Speech by Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru at the convocation in Aligarh Muslim University
I am proud of India, not only because of her ancient, magnificent
heritage, but also because of her remarkable capacity to add to it by keeping
the doors and windows of her mind and spirit open to fresh and invigorating
winds from distant lands. India ’s
strength has been twofold; her own innate culture which flowered through the
ages, and her capacity to draw from other sources and thus add to her own. She
was far too strong to be submerged by outside stream.-(pp. 335)
I have said that I am proud of our inheritance and our
ancestors who gave an intellectual and cultural pre-eminence to India . How do
you feel about this past? Do you feel that you are also sharers in it and
inheritors of it and, therefore, proud of something that belongs to you as much
as to me? Or do you feel alien to it and pass it by without understanding it or
feeling that strange thrill which comes from the realization that we are the
trustees and inheritors of this vast treasure? I ask you these questions
because in recent years many forces have been at play diverting people’s minds
into wrong channels and trying to pervert the course of history.-(pp. 335)
You are Muslim and I am a Hindu. We may adhere to different
religious faiths or even to none; but that does not take away from us that
cultural inheritance that is yours as well as mine. The past holds us together,
why should the present or the future divide us in spirit?-(pp. 335-336)
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