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 2 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.