Monday, January 21, 2013

PYDIMARRI VENKATA SUBBA RAO AUTHOR OF INDIAN NATIONAL PLEDGE

India is my country and all Indians are my brothers and sisters.
I love my country and I am proud of it's rich and varied heritage. 
I shall always strive to be worthy of it.
I shall give respect to my parents, teachers and all elders and treat everyone with courtesy.
To my country and my people, I pledge my devotion.
In their well being and prosperity alone, lies my happiness.

Do you know the author of this  National Pledge?

Unfortunately, a majority of the students who recite this as a ritual every morning and their teachers do not have the answer.

The National Pledge was penned by Pydimarri Venkata Subba Rao, a noted author in Telugu and a bureaucrat, while working as the District Treasury Officer of Visakhapatnam in 1962.Just like the National Anthem and the National Song that’s engraved on our memory, our National Pledge is taken by students in schools across the country, but the writer who penned it is hardly known to people.

The author was a multi-faceted personality and a polyglot having achieved mastery in Sanskrit, Telugu, English and Arabic. He wrote on various subjects, including naturopathy besides authoring many books in Telugu, including a popular novel, 'Kalabhairavudu'.

 

A native of Anneparthi village near Nalgonda district, he presented it to senior Congress leader Tenneti Viswanadam, who forwarded it to the then Education Minister P.V.G. Raju, father of current Union Minister for Civil Aviation Ashok Gajapathi Raju. Due to the efforts of the then Education Minister, the Pledge was included in school textbooks which was later translated to English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarathi and many other regional languages.

The pledge was first introduced in a school in Visakhapatnam in 1963 and later in many other schools that year. It was recited in Republic Day celebrations in 1965.Subba Rao was said to have been unaware of its status as the National Pledge. He was said to have come to know about it when his granddaughter was reading the pledge from her textbook.

The authors of National Anthem or the National Song are well known in India, but Subba Rao remains largely a little known figure, as his name is not mentioned either in books or in any document. The Human Resources Development Ministry, however, records Subba Rao as the author of the pledge. “Union Ministry of Human Resource Development records, however, show Subba Rao as the author of the Pledge.

Subba Rao was an employee in the State Treasury Department and worked in various capacities in Nizamabad, Khammam, Nellore, Visakhapatnam and Nalgonda and retired in 1971. While he was in Visakhapatnam between 1962-64, India was in war with China during which time Subba Rao wrote a story to inculcate patriotism among people.

Since the introduction of the Pledge in school textbooks in the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh in 1964, it continues to serve the same purpose as our National Anthem and is quite well-known. But its author Pydimarri Venkata Subba Rao, who hails from Nalgonda district, has remained inconspicuous for some reason and has not got the due recognition that he so deserves.

The successive governments in united Andhra Pradesh made no efforts to popularize him, neither did they give him credit for his work by mentioning his name in the textbooks that had the Pledge.

Collected from News Paper.

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