In Mamdani’s victory in New York, the Indian Nehru found an echo

“There comes a time, but rarely in history, when we step out of the old into the new,” Zohran Mamdani told a jubilant crowd in New York on Wednesday — quoting India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s midnight speech in 1947 as the country awoke to freedom.

“When an era ends and the soul of a nation finds expression. Tonight we step out of the old into the new,” Mamdani continued.

As Mamdani finished his victory speech, the title track from the 2004 Bollywood hit Dhoom blared through the hall – followed by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ Empire State of Mind, now pulsing with new meaning as New York’s first Indian-origin mayor made history. Months earlier, Mamdani turned around Bollywood in the language of the campaigna nod to his South Asian roots – his mother is filmmaker Meera Nair and his father is Mahmud Mamdani, a Ugandan-born scientist of Indian origin. On Instagram, he has recorded several messages in Hindi, often relying on catchy images and dialogues from popular Bollywood films.

The reference by India’s first prime minister on Wednesday was a final flourish.

Seventy-seven years ago, Nehru, in the sweltering Constituent Assembly Hall of Delhi, had preceded the lines borrowed from Mamdani with one of the most stirring revelations in history: “Many years ago we had a meeting with destiny and now comes the time when we shall redeem our promise, not wholly or fully, but very substantially.”

“At midnight, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

It was just before midnight on August 15, 1947, and India was about to become independent after almost two centuries of British rule. The words carried both exhilaration and seriousness – a promise of responsibility and a nation finding its voice.

Many believe that Mamdani’s nod for Nehru’s speech gave the promise that something new, untested, and potentially transformative had begun in New York.

Decades earlier, in another moment of awakening, Nehru was sparking something far greater—the rebirth of a nation.

Freedom, Nehru continued, is not an end, but a beginning – “not of tranquility or rest, but of unceasing striving”. The service of India, he insisted, meant serving the “millions who are suffering” and ending “poverty, ignorance, disease and inequality of opportunity”.

He promised that India’s work would not end “while there are tears and suffering” and called for unity over “petty and destructive criticism” to build “the noble estate of free India where all her children may live”.

The speech of about 1,600 words by the first Prime Minister of India has become one of the most famous speeches in history.

The New York Times said Nehru “electrified his countrymen with a speech of towering eloquence”. Historian Ramachandra Guha called it a speech “rich in emotion and rhetoric”. Srinath Raghavan, a historian, told an interviewer that “the speech still resonates in India because it really captured the moment in the way that great speeches can.”

There were three keynote speakers that evening: Chaudhry Khaliquz-zaman spoke on behalf of Indian Muslims, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosopher, for his eloquence and vision, and Nehru, the star of the evening.

The outline of Nehru’s speech was electric. Time magazine reported that Indian leaders gathered in the Constituent Assembly Hall an hour before midnight. The hall was “lit in the colors of India’s new tricolor flag – orange, white and green”. Nehru made what the magazine called an “inspired speech”.

What followed was pure theater of history.

“And as the twelfth chime of midnight fell, a conch shell, the traditional harbinger of dawn, sounded hoarsely in the hall. The members of the Constituent Assembly rose. Together they swore in this solemn moment … to the service of India and her people.”

Outside, the Indians were jubilant. In his book India After Gandhi, Guha quotes an American journalist who reported: “Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs celebrated happily together… It was Times Square on New Year’s Eve. More than anyone else, the crowd wanted Nehru.”

But behind the euphoria, chaos and violence were already brewing. Religious riots erupted throughout the subcontinent. Two days later, the borders were drawn – sparking one of the largest and bloodiest migrations in history, as up to 15 million people moved and around a million died.

Amid the cataclysm, Nehru’s words stood out – a reminder of India’s unfulfilled promise and of a leader whose command of the language, many said, matched the monstrosity of the moment.

By then, Nehru had earned a reputation as a great orator, delivering extreme speeches that seamlessly straddled politics, science, art and ethics. As the Australian diplomat Walter Crocker noted, the breadth and spontaneity of his addresses were “unparalleled”.

As he concluded his most famous speech in August 1947, Nehru said, “We have hard work ahead of us. There is no rest for any of us until we have fully redeemed our promise, until we have made all the people of India what they were destined to be.”

Seven decades later, in New York, Mamdani has his own, rather different job.