Nehru’s plans for a new India were sadly short-lived

In Jawaharlal Nehru’s final will and testament he asked for most of his ashes be taken in an aeroplane and scattered ‘over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India’. Taylor C. Sherman says this ‘request was a humble acknowledgement of his own relative insignificance’, but that it also makes India indistinguishable from Nehru.

The iconography of the man was already indistinguishable from India. He was there at the moment the country gained its hard- fought independence. In a well known image, he stands at the Red Fort in New Delhi before crowds of thousands in August 1947. It was the culmination of his decades- long nationalist struggle as the leader of the Indian National Congress Party – which also saw him imprisoned by the British. He had argued passionately against partition, wanting a united India, once the British left, to accommodate its 100 million Muslim minority; but in the end, he reluctantly conceded to the new dominion of Pakistan.