The Great Speeches of Modern India

by Rudrangshu Mukherjee

  An institution will scarcely deserve to be called a university if it undertakes only teaching and no research, or only research and no teaching. And it will not deserve that name if it is devoted exclusively to only one single discipline. There is no reason to move from an extremely wide to an unduly narrow band of subjects. The viable university that I have in mind will have a cluster of disciplines with, perhaps, a core and a periphery. Not all universities need to have the same core or the same periphery.

  The kind of university that had its greatest success in the second and third quarters of the twentieth century had at its core the arts and sciences, comprising disciplines such as philosophy, history, languages, mathematics, physics, and chemistry with professional subjects such as law and medicine at the periphery (Parsons and Platt 1973). Harvard is an outstanding example. That kind of university will and should continue to exist in the future. But there will be other types as well, with science and technology, or economics and management, or law, or education at the core. The cluster has to be carefully selected and organized; it cannot be some ad hoc arrangement put together from existing institutions that are themselves declining or moribund. Again, such an institution can prosper in the future only if its reckless expansion is prevented.

  REFERENCES

  Béteille, André, 2009, Universities in the Twenty-first Century, New Delhi: National University of Educational Planning and Administration (Third Foundation Day Lecture).

  Government of India, 1950, The Report of the University Education Commission, 1948–49, New Delhi: Ministry of Education.

  Nehru, Jawaharlal, 1958, Speeches: 1946–49, New Delhi: Government of India, vol. 1.

  Parsons, Talcott and Gerald M. Platt, 1973, The American University, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

  Shils, Edward, 1997, The Calling of Education, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Rekindling a spark of enthusiasm (Bombay, October 1982)

  J.R.D. TATA (1904–1993)

  In October 1932, twenty-eight year old J.R.D Tata had flown solo from Karachi to Bombay on a single-engined plane carrying air mail. The flight heralded the birth of his company Tata Airlines which would go on to become Air India. J.R.D. repeated the flight in October 1962 and again thirty years later, on the flight’s golden jubilee. He was, then, two years short of eighty. There was a crowd to receive him when his Leopard Moth landed in Juhu airport at the end of the last trip and he made this delightful speech—extempore—to the gathering. It has—like all his speeches—great style and the stamp of his remarkable personality.

  It has been said at times that there are moments in life when one feels that if there was a nice big hole in front of one, one would gladly plunge into it. This is one such moment, as I have never been so embarrassed in my life as I have been this evening listening to the speeches about me.

  His Excellency the Governor has been good enough to say that I am a modest man. I have usually felt that I had plenty to be modest about. And even today, in flying to Karachi and bringing back a perfectly safe aeroplane—an old lady, it is true, but one who gets on very well with her old pilot—I did not feel that I was doing anything that required great skill, courage or competence. I did not have to cross high mountains, or to battle with snowstorms or fog. On both these occasions, as also fifty years ago, the flight was a relatively simple one of merely staying the air and navigating with reasonable accuracy. There was, it is true, one difference this time. Fifty years ago, the only means I had to navigate was to look at the map, and at the ground passing below me, follow a compass and hope that I was going to end up where I intended to. Today, there was a radio to help me. I do feel with no sense of undue modesty that the compliments and congratulations showered on me are greatly in excess of my performance. But I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy hearing them, however undeserving of them I may feel and I am terribly grateful for them.

  Right from childhood, I have been mad about flying and anxiously waited for the day when I would fly myself. I read about every well-known pilot from the beginnings of aviation and was enthralled by their feats. Lindbergh’s flight in 1927, in thirty-three hours across the Atlantic in a single-engined plane that was at least six years older than this one, was the kind of achievement that would merit all that has been said today.

  I am a little disappointed that I have not been asked, ‘Why the hell did you do it, if it was so simple?’ In fact, I was asked that in 1962 when I did the same thing. At that time I felt—as I feel even more so today—that the birth of civil aviation and commercial aviation in India, and the growth of air transport over a period of thirty years deserved some kind of celebration. I did not think then that twenty years later, at an age approaching seventy-nine, there would either be an aeroplane for me to fly or that I would be fit to fly. So that was the reason then and so was it today.

  I felt that I should do something myself to celebrate and commemorate the occasion (Golden Jubilee) and the only thing I was fit for was to fly an aeroplane.

  I had also two other reasons. One was that I wanted to dedicate a gesture to those, at first in handfuls, then in hundreds and finally in thousands, the men and women who, over a period of forty-six years had helped me to build up Air-India and Indian air transport. I wanted to express in some way my gratitude and pay tribute to them and I did not know of any other way of dramatizing the event than by the personal gesture of this flight. And so to them and to Air-India who sponsored the flight and got the plane repaired, renewed, refurbished, and made flyable, I express today my very deep gratitude for the enthusiasm, for the toil and the sweat they contributed to our joint endeavour and for sharing with me the joys as well as the heartbreaks of the past fifty years.

  The other reason which I think motivated me was to relive a memorable occasion of the past, something one often wants to do—for instance, one’s engagement or marriage. Some people do it by marrying more than once. But nowadays with taxes as they are, very few people can afford more than one wife. In any case, my wife might have taken a dismal view of any such thought on my part.

  I also had another reason. As I got older, I felt distressed that in recent times there was a growing sense of disenchantment in our land, that the hopes, the aspirations, the enthusiasm, the zest, the joy with which freedom was received in our country some thirty-five years ago, and even before that, the achievements that we participated in, including the creation of Air-India had faded, that there was a loss of morale, a loss of belief in ourselves.

  When you talk to young people today, their main worry is to get a job. I don’t blame them. It is a real worry. But also, there seems no longer to be the feeling that we can do things as well or better than others or even things that others haven’t done. So I thought that, perhaps, this flight would rekindle a spark of enthusiasm, a desire to do something for the country and for its good name, and that it would show that even in these days, when aviation is no longer an adventure but only big business, the times for pioneering are not gone. There are many other things that can be done and many things that the young of this country can do and must steel themselves to doing, however difficult, however discouraging at times the environment, the conditions may be.

  And so, in a small way, this flight of mine today was intended to inspire a little hope and enthusiasm in the younger people of our country. I want them to feel, those who are today at a stage of their life I was at in 1932 (fifty years ago), that when they are seventy-eight—and I hope they all will live at least to seventy-eight—they will feel like I do, that despite all the difficulties, all the frustrations, there is a joy in having done something as well as you could and better than others thought you could. I thank you all for your presence.

  Sources

  Every effort has been made to get permissions for all the speeches. In some cases we have been unable to find the right person to get the clearance from. Please do be in touch with us if you hold the estate to any of the speeches included in this book.

  Gr
ateful thanks are due to the following to print copyright material:

  1. Amartya Sen

  2. André Béteille

  3. Aruna Roy

  4. Atal Bihari Vajpayee

  5. Bose Institute

  6. L.K. Advani

  7. Mani Shankar Aiyar

  8. Manmohan Singh

  9. Muhammad Ali Jinnah: courtesy of Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Islamabad

  10. Narasimha Rao: courtesy P.V. Ranga Rao

  11. Rabindranath Tagore: Rabindra-Bhavan, Visva Bharati

  12. Salman Rushdie:© 2002, Salman Rushdie, all rights reserved

  13. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan©: Estate of late Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

  14. Shyamaprosad Mookerjea, Selected Speeches in the Bengal Legislative Assembly, 1937–47 (edited by R. Bhadhuri, 2002) Shyamaprosad Mookerjea, The Kashmir Issue, Speeches, Correspondence and Reports (edited by R. Bhadhuri, 2003) Shyamaprosad Mookerjea: courtesy Ashutosh Memorial Institute for using speeches from its publications:

  15. Somnath Chatterjee

  16. Sonia Gandhi

  17. Subhas Chandra Bose©: Netaji Research Bureau, Kolkata

  18. Vikram Seth

  Acknowledgements

  The idea of this book was conceived during a lunch conversation in which Martand (Mapu) Singh, Malavika Singh, Shobita Punja, Chiki Sarkar, and I were present. I then thought that it was one of those fleeting and brilliant ideas that crop up when the food and the company are good. Chiki Sarkar took it beyond the lunch table and insisted that the book should be done and that this was the right time to do it. The project seemed too tempting to resist so I allowed temptation to walk right in. This is Chiki’s book. It would not have been possible without her prodding and her innumerable creative suggestions. The credit is all hers. The errors that remain are products of either my ignorance or my indifference.

  A book of this kind is impossible without the help of libraries and librarians. I would like to thank Sakti Roy of the ABP Library: he never turns down a genuine request and is ceaseless in his quest. The staff of the library of the India International Centre was always co-operative. My colleague Jayanta Ghoshal helped in locating some speeches. I remain grateful.

  My dear friend Ravi Vyas has over the years taught me more about books and editing than he would ever care to admit. It is my privilege that he edited this book with his characteristic care and compassion for the written word. Aveek Sen and Bhaswati Chakravorty read and commented on a draft of the introduction, as did the anonymous reader who always reads whatever I write with a red pen in her hand. To such friends I do not say thank you but I promise to impose on them again.

  A note on the editor

  Rudrangshu Mukherjee is a historian and journalist. Currently running the editorial pages of The Telegraph, he has held various academic posts and taught, among others, at Calcutta, Princeton, and Manchester universities. He is the author of four books on the revolt of 1857: Awadh in Revolt, 1857–58: A Study of Popular Resistance; Spectre of Violence: The Kanpur Massacres in the Revolt of 1857; Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or Accidental Hero; Dateline 1857: Revolt against the Raj. He is co-author of India: Then and Now and of New Delhi: The Making of a Capital and is the editor of The Penguin Gandhi Reader; Indian Persuasions: Essays from Seminar and co-editor of Remember Childhood: Essays in Honour of Andre Beteille. Rudrangshu Mukherjee lives in Calcutta.