmody@gmail.com.

In 1912, the 23-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru returned to India after seven years as a student in England, where he was first a schoolboy at Harrow, then an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, and lastly at the Inner Temple in London for his bar-at-law. His father, Motilal, a towering leader of the Allahabad bar with a flourishing practice, expected that the young and western-educated Jawaharlal would start as his apprentice and eventually emerge as a barrister of national fame.

But Jawaharlal's life took an altogether different turn. He found law uninteresting and the atmosphere of law chambers boring. There is no record of the number of briefs he took up or of how much he earned as a lawyer. All that we know is that he didn't stay long in the profession.

 

Urmila Vaidyanathan is a Trustee of Bhaktavatsalam Educational Trust and Academic Director of Brindavan Public Schools, Tamil Nadu. Her qualifications are B.A in Social Sciences, M.A. in Political Science and B.Ed. in English and History. Her interests include reading, music, dance, and travel.

Author's note: My father Sri. O V. Alagesan was a freedom fighter, President, Tamil Nadu Congress Committee, Union Minister and Ambassador at various points of time in his political career. Therefore, he had a close association with Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri. While in jail as a political prisoner, he translated Nehru's Glimpses of World History into Tamil. Hence, this piece of writing contains some of his personal recollections about Panditji.

This happened way back in 1956. The day was February 28, 1956 and it was raining cats and dogs in Delhi. The rain poured and poured\; so did the tears from the eyes of a little eight-year-old girl that I was. Some days or weeks (I don't remember) earlier, I had won the gold medal for Indian Classical Dance (mine was Bharathanatyam\; other Indian dances were also featured) in a show called ‘Little Theatre' organised by Shankar's Weekly, a prominent publication at that time.  I was to perform the same item again (Natanam Aadinar in the ragam Vasantha) on the 28th before Chacha Nehru, who was my hero as he was to thousands of children in India during the1950s.

I C Srivastava was born in 1943. A student of English Literature, he joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1966. During his 37 years tenure, he was Collector/ District Magistrate of three districts, served as the Chairman, Board of Revenue, Rajasthan, and retired as Chairman, Rajasthan State Mines and Minerals Corporation. He has authored several books in Hindi and English. Nowadays, he is associated with various social and cultural activities in Jaipur.

On 16 December 1971, a ceasefire was declared in the war between India and Pakistan. The day marked the end of hostilities and the end of the war.

The Indian Army had captured and occupied nearly 8,000 square kilometers of Pakistan territory in Chhachro and Nagar Parkar Tehsils of Tharparker District.  Barkatullah Khan, Rajasthan's Chief Minister at that time, announced his intention to hoist the Indian tricolor flag at Chhachro Tehsil Head Quarters. And he did so, in a ceremony, a few days later.  Our story takes place in the days in-between.

I was the Collector and District Magistrate of Barmer district, which has a border with Pakistan's Sind province. India's Major Gen. R.D.R. Anand, the GOC (General Officer Commanding) of the Army in the area, had advanced, with his troops, to the occupied territory in his 'Caravan' vehicle. Around 2 PM on 19 December 1917, he called me from somewhere near Naya Chhor in Pakistan's Mirpur Khas district. The Army had laid new telecom lines over the sand dunes. They were now active.

I C Srivastava was born in 1943. A student of English Literature, he joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1966. During his 37 years tenure, he was Collector/ District Magistrate of three districts, served as the Chairman, Board of Revenue, Rajasthan, and retired as Chairman, Rajasthan State Mines and Minerals Corporation. He has authored several books in Hindi and English. Nowadays, he is associated with various social and cultural activities in Jaipur.

In 1971, I was the Collector and District Magistrate of Rajasthan's Barmer district (area over 28000 sq. kms.), which has a border with Pakistan.

After the outbreak of Indo-Pak War on 3 December 1971, Barmer  witnessed a series of bombing operations by Pakistani warplanes. These planes would usually fly out from Badin Airfield in what was West Pakistan at that time. On the very first day and the night itself, Pakistan Air Force planes destroyed an Indian Air Force aircraft at Uttarlai airfield in Barmer district and martyred one Indian airman.  After random and intermittent bombing of Chohtan, a border tehsil town, and the bed of a rural water tank near Parehpadra Tehsil headquarters, Pakistani warplanes mounted an air assault was mounted on the Railway Station in Barmer city on the night of 8December 1971.

As District Magistrate and ex-officio Civil Defense Controller, it was a part of my essential duties to inspect and find out first-hand the impact of and the damage caused by enemy air sorties and bombing.

Editor's note: Several people have written their memories of the day Prime Minister Nehru died in May 1964. If you have memories of that day, please contribute your memories.

Authors

Kamakshi Balasubramanian

Vijay Padaki

Vinod Puri

Meenakshi Hooja

Mira Purohit

Raja Ramanathan

Chandra Chari

Anand Barve

R. C. Mody

Subhash Mathur

Remembering Nehru

Kamakshi Balasubramanian is a retired educator living in Mysore. She is an occasional writer. Her interests include cinema, popular culture, travel (particularly within India), and sewing by hand. Kamakshi received her higher education in India, the erstwhile U.S.S.R., and the U.S.A. She speaks Tamil, English, and Russian fluently, and knows Hindi.

The news reached us in the late afternoon. The radio was playing mournful music, and our summer holiday spirit ended abruptly. I had just finished high school.

Nehru's death was the first major national loss I experienced. We knew he was ailing. But you don't wish for a family member's death, at least not when you are very young and can't know that death is sometimes a deliverance. Not one of us siblings was ready to hear that he was gone.

Jatinder Sethi was born in Lyallpur, now Faisalabad, in pre-Independence India. He finished his M.A. (English) from Delhi University in 1956, and went off to London to study Advertising in 1958. He passed his Membership Exam of The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (M.I.P.A) in1965, and joined Rallis India in Bombay. Later, for over 20 years, he worked for the advertising agency Ogilvy &amp\; Mather. Now retired, he helps his son in his ad agency in Delhi.

An Eye-Witness Account of the Funeral Procession of Mahatma Gandhi
January 31 1948 - from Birla House to Rajghat, New Delhi
By a 16- year old Refugee Boy from Lyallpur

Flashback

My name is Jatinder Nath Sethi, born in November 1931, youngest child among six brothers and two sisters, all born in Lyallpur, now in Pakistan. I was in the 10^th class in Arya School, Mai -Di-Jhugi, when the country got divided into India and Pakistan.

Till then, if I recall correctly, we never had any religious animosity between Hindus and Muslims. In fact, our closest friends were Muslim families. Not only that, but both religious communities together were involved in the freedom movement, though as a kid I didn't much understand it. I remember clearly the huge crowd that came out to greet Nehru when he, on a white horse, visited Dussera Grounds in Lyallpur. The freedom movement was at its height.

Bhupendra Hooja, born in Lahore in 1920, was a revolution focused student leader, an aspiring actor, a moderately successful scriptwriter and author. In the 1940s, he was a broadcaster for All India Radio and BBC in London. In the 1950s, he  was civil servant in Delhi and later an Indian Administrative Service officer in Rajasthan. After his retirement in 1978, be became the editor of the Indian Book Chronicle. He passed away in 2006.

Bhupendra Hooja. London. Late 1940s.

Rakshat Hooja writes:

Inqilab Zindabad! Let the revolution live forever. Bhagat Singh made this phrase popular in the 1920. He was a revolutionary and a martyr, who was one of the central figures in India's freedom struggle.

The British hung Bhagat Singh and his comrades Sukhdev and Rajguru on the evening of 23 March 1931 in Lahore.