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Exhibit on Life of Nehru Opens

Jan. 27, 1965 - Mrs. Indira Gandhi (right with Mrs. Muriel Humphrey and Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy) stood in a glass-walled tower on Park Avenue tonight to welcome world and national figures to the opening of a photographic essay on the life of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru.

U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations; Vice President Hubert Humphrey; Chief Justice Earl Warren, and the five living former U.S. Ambassadors to India were among those she received at the premiere in the Union Carbide Building at 47th Street.

Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy were also among the guests.

Nearly 1,700 persons attended. Indian hostesses in flowing saris stood under a bamboo arch at the top of the long escalator that carried visitors from the lower entrance lobby to the second story. The display occupies about 10,000 square feet of open space on that level.

Vice President Humphrey said Nehru had understood “the perils of nuclear proliferation” and would “rejoice that his successors have heeded his advice and resisted the call to join in a nuclear arms race which could only bring peril to Asia and to the world.”

Nehru, while a principal figure in the long struggle for Indian independence, was also a gifted commentator, and his words appear throughout the exhibition in explanation of the pictorial content.

Nehru wrote that in 1906 and 1907, while he was a schoolboy in England, news of deportations and uprisings in India “stirred me tremendously, but there was not a soul in Harrow to whom I could talk about it.”

Later, when he beheld “the vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters” of the land and its overwhelming poverty and hunger, he wrote that “a new picture of India seemed to rise before me — naked, starved, crushed, and utterly miserable.” This filled him “with a new responsibility that frightened me,” he wrote.

The famines of India are depicted in pictures of children lying dead on stone walks. But there is also beauty and humor in the exhibition.



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© 2024 by Joe Rubenstein

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