spectacle, replete with Vedic hymns sung and Hindu priests chanting –
in flagrant disregard of his express wishes that no religious rites be
performed at his funeral. ‘I wish to declare with all earnestness that I
do not want any religious ceremonies performed for me after my death,’
Nehru had written in his will. ‘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 ourselves and others.’^6 His daughter, Indira Gandhi,
knew about this, but was either persuaded, or chose, to ignore it. As part
of the pageantry of succession and an attempt at building legitimacy, one
of Nehru’s main opponents within the Congress, Morarji Desai, staked
his claim to succession over the corpse of Nehru, placing himself in a
prominent position near the body, displayed in state: the nation would
see him as close to the dear departed leader as possible. The Hindu side
of the Congress was reasserting itself, and Nehru was in death to be its
symbol: the process of appropriation of Nehru was already under way. The
route of the funeral procession was more or less the same as Gandhi’s had
been; the pyre was lit by Indira’s younger son, Sanjay. The people, so the
rationale went, were religious; so it would be religion that they would get.
Mammoth crowds lined the route of the funeral procession and huge
numbers watched the cremation.
A residual spiritualism, perhaps, had remained in Nehru; he had
requested a scattering of his ashes from the air over the countryside, his
fantasy of oneness with an India that he had been unable to mould to his
liking. A small handful, however, he requested be disposed of in the river
Ganga: ‘a symbol and a memory of the past of India, running into the
present, and flowing on to the great ocean of the future.’ ‘I do not wish,’
he wrote, ‘to cut myself off from the past completely.’ This was to be his
‘last homage to India’s cultural inheritance’;^7 but it was not intended to
be a ‘return’ to a ‘Hindu’ religion that he had never practised or believed
in. That was not how it was displayed to the public. ‘In something like
the delirium of grief, the scattering of the ashes took place with pomp and
ceremony which had near revivalist overtones he had warned against.
However, it was a lapse which could be related to a kind of temporary
mental atrophy which overtook many as he died.’^8
There was a strong sense that a noble era had ended and that what
followed was bound to be petty in comparison. Nehru had often been
encouraged to speak out on the question of succession: the very language
had the ring of monarchy about it. Later in his life, admittedly, he had
CONCLUSION: DEATH, SUCCESSION, LEGACY 257