NEHRU MEMORIAL MUSEUM & LIBRARY
P V Rajgopal, Bangalore
The Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of the Indian Army ranked just below the Viceroy of India in the Order of Precedence during the colonial period. While the Viceroy’s house (Rashtrapati Bhavan) was constructed on a 320 acre plot, the residence of the C-in-C was constructed on a 30 acre plot on Haifa Road in 1930.The building named ‘Flagstaff House’ was designed by Robert Tor Russell, the British architect who also designed the Connaught Place. After Independence, in mid-1948, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru moved into this building from his earlier York Place (Motilal Nehru Marg) residence and stayed in this mansion, renamed as Teen Murti Bhavan and the road renamed as Teen Murti Road, for 16 years till his death in May 1964.
After Nehru’s death, his daughter was insistent that this building should be converted into a Museum for her father much against the wishes of the successor PM Lal Bahadur Shastri who wanted this house to be earmarked as the permanent residence of the Prime Ministers of India much like the 10 Downing Streetresidence in London. The Museum and the Library started functioning in this building from Ist April 1966 and later the Library was shifted to a separate building constructed in January 1974 in one corner of the vast complex. Thus was born the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML)
After my retirement from Service I got down to writing the two-volume biography of Mr K F Rustamji. In one of my interviews with him, he told me that he had donated all his diaries to the NMML. For five years I kept going regularly from Gurgaon, where I had settled after retirement, to the NMML to go through the vast collection of Rustamji’s papers.
The NMML has a massive collection of original manuscripts belonging toseveral eminent personalities carefully preserved in thousands of boxes. The Oral History Division recorded the reminiscences of over 800 makers of modern India.The library had also microfilmed several newspapers (some more 100 years old) and these form a valuable source of information. There is a separate photo section with about two lakhs photographs related to the freedom movement. The library houses more than two lakhs books catalogued in the computer for easy retrieval. I thoroughly enjoyed spending hours in the library and in course of time it became a second home for me.
Anyone wanting to go through the old manuscripts and archives has to sit in a small room which has about 15 small desks arranged in the manner of a school classroom with two officials constantly keeping watch. One sits in the front like a teacher and the other at the back, ensuring no one did any damage to the valuable manuscripts. Sometimes I found it boring going through just only Rustamji’s papers. Therefore I used to peep into what the other readers were going through and got absorbed reading some of those manuscripts described below.
Bhagat Singh: The fiery revolutionary Bhagat Singh Sandhu who was hanged in Lahore Jail in 1930 at the age of 24, had folded a brownish foolscap size papers twice and made a small booklet in which, in his extremely beautiful handwriting,he had noted down some interesting quotations of famous English poets and authors like Charles Dickens, William Wordsworth and a few Marxist authors. I could never imagine that the revolutionary was proficient in English and had such high literary tastes.
Nizam of Hyderabad: I saw a copy of the Fortnightly Report submitted by the British Resident in Hyderabad to the Government of India in 1934. In his report he wrote that he had met the Nizam, who kept complaining to him that a very large number of low caste Hindus were fed up of the treatment meted out to them by the higher caste Hindus and hence wanted to convert to Islam but the bloody Brahmins were preventing them from doing so.
C. Rajagopalachari: A day after Independence, the Radcliffe Award demarcating the boundaries of India and Pakistan was announced. Immediatelythereafter, riots broke out and there were large scale killings on both sides of the border. I was told by Mr Ashwini Kumar, a Punjab Cadre officer and later DG BSF, that it was difficult to travel from Delhi to Karnal – a distance of 120 km - due to the stench emanating from the decomposed bodies lying all along the highway. The situation was out of control. Nehru and Patel just did not know how to put a stop to it. Nehru wrote a long letter dated 4th September 1947 to C Rajagopalachari, who was then Governor of West Bengal, about the brutal killing of lakhs of people and the transfer of population taking place between India and Pakistan. Nehru wrote, “Though we are opposed to it, we are seeing the massive exchange of population taking place right in front of our eyes. We are unable to control the situation. I was thinking about a peaceful exchange of population between West Bengal and East Pakistan. It is just a thought. Nothing concrete has been decided. Just keep it to yourself. Let me know what your view is.” This letter, in C Rajagopalachari’s file, gives an indication of Nehru’s line of thinking at the time when the country was going through an unprecedented crisis.
Prof J D Bernal: When PM Nehru went to China in 1954, he met his old friend the eminent scientist Prof J D Bernal who was a Professor of Physics in Cambridge University. He was the founder of Molecular Biology and his research helped develop X-ray crystallography. He was also Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He knew Nehru since 1937. In the transcript written by the Professor in his own hand regarding his meeting with Nehru, he wrote, “Nehru told me ‘most of my ministers are scoundrels or reactionary, but as long as they are my ministers, I can keep a check on them. If I were to resign, they would be the government and they would unleash the forces that I have tried, ever since I came to power, to hold in check.’” Bernal added, “I think he (Nehru) was perfectly sincere in what he said but I also felt he should have never said it to me.”
C C Desai ICS: I came across a booklet containing the transcript of a long interview done by a NMML official of C C Desai, a 1922 batch ICS officer allotted to MP. He was in Cambridge University along with Subhas Chandra Bose. The Jalianwala Bagh massacre which took place a few years earlier had a deep influence on Bose who wanted to devote his life to the freedom struggle. However, his father, who was a Police Prosecutor in Cuttack, (Orissa) insisted he should continue with his studies and appear for the ICS. Desai stated that Subhas Chandra Bose qualified for the ICS securing a 4th position. He joined the training, but after sometime decided to resign as he did not want to serve under the British masters. However, the problem was that since Bose had undergone the training, he had to reimburse 250 pound sterling for his resignation to be accepted. On a request made by Bose, Desai gave him a loan of 250 pounds. Bose did not return the money for many years. Desai stated that Bose, who had no source of earning, took many years and repeated reminders to return the entire amount in small instalments.
M A Jinnah: The NMML had a large room which housed the microfilming section. There are several monitors where one could sit and go through newspapers of bygone years. I found some interesting articles in the old newspapers. In one of the leading newspapers, there was a write-up by Mr. Sri Prakasa, India’s first High Commissioner to Pakistan from 1947 to 1949. He has written that the President of Pakistan, M A Jinnah once summoned him and said, “I say, tell Jawahar not to be so mean and declare my house in Bombay as Enemy Property. When I was agitating for Pakistan, I thought that once Pakistan is formed, I shall go back to Bombay and spend the last years of my life in the house that I built with the sweat of my brow. I never thought I would get stuck in this dusty, bloody place (Karachi). Tell Jawahar that we have been family friends for many years. Whenever I used to go Allahabad his father would insist I stay in his house. Ask Jawahar to give the house on rent to a European who would treasure the lavish house with its ornate furniture and fittings and not to an Indian as Indians do not know how to maintain a house.” Sri Prakasa further wrote that he conveyed this to PM Nehru who appears to have obliged Jinnah despite his animosity towards that man. The house was given on rent to the Deputy High Commissioner of UK who had his office and residence in that house for several years.
Mr Rustamji has mentioned in his diaries that during the six years he was with Nehru, he often heard Nehru cribbing that he spent nine long years in British jails, whileas that man Jinnah never went to jail even for a single day as he took no part in the freedom struggle but yet he got his Pakistan on a platter. Jinnah’s house is situated on a 2.5 acre (over one lakh sq ft) plot in the posh Malabar Hill area overlooking the sea. He had engaged a British architect to design the house on which he spent a colossal amount of Rs 2 lakhs in 1936. The house, which is lying unoccupied and is in some legal dispute, is now worth several hundreds of crores.
Travancore-Cochin (T-C): Going through newspapers of 1953 in the Microfilming section, I came across a small news item which read that the government of T-C has appealed to the Centre to permit its people to appear at the Competitive examination for selection to the IAS and IPS. This news item intrigued me and so I tried to find out why such an appeal was made. The present State of Kerala comprises of the two princely States of Travancore and Cochin and the erstwhile British district known as Malabar. At the Congress session in October 1946, when Sardar Patel raised the subject of having the two All India Services (AIS) namely the IAS and IPS, there was vehement opposition from all the Congress Chief Ministers led mainly by Gobind Ballabh Pant of UP and Ravi Shankar Shukla of MP, who did not want outsiders to govern in their State. They wanted to have their own State Service officers to man the top posts. Patel got furious and shouted, “The Union will go if we do not have an AIS to keep the country united.” The State of T-C did not take in AIS officers. Patel retaliated by debarring people of T-C from appearing for the competitive exams. I saw the old IPS Civil List and found that Kerala Cadre had two direct recruit officer of 1948 seniority. I discovered they were transferred from Madras Cadre in 1956 at the time of reorganization of States. None was recruited from T-C from 1948 to 1953.Three officers were recruited in 1954 for the first time. Apparently, the State government appeal was acceded to by the Center.
It’s a misnomer to think that the NMML is a storehouse of documents pertaining to Nehru only. It also has papers relating to leaders of other political parties and several freedom fighters of the last 160 years, i.e. from 1857 onward.The vast, rare collection of archives and manuscripts has been possible mainly due to the pioneering efforts put in by a few dedicated individuals who contacted the surviving freedom fighters and retired officials or their family members and persuaded them to part with their manuscripts or interviewed them and made a transcript. Their labour resulted in preserving for posterity archives pertaining toIndia’s freedom struggle.
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