Declaring The Close of The Colonial Era
On 15 August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of free India, addressed the Constituent Assembly. In his famous speech, Tryst with Destiny, he declared the end of the colonial era and called on citizens to recognize the promise and opportunity of the moment:
"Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny. Now the time has come when we shall redeem our pledge - not wholly or in full measure - but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment 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."
His speech went on to pay homage to Mahatma Gandhi's efforts in the Independence Movement and called upon his countrymen to work together to
"...bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman."
The declaration ends with an exhortation to work together in the common weal and cautions against narrow sectarian or religious divisiveness:
"All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India with equal rights, privileges and obligations. We cannot encourage communalism or narrow-mindedness, for no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought or in action."
Read more about this topic: Indian Speeches About Independence
Famous quotes containing the words declaring, close, colonial and/or era:
“Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
“I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.””
—Anthony Hecht (b. 1923)
“I have led her home, my love, my only friend.
There is none like her, none.
And never yet so warmly ran my blood
And sweetly, on and on
Calming itself to the long-wished-for end,
Full to the banks, close on the promised good.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“In colonial America, the father was the primary parent. . . . Over the past two hundred years, each generation of fathers has had less authority than the last. . . . Masculinity ceased to be defined in terms of domestic involvement, skills at fathering and husbanding, but began to be defined in terms of making money. Men had to leave home to work. They stopped doing all the things they used to do.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the transpolitical is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)