Jis ko maana tha Khuda khaak ka paikar nikla / Haath aaya jo yaqin wahm sarasar nikla.
(The one I believed to be God turned out to be a clay icon/ the certainty I grasped, proved to be nothing but illusion.)
These lines of Waheed Akhtar aptly capture the crests and troughs of history and the ways in which historical narratives are repeatedly overturned. From the #RhodesMustFall movement to the desecration of statues of Mujeeb in Bangladesh, we are witnessing, across the world, a moment in which history is actively being rewritten—old heroes are re-evaluated, dismantled, and sometimes recast as villains. Nehru’s legacy cannot remain immune to this global churn. The reference to Nehru in the recent acceptance speech of Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected Mayor of New York City, testifies to Nehru’s continued relevance, even as he attracts as many detractors today as he arguably did in his own lifetime. Scholars of post-Partition India have frequently attributed to Nehru a significant—if not singular—role in the minoritization and gradual marginalization of Muslims in pre- and post-Partition India. Yet, Indian Muslims’ love for Nehru and their enduring affection and near veneration of him, is emblematic not just of Nehru’s charisma but also the deeper, more tragic historical reality. For Muslims who chose to remain in India—because it was, and could possibly be, their only homeland—Nehru represented a final anchor of hope amid rising jingoistic and communal fervour on both sides of the border that effectively disowned them. To them, Nehru was not merely a statesman, but the last fragile assurance of belonging.
Urdu poets, naturally, responded overwhelmingly to Nehru’s passing, mourning it as a loss far deeper than that of a political leader. Nehru’s death was experienced as an intensely personal bereavement—the passing of a final bastion of hope. It is therefore hardly surprising that Mahmood Farooqi in his Foreword invokes the famous Marsia (Elegy) of Mir Anis that captures the loneliness of India’s Muslims, after the passing of Nehru ‘Aaj Shabbir pe kya alam-e tanhai hai’ (Such loneliness has befallen Shabbir today).
Mohammad Naushad’s book is a compilation of Urdu poetry written in Devnagari script on the passing of Jawaharlal Nehru, a publication that serves as a reminder of the double-bind of India’s Muslims. A cornucopia of about a hundred nazms, each written in the tone and tenor of Marsia (a poetic form which though primarily dedicated to the tragedy of Karbala, found resonance with Urdu poets caught in the changes in the 18th and 19th centuries). The collection offers a range of aspects of Nehru’s persona and politics that Urdu poets praise, remember and mourn. Each of these articulations is also an act of disarticulation, unravelling latent fears, emotions, apprehensions, and anxieties for the future that the Indian Muslim community was confronted with in post-Partition India.
Hindi poets like Nagarjuna, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, and others were vociferously critical of Nehru, but not the Urdu poet. He saw in Nehru a friend of the Urdu language, a promoter of Bombay cinema, which was steeped in Islamicate culture and a Messiah who could defend them from radicals of all shapes and colours, including the Islamists. Nehru’s secularism, in short, was the hinge that tied Muslims to Nehru and to India as a better option than the pure Islamic State of Pakistan.
Naushad, in his well-written introduction to the collection, hints at the need to revisit Nehru on his 60th Birthday as a foil to attempts to tarnish Nehru’s image through memes and social media messages. Throughout these nazms, Nehru is remembered as amar (eternal), zinda/ jawidaan (living), mard-e-kamil (perfect man), minar-e-noor (lighthouse), rahbar (leader), watan ki aabru (nation’s honour), ahl-e-watan ka iftikhar (pride of countrymen), insaniyat ka taajdar (crowning glory of humanity), fasl-e-gul ka payambar (the messenger of spring), ahd-e-nau ka rasul (the apostle of the new era), and much more.
Mostly, the poems juggle between mourning and celebration. Nehru is envisioned as a Messianic figure who made sacrifices for the well-being of a vastly populated and ill-fed poor nation. For Sahir Ludhianvi, ‘saari qaumon ke gunahon ka kada both liye/ Umr bhar surat-e-Isa jo sar-e-dar raha’ (Carrying the burden of nations’ sins/ Like Christ, he endured a lifelong crucifixion). Kaifi Azmi echoes the sentiment when he says, ‘Sabse pehle wo suli pe chadta raha’ (He was the first to be put on the gallows). Ali Jawad Zaidi, in his nazm, speaks in the voice of Nehru asking countrymen not to grieve on his death, as his lifelong pursuit was to remove people’s grief. He even positions Nehru as a world leader who belonged as much to Africa and Asia (Afrika ka rafīk-e-safar/ Asia ka naghma-i-nau). Josh Malihabadi whom Nehru had tried to convince not to migrate to Pakistan, regrets being alive after Nehru (in his memoir Yadon ki Baraat, Josh recalls responding to his Pakistani friends, on being asked by them to move to Pakistan, ‘How can I come to Pakistan as long as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru is alive?’). He calls Nehru Yusuf-i-Kan’an. Progressive poets like Ludhianwi and Ali Sardar Jafri praise Nehru for his socialism and his commitment to a just society, the A’in-i-masawat (law of equality) and Nehru’s ability to remove the gap between wealth and labour (ham mita dalenge sarmaya-o-mehnat ka tazaad).
While Urdu poets largely hail Nehru’s role in the freedom struggle, his bold political decisions, his leadership as the architect of modern India, his empathy for the subalterns of the country and his wisdom, one quality of Nehru that endears him to all is his secularism. Sahir, in his much acclaimed nazm, ‘Nehru ke Baad’ (After Nehru), elevates him to an idea that transcended ephemeral constraints of the human body and lives on even after the physical death of a human being. Praising Nehru’s secularism, he says, ‘Wo jo har deen se munkir tha, har ik dharm se door/ Phir bhi har deen, har ik dharm ka gham-khwaar raha’ (He who denied every creed, stayed away from every faith/ Yet shared the sorrow of every creed, the care of every faith). Bringing out Nehru’s secular credentials, Kaifi Azmi paints him as someone who had ‘Khoon me Ved gunje hue/ Aur jabin par farozaan azaan/ Aur seene pe raqsaan saleeb’ (The Vedas echoing in his blood,/ the azan illuminating his forehead/ and the cross swaying upon his breast). This veneration for Nehru’s secularism seems ironic, considering the fact that scholars like Mushirul Hasan and Ayesha Jalal have argued that Nehru’s secularism prevented him from addressing the specific insecurities and marginalization of Muslims after Partition. Nehru’s secularism, though ideologically robust, did not translate into sufficient political safeguards for Muslims in post-Partition India and he could not adequately gauge the depth of Muslim trauma and vulnerability, resulting in a politics of neglect rather than active reassurance.
While Mohammad Naushad has meticulously collected the poems, the introductory notes on the poets appear rushed and, at times, inattentive. Several poets—including well-known figures such as Rif‘at Sarosh, Hurmat-ul Ikram, and Umar Ansari—are simply marked as namalūm (unknown). Hurmat-ulIkram was a doyen whose poem ‘Kalkatta: Ek Rubaab’ remains a widely celebrated masterpiece to this day. Umar Ansari passed away barely two decades ago and was well-known in Urdu circles. Detailed biographical information on these poets is readily available. This combined with some glaring typographical errors such as misprinting of the name of a renowned Urdu poet like Makhmoor Saeedi as Mahmoor Saeedi, not once but thrice, dilutes the academic edge of the volume and weakens the very work of remembrance that the volume seeks to perform. With a little more care, the anthology could have enhanced its archival merit.
At a time when both Nehru’s legacy and the Urdu language are being actively reworked—Urdu at once disparaged and deeply cherished—and when more readers now encounter Urdu literature outside the Nastaliq script than within it, an anthology of Urdu poets’ responses to Nehru’s death, published in Devanagari, has special resonances. It weaves together script and language, memory and history, politics and affect, past and present, to gesture toward a future in which these intertwined inheritances remain intelligible, accessible, and loved.
Nishat Zaidi is a Professor of English and the Honorary Director of the Sarojini Naidu Centre for Women’s Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia. Her forthcoming publication is Vernacular Encounters: Politics and Possibilities, Routledge, 2025.