This column is about the phrase ‘Father of the Nation’.
It has been used for Mahatma Gandhi for decades. Rather less now than it used to be, but still in vogue. Do most people who know of it know its origin? Well, history not being a passionately loved subject in today’s generation, most might not be bothered to know it. But if asked to guess who coined it, today’s young are likely to ask tentatively, “Was it not Rabindranath Tagore?” They would understandably mix up the poet’s famous use of ‘Mahatma’ for Gandhi with ‘Father of the Nation’. Only those with a penchant for detail would give the correct answer—Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.
By July 1944, World War II was entering a defining moment. The Allied Powers’ determination to take the offensive in Europe and the Pacific was clear. Did the Axis Powers realise this? Military realists among them, we can be sure, did. Be that as it may, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, then in Singapore, was positioning his Azad Fauj, the INA as the Indian National Army was known, alongside the Japanese military machine to enter British India via Rangoon to capture power from the British Raj.
Gandhi and the Congress’ senior leadership had only a little earlier been released after three years in prison following the launch of the Quit India Movement. Personal privations had assailed them, side by side with the immobilisation of prison. Maulana Azad lost his wife while he was in the Ahmadnagar Fort prison, and Kasturba Gandhi died on February 22, 1944, in Poona’s Aga Khan Palace-prison where she and Gandhi were imprisoned. In July, he was in Panchgani, recuperating from his bereavement and an attack of malaria. The nation looked to him to resume the enchained struggle for freedom.
The characterisation of the then 75-year-old Gandhi by the then 47-year-old Netaji as ‘Father of the Nation’ came in an Azad Hind radio broadcast from Singapore on July 6, 1944. He said: “Father of our Nation, in this holy war for India's liberation, we ask for your blessings and good wishes.”
Those who want to see Gandhi and Bose as politically adversarial and nationalistically opposed may not like this origin of the phrase being highlighted. But those who note their divergences yet see their convergences as much greater (as in the case of Gandhi and Ambedkar) must remind themselves of that radio broadcast and remind others of it as well.
Netaji was a man of action. So, when he used words, he used them with care and precision.
Has the phrase had currency in imperial, political and nationalist vocabularies?
Indeed, yes.
George Washington, the first president of the United States, was called that, to public acclaim. Closer to our time and place, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was called that by his people in Turkey; Sun Yat-sen was conferred that in 1940 by the brief-lived Nationalist government in China; M A Jinnah was called that in Pakistan; and so was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in Bangladesh. Were those two countries of South Asia taking their cue from Netaji’s formulation? Without doubt, yes.
Two of the greatest parallels from ancient history are of Alexander the Great—Father of the Greeks—and, in ancient India, of the Emperor Asoka, who ascribed a paternal role to himself, saying in his famous Kalinga Rock Edict, “sabe manuse praja mama”, or ‘all my subjects are my children’.
Joseph Stalin, as the unchallenged ruler of the Soviet Union, was given by the Soviet press and officials the title ‘Father of Nations’ on his 70th birthday in 1949. This may be said to have been the ‘own arrangement’ of the man who, through purges, mass executions and the individual killings of all those he perceived as his adversaries, had blood on his hands.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, India’s Ambassador to Moscow, was received by Stalin for a farewell call when he left Moscow in 1952 to become India’s first Vice President (the first Stalin had granted to any ambassador in two years). Radhakrishnan’s biographer and son, Sarvepalli Gopal, writes in his book, “Stalin came round the table to shake hands with Radhakrishnan, who patted him on the cheek, wished him well, hoped that he would prove as great a man of peace as he was of war, and told him of the Emperor Asoka and his change of heart at Kalinga: ‘Will that happen to you?’ Radhakrishna then reminded Stalin of Christ’s saying: what shall it avail a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?—and Stalin was visibly moved as he replied, ‘I too was in a seminary for some time, and miracles do happen’.”
So there have been many Fathers of Nations. But Netaji’s characterisation stands apart. And even from his new plinth under the canopy beside India Gate in New Delhi, his upraised hand seems to remind us of those words.
Those interested not just in the chronology of history but in the lessons in life that history accords know this: As the great philosopher and ruler of Rome, Marcus Aurelius, knew and, from his Meditations, has shown, is that sway over their times comes to some naturally, to some by the use of power and force. The truly great among them know the truth of the Latin words that the slave seated behind the victorious general returning after his triumph was tasked to whisper into his ears: memento mori—remember death. Remember you are mortal.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi | Kaapi, Kaapi, Kaapi | Former Governor of West Bengal and Bihar