From Jeorani Nehru to Rahul Gandhi: Displacement Transformed into Political Pilgrimage |
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“My grandfather, Ganga Dhar Nehru, was Kotwal of Delhi for some time before the great Revolt of 1857. He died at the early age of 34 in 1861. The Revolt of 1857 put an end to our family’s connection with Delhi, and all our old family papers and documents were destroyed in the course of it. The family, having lost nearly all it possessed, joined the numerous fugitives who were leaving the old imperial city and went to Agra. My father was not born then, but my two uncles were already young men and possessed some knowledge of English… For some years the family lived in Agra, and it was in Agra on the sixth of May 1861 that my father was born. But he was a posthumous child as my grandfather had died three months earlier.”
This is how Jawaharlal Nehru mentions his grandfather Gangadhar Nehru, his yet-to-be-born father Motilal Nehru, his two uncles, and the immense loss his ancestors suffered during the uprising of 1857 in his book An Autobiography, first published in 1936.
Surprisingly, even though the first prime minister was a large-hearted democrat and a facile writer, he skipped mentioning his grandmother, who, in a state of pregnancy, lost her husband. Just imagine the psyche of the young widow, with two young sons – Bansidhar and Nandlal, born in 1842 and 1845 respectively – forced into exile from her home in Delhi to the unfamiliar streets of Agra.
Be it the problem of phonetics with colonial chroniclers, the inherent patriarchal bias in the writing of history, or the instinctive discrimination against women, the widow of Gangadhar, mother of Motilal and his two brothers, and grandmother of Jawaharlal appears under different names in records – Jiorani Nehru, Jeorani Nehru, Indrani, Jeonari Devi et al.
River Yamuna tells the........