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Letters from a province: Harekrushna Mahtab to Jawaharlal Nehru, 1947–1949
On 1 November 1947, Harekrushna Mahtab, premier of Orissa, British/independent India’s youngest province, wrote a letter to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. This was in reply to the first of Nehru’s famous letters to the provincial chiefs. In it, Nehru had expressed his wish to read similarly from them and Mahtab responded in kind. For the next two years, Mahtab wrote to Nehru, before leaving Orissa to become a union minister. These letters, present among the Mahtab Papers (NMML, New Delhi), provide an often-downplayed vantage of the province, to view the concerns of the nation contained in Nehru’s letters. Where the latter were meant ‘to educate and exhort’, the former comprised a return catalogue of official information, societal caution, and the Congress Party’s particularities.
History
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- Social Sciences and Humanities
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- International Relations, Politics and History
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Studies in Indian PoliticsVolume
9Issue
2Pages
208-220Publisher
SAGE PublicationsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
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© Lokniti, Centre for the Study of Developing SocietiesPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by SAGE Publications under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Acceptance date
2021-06-28Publication date
2021-09-27Copyright date
2021ISSN
2321-0230eISSN
2321-7472Publisher version
Language
- en
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Dr Rakesh Ankit. Deposit date: 16 September 2021Usage metrics
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