Jayaprakash Narayan (1902-79), popularly known as JP and Lok Nayak, was a young Marxist who graduated to socialism, then practised Gandhi’s mantra of non-violence and later took the country by storm with his clarion call for Total Revolution. Fascinating anecdotes from his life are still told and retold. Here are a few snippets from the life of Jayaprakash Narayan.
Rebel with a cause
Year: 1920. Patna College, Patna. A tall strapping young man, barely 18, brilliant in academics and noted for his simplicity and elegance, was studying science in the prestigious college in Bihar. His 15-year-old wife, Prabhavati, stayed back in his village in Saran district (Bihar) and the teenager named Jayaprakash Narayan pored over his textbooks. Barely 20 days were left for the final examination when Mahatma Gandhi gave a call for non-cooperation. In Patna, Maulana Azad exhorted the students to non-cooperate with all educational institutions maintained or aided by the British Government. The studious teenager joined the boycott, walked out of Patna College to join the Bihar Vidyapeeth set up by Dr Rajendra Prasad. “That brief experience of soaring up with the winds of a great idea left imprints on the inner being that time and much familiarity with the ugliness of reality have not removed,” JP wrote much later.
Setting sail for the US
May 16, 1922. Not yet 20, Jayaprakash Narayan, along with three friends, took a train from Patna to Calcutta (now Kolkata) leaving behind his wife in the village. It was in Calcutta that Narayan first saw a tram, and it was in this city that he bought a passage on a steamer going to Kobe (Japan). From Kobe, Narayan and his friends took a train to Yokohama where they bought seats in a ship belonging to a Japanese line, which had been acquired by Japan as part of German reparations for World War I. In October 1922, Narayan reached the docks of San Francisco (California).
University and odd jobs in the US
After a night in San Francisco, Narayan reached the University of Berkeley as an under-grad student of chemistry. To his utter surprise and disappointment, the registrar informed him that he was late for the semester and would have to wait for the next Spring semester to study full time. Narayan’s first job was 9-hours a day work at a ranch laying grapes in the sun to dry them into raisins. He did not continue in Berkeley. He graduated from Ohio State University with a BA in behavioural science and later from the University of Wisconsin with an MA in Sociology. In Ohio State University’s Ohio Union Hall, there still hangs a photograph of Narayan in the Buckeye Brilliance gallery (Buckeye is the state tree of Ohio and the university’s brilliant alumni are called Buckeyes).
During the academic session, he studied social sciences, pored over Marx, Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Georgi Plekhanov, and Rosa Luxemburg. On Sundays, he waited tables and during vacations, did odd jobs to pay for his tuition.
Return to India
Barely a week before the infamous Wall Street crash of 1929, Narayan sailed from New York and stopped midway in London where he met several Communist Party members and waited for a berth to Bombay (now Mumbai). Exactly seven years after he had set sail from Calcutta, Narayan reached Patna on November 29, 1929. He had turned 27 and his wife 23, both zealously committed to serving the cause of India’s freedom from British rule.
56 dhotis and the great escape from Hazaribagh Jail
November 8, 1942. Hazaribagh Central Jail was shimmering with the lamps lit to celebrate Deepawali. The Hindu guards were off-duty and six political prisoners - Narayan, Ramanand Mishra, Shaligram Singh, Suraj Narayan Singh, Gulab Chand Gupta and Yogendra Shukla - waited for the clock to strike 10 pm. The night was dark, and the revolutionaries knew that at 10 pm, the jailor often stepped out for an after-dinner smoke. The jail wall was 17 ft high, but the men had an escape plan. And an unusual tool - 56 dhotis - to climb and jump off the wall. All six escaped. For 9 hours, the escape went unnoticed. Then, all hell broke loose. Two companies of British soldiers were deployed to find Narayan and his allies - dead or alive. The award was set at Rs 10,000. The British failed. The revolutionaries were not found. The award went unclaimed.
Self-assessment: Jayaprakash Narayan in jail
While imprisoned, Narayan wrote about his own unbending mindset: “Perhaps I take things too seriously: I still remember how Jawaharlal ji had taunted me at Tripuri when I had expressed my indignation that in the very midst of a crisis some friends had to talk about seeing the Marble Rocks. That was foolish of me, of course. How can life be made so narrow and restricted? Perhaps my fundamentally socialist way of looking at things makes me so completely possessed with political issues of the moment. (Inside Lahore Fort).
Martin Luther King Jr.’s meeting and letter to JP
On February, 3, 1959, Martin Luther King Junior, his wife Coretta Scott King and his colleague Lawrence Reddick departed for a five-week tour in India. On May 19, 1959, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a letter from Montgomery, Alabama (USA), to Narayan about his trip to the Ashram in Bihar on February 14. “Words are inadequate for me to express my appreciation to you for making our recent visit to India such a meaningful and enjoyable one. I will long remember our moments together. Your deep sense of dedication, your warm personality, and your devotion to God and man, tremendously impressed me from the very beginning. I was deeply moved by the powerful and positive manner that you are going about the task of serving humanity,” King wrote.
In his tour diary, James Bristol, president of the Quaker Center, New Delhi, and host of King’s India tour, said the visit with Narayan was “both a revelation and a revolution-in-the-process for Martin and Coretta King.”
Jayaprakash Narayan's obituaries
“The death of Jaya Prakash Narayan removes from the national scene the last of the prominent leaders who worked with Mohandas K. Gandhi for the independence of India…. He was a Marxist in his youth, a Socialist but anti‐Communist in middle age and a staunch pacifist in his later years. But he remained a revolutionary throughout his life and died as one.”- The New York Times.
“Mr. Narayan was one of the last major links to Mohandas K. Gandhi, the father of Indian independence, and a disciple of the nonviolence that Gandhi preached. A man of unquestioned integrity, he was able to exert an enormous influence in Indian politics by virtue of his pronouncements and the example he set,” JY Smith wrote in The Washington Post published on October 9, 1979.
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