Indira Gandhi possessed a sharp literary instinct—something reflected in the careful edits she made to an English translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s iconic poem ‘Ekla Chalo Re’, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said on Wednesday, marking the former Prime Minister’s 108th birth anniversary.
Ramesh, the Congress general secretary in charge of communications, noted that Indira Gandhi shared a special connection with Tagore. She spent nearly nine months at Shantiniketan between July 1934 and April 1935 and continued to visit Visva-Bharati regularly throughout her life.
In the final month before her assassination, Indira Gandhi exchanged letters and discussions about her favourite Tagore poem with her close aide, H.Y. Sharada Prasad, Ramesh recalled. He shared on X an article written two years earlier by Sanjiva Prasad, Sharada Prasad’s son, which documented her “sensitive and diligent” editorial suggestions.
According to the article, Sharada Prasad discovered Indira Gandhi’s edited version of the English translation among his father’s archives, alongside memorabilia from her office. Sanjiva Prasad wrote that in October 1984, during her last weeks, Indira Gandhi had several interactions with his father and noted sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri.
One of her final official decisions—taken on 30 October 1984—was approving Chaudhuri’s appointment as Chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi, despite veteran politician Ram Niwas Mirdha securing the most votes. Mirdha, recognising the importance of cultural leadership, recommended that a respected artist should head the institution.
The article described how Indira Gandhi spent time reviewing translations of Tagore’s ‘Jodi tor dak shune keu na ashe’, famously associated with the phrase ‘Ekla Chalo’. None of the versions satisfied her high standards, prompting her to make detailed linguistic edits.
Sharada Prasad had often said that Indira Gandhi worked meticulously on her speeches and could easily have been an outstanding sub-editor. He believed her intellect placed her among the most well-read leaders of her era—so much so that thinkers like Iris Murdoch and André Malraux sought her company.
Sanjiva Prasad wrote that her handwritten edits revealed how particular she was about nuance and meaning, reflecting her deep engagement with literature.
“Looking at her painstaking work on the poem, one can appreciate her literary sensibilities,” he observed, although it remains unclear whether her edited version was ever published—or who the “little girl reader” she had imagined while refining it might have been.
