‘The Ganga’ is an excerpt from the last will and testament of Prime Minister Nehru dated June 21, 1954.
I have received so much love and affection from the Indian people that nothing that I can do can repay even a small fraction of it, and indeed there can be no repayment of so precious a thing as affection.
Many have been admired, some have been revered, but the affection of all classes of Indian people has come to me in such abundant measure that I have been overwhelmed by it. I can only express hope that in the remaining years I may live, I shall not be unworthy of my people and their affection.
To my innumerable comrades and colleagues, I owe an even deeper debt of gratitude. We have been joint partners in great undertakings and have shared triumphs and sorrows which inevitably accompany them.
I wish to declare with all earnestness that I do not want any religious ceremonies performed for me after my death. I do not believe in any such ceremonies and to submit to them, even as a matter of form, would be hypocrisy and an attempt to delude our. selves and others.
When I die, I should like my body to be cremated. If I die in a foreign country, my body should be cremated there and my ashes sent to Allahabad.Continue reading the main story
A small handful of these ashes should be thrown into the Ganga [Ganges] and the major portion of them disposed of in the manner indicated below. No part of these ashes should be retained or preserved.
Denies Religious Significance
My desire to have a handful of my ashes thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad has no religious significance, so far as I am concerned.
I have no religious sentiment in the matter. I have been attached to the Ganga and Januna [Jumna] Rivers in Allahabad ever since my childhood and, as I have grown older, this attachment has also grown. I have watched their varying moods as the seasons changed, and have often thought of the history and myth and tradition and song and story that have become attached to them through the long ages and become part of their flowing waters. The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved by her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats.
She has been a symbol of India’s age‐long culture and civilizatiton, ever changing, ever flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the snow‐covered peaks and the deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below, where my life and work have been cast.
Smiling and dancing in the morning sunlight, and dark ahd gloomy and full of mystery as evening shadows fall; a narrow, slow and graceful stream in winter, and a vast roaring thing during monsoon, broad‐bosomed almost as the sea, and with something of the sea’s power to destroy, the Ganga has been to me a symbol and a memory of the past of India, running into the present, and flowing on to the great ocean of the future.
And though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain and divide her people, and suppress vast numbers of them, and prevent free development of body and spirit; though I seek all this, yet I do not wish to cut myself off from the past completely.
I am proud of the 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 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.