How do nations die? Sometimes when they are conquered, sometimes when their people and culture become extinct from war, natural calamity or sheer internal malaise. But most often, nations wither away. They continue in name but their essence changes. When values die out. Or sometimes they just go out of fashion. Values which live in the realm of the mundane and the ignored. The bridges, the train stations, the market archways and most fundamentally, the people.

Like nations around the world, India lives through its people one day at a time. Not just in emotionally charged sloganeering, excited sports match cheering, war-time solemnity or national day celebrations; but in the everyday quiet choices which are symbolic of being Indian from a bygone era. Choices made while navigating being from this caste, that religion and this language, or being a farmer along with being a father, or being a sister and an architect…

Telling the life story of a man as an Indian daughter is poignant as it is freeing. Especially when the father passes on.

Socially, daughters have little role in a father’s world. Yet, daughters are present in every minute of a man’s worldly life, connected with every aspect of his choices. A daughter remains unencumbered by his worldly commitments. Never fully a father’s second-in-command, she inherits the vantage point of knowing the man beyond the father. And in telling a father’s other story, one of him being a man, she carries his legacy. Not in material ways and in the social systems of her father’s world, but in making new paths in new worlds that she moves in.

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When India as some of us have known it was taking birth, in 1935, under the Government of India Act and in the many mutinies against the Raj, first-born men in Jagirdar families from Rajasthan didn’t know how fast the world they were raised to uphold was unravelling. Very few got the chance to look towards the new light.

Those who did, built Nehru’s India in all its splendour and squalor. Its breathtaking successes – of the vote and in technical advancements – and its heart-wrenching social stuck-ness – the biases and the suffering.

They built the Indian nation as a living being. An India which occupied the moral space of being the first in the world to provide a voice to the most ‘wicked’ of human problems. Through voting to every single adult citizen – the poor, women, the landless, the tribal; through the ambition to strap together a national identity available to all, to build grand institutions of higher learning and expertise.

All too familiar to us is the story of how India’s big elites, the Tatas, the Birlas, the Amrit Kaurs, the Vikram Sarabhais, the Subbalakshmis built India. But Nehru’s India was made in the lives of its people’s elites, as well as the leaders of its small towns, and the representatives of its local cultures and old identities.

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Firmly rooted in his Jagirdar Rajput roots, my father built the India that we take for granted today. Embellished with the pristine English of the Encounter magazine on world affairs, and the high modernism of India’s Naya Daur (New Era) represented in public institutions such as the hallowed archways of Bombay University’s Wilson College — which he walked as a science professor, a student leader and, a magazine editor during the first decades of independent India – he lived through it all and he made it all his own.

Tougher still, he shouldered choices that these historic currents posed to people like him. Not letting go of the demands of the riwaaz (custom) of his times, he at the same time created spaces for change. For new light to stream into old havelis. It is what mundane revolutions look like. Pushing for educating women and recognising the value of professional achievement. The need for women to have identities, even if limited, outside of family ecosystems.

Once becoming a scribe of his hometown Kota’s history, in his last decades, he stood for forgotten national values in a rapidly changing India. Of hesitatingly challenging rituals, traditions, customs; never to discard, but to adapt, to reshape so people of different worlds can walk together. To entertain conversations on how traditions when taken to extremes may hold us back. To keep the flow of ideas going, no matter how uncomfortable they were to his own truths. To live out the value of waiting for the right time, for ideas of the wider good to take form.

It’s tough for such fathers to raise daughters. That path is never perfect or always enjoyable. It is not that he told me to follow my heart. Or that he agreed with my refusal to attempt the civil services entrance exams. His worldview and values created the space for my own world to take form, which in important ways deviated from his own.

It happened through seemingly innocuous comments like “your friends must be from all parts of the country”, which opened the door for me to know of new dreams and life paths. Through taking in my questions on the many stories of Krishna’s life, with grace, responsibility and understanding of the viewpoint of an academic living in London. Through taking them as a father and not a devotee. Not to dismiss them as being disrespectful. Through a life lived with a commitment to hold the old and new together, and move through the loneliness that brings.

Farewell Rao saheb… for giving us the heart and the mind to face the new India head on.

Priyadarshini Singh is a research scholar of public policy focusing on education and health.

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