I wish to declare with all earnestness that I do not want any religious ceremonies
performed for me after my death. 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.
When I die, I should like my body to be cremated. If I die in a foreign country, my
body should be cremated there and my ashes sent to Allahabad. A small handful
of these ashes should be thrown in the Ganga and the major portion of them
disposed of in the manner indicated below. No part of these ashes should be
retained or preserved.
My desire to have a handful of my ashes thrown in the Ganga at Allahabad has
no religious significance, so far as I am concerned. I have no religious sentiment
in the matter. I have been attached to the Ganga and the Jumna rivers in
Allahabad ever since my childhood and, as I have grown older, this attachment
has also grown. I have watched their varying moods as the seasons changed,
and have often thought of the history and myth and tradition and song and story
that have become attached to them through the long ages and become part of
the flowing waters. The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her
people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears,
her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of
India's age-long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing and ever the
same Ganga. She reminds me of the snow-covered peaks and the deep valleys of
the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains
below, where my life and work have been cast. Smiling and dancing in the
morning sunlight, and dark and gloomy and full of mystery as the evening
shadows fall; a narrow, slow and graceful stream in winter, and a vast roaring
thing during the monsoon, broad-bosomed almost as the sea, and with
something of the sea's power to destroy, the Ganga has been to me a symbol
and a memory of the past of India, running into the present, and flowing on to
the great ocean of the future. And though I have discarded much of past
tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles
that bind and constrain her and divide her people, and suppress vast numbers of
them, and prevent the free development of the body and the spirit; though I seek
all this, yet I do not wish to cut myself off from that past completely. I am proud
of that great inheritance that has been, and is, ours, and I am conscious that I
too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back in the dawn
of history in the immemorial past of India. That chain I would not break, for I
treasure it and seek inspiration from it. And, as witness of this desire of mine and
as my last homage to the great ocean that washes India's shores.
The major portion of my ashes should, however, be disposed of otherwise. I want
these to be carried high up into the air in an aeroplane and scattered from that
height over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle
with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India.
I have written this Will and Testament in New Delhi on the twenty-first day of
June in the year Nineteen Hundred and Fifty-four.
Signed/ Jawaharlal Nehru 21 June, 1954 Attestor 1: Kailas Nath Katju Attestor 2: N.R. Pillai
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