jawaharlal nehru speech at the stroke of midnight

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU SPEECH AT THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT FULL
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU SPEECH AT THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT FREE

'At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. In the video, India's first prime minister frequently looks down at his notes, speaking in his familiar clipped accent he acquired at school in Great Britain. While Nehru often spoke extemporaneously, he scripted this particular moment.

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU SPEECH AT THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT FREE

The life of an India free from British rule began with that speech. We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.NEW DELHI // A short, grainy video from 65 years ago today shows the then prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, standing at the podium in parliament under a whirring fan, dressed in a silk jacket with his signature rose in the buttonhole, and addressing the noisy constitutional assembly. This is no time for petty and destructive criticism. To the people of India, whose representatives we are, we make an appeal to join us with faith and confidence in this great adventure. Peace has been said to be indivisible so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is a disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that they can live apart. And so we have to labor and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over. The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we might fulfill the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today. Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now. Before the birth of freedom, we have endured all the pains of labor and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow. That responsibility rests upon this Assembly, a sovereign body representing the sovereign people of India. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?įreedom and power bring responsibility. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us.

We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.Īt the dawn of history, India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her successes and her failures. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU SPEECH AT THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT FULL

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. Speech Delivered At The Midnight Session Of The Constituent Assembly, August 14, 1947 He worked with Gandhiji in the freedom struggle movement during 1920-1947. He was elected President of the Indian National Congress in the year 1929. His political apprenticeship with Indian National Congress happened during 1919-1929. A daughter, Indira, was born to them in 1917. In 1912, he returned to India and later married Kamala Kaul.

Jawaharlal Nehru was born on 14 November 1889 in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh.

Jawaharlal nehru speech at the stroke of midnight