Dr. Sir S. Subramaniam: Lawyer And Judge

Dr. Sir S. Subramaniam:

Lawyer and Judge

Ever since the transfer of India to the Crown, many Indians of great talents have played prominent parts in the consolidation and refinement of British rule. Of such eminent Indians, Subramaniam with Muthuswami the Judge and Bhashyam the jurist formed a brilliant trio gaining a special reputation for Madras and a first class name for Indian judicial talents. But Subramaniam was more representative of the Time-Spirit of transitional India, and his work, largely pioneering and humanitarian, reflected more precisely the hopes and aspirations of the people.

Subramaniam was born in Madura on 1st October 1842. After a short but brilliant school life, he passed the B.L. in 1868 straight from the F.A. Subramaniam enrolled himself as a Vakil of the Madras High Court in 1869 but set up practice at Madura, the homeland of his forefathers for over five generations.

Subramaniam enjoyed the golden mean which gives a talented young man a proper start in life. He was neither so opulent as to waste away in ignoble ease, nor so poor as to feel the chill of poverty. He was well-connected and had a wide circle of cultured relations. His father had endowed him with the priceless inheritance of a whirlwind energy, and his own good angel blessed his cradle with a very rare and mobile intelligence.

Subramaniam made his mark very early in his career. He continued to have increasing practice and respect at the Madura Bar of which he became the leader almost from the start.

Law is a jealous mistress. But Subramaniam's splendid energyand versatile gifts led him to take interest in public life, especially municipal work. In recognition of such work he was nominated in 1884 as a non-official member of the Madras Legislative Council. This change of place in the public activity of Subramaniam naturally brought about a, change in the place of his professional work. He migrated from Madura to Madras, from the provincial to the metropolitan city.

From 1885 to 1895, his was the most splendid career for a decade at the Madras Bar. Sir V. Bhashyam, the eminent jurist, was his formidable opponent. They mutually kept each other at the maximum of effort and brilliance. Law, as administered according to British jurisprudence, was still an unexplored field and acutely and all embracingly responsive to the subtlety, memory, dryness and logical clearness of the South Indian mind. The joy of pioneering work welded the Bench and the Bar in a comradeship of high endeavour and gave even to mediocre talents the spurts of genius. The legal profession had then the urge of a renascent impulse, the sweetness of law and order coming after a period of troubled political uncertainty. It was still a fresh and fluid thing. It was not yet prisoned and standardised into melancholy digest-work leading to pitiful nervous break-down of the most hopeful and gifted young.

Subramaniam and Bhashyam, ranged on opposite sides in such an atmosphere, had the chance for the full play of creative genius, with. something of the quickening which ordinarily the expressionistic impulse of sex alone gives. This largely accounts for the splendid heights to which both Sir V. Bhashyam and Subramaniam always rose and kept also Muthuswami, that eminent judge, at his very highest. The atmosphere had the exciting joy of first class work such as a new farm gives to its young owner-tiller.

Subramaniam as a lawyer and judge owed his pre-eminence to one quality, his acute sense for truth. It was almost an uncanny power with him. His lightning mind took in the whole situation at a glance and gave him an extraordinary command over facts and the rarer power of grouping them in their proper places in the framework. He had the vision to relate the facts on paper to their relevant setting in the human story of a case. This authentic imagination gave his forensic advocacy the grip and intimacy of a personal narrative.

Subramaniam's forensic eloquence was like a cord of silk, even, soft, slender-looking but strong. It had neither knots nor twists, to assure even the casual and careless touch of its excellence. Its colour was white. It lacked prismatic glow. But it had the living freshness and the sprouting graces of the spring. It was adequate without being hard. It was subtle without being sinuous. It was suggestive without being vague. His spoken word was greater than the written. For, his voice was fascinating and fully charged with the electrons of sympathy.

Subramaniam was a very good scholar in general and an ardent worker in law. But he was not a pedlar who carried his stock ever on his , showing all his wares at every door. His wide reading he never used merely for crowded display in a single judgment or for an isolated and misleading forensic triumph. He used it only to implement his resources and widen the range of illustrative reasoning. The sense of pity and righteousness dominated every other impulse.

But these very excellences which broadened the river and amplified its majesty, served only to lessen the glory of incisive motion which his great rival, Sir V. Bhashyam, enjoyed. The method of each is worth a careful study. Subramaniam's was a frontal attack well-supported and in full dignity, sensitive to every rule and decorum of the game. But Sir V. Bhashyam's was a flank movement of infinite strategy with dagger and spear, and with the utmost economy of action. It broke the enemy or itself the first few moments. There was no middle position. It was in essence combat of the highest order and deadliest intention. Sir V. Bhashyam had that extraordinary instinct for a perfect economy of materials resulting from constant test, careful selection, keen foresight and all-absorbed preparation and thinking.

Subramaniam's forensic eloquence radiates like solar energy over all. It spreads itself everywhere for the sheer joy of it. The seeming waste is much. But Bhashyam's, like an X-ray, penetrates to the core and lights the dark interior with a flaming torch. It had all the narrowness, sharpness and strength of an one-pointed and centralised effort. If it wins, it wins by surprise. If it fails, it demoralises the game itself. Both in success and in failure, the whole field is strewn with many a wreckage, doubts and difficulties. It unsettles the existing order. It is a great instrument of power for destruction, and never reckons for a moment that the law is part of life. It lifts as well as debases the science of law into a science like geometry and algebra where the symbols are live men and valuable materials. This subtle and incisive power, Subramaniam possessed in an almost equal degree without his rival's sovereign devotion to the gift. But his comprehension of law was that, as part of life, the smaller game should be controlled by the rules of the higher. He lived as a lawyer for life's own beautiful sake, not for the law's own cruel and jealous exactions, and abstract and tormenting glories, like Sir V. Bhashyam.

From the lawyer to the judge, it was the greatest narrowing which Subramaniam's sunny genius had to bend to out of deference to the unseen but real spirit of the age. But even into the cushioned chair of the judge, warm and velvet-lined, he carried without violence to any sense of propriety or order, the same humanitarian outlook and unified vision of life. The reforming and progressive spirit, constantly kept within proper legal bounds, expresses itself in all his leading judgments.

As a judge he had to succeed perhaps the greatest Indian judge. Subramaniam's contribution of quality as a judge was again in his mode of approach to the law. It was not to him a grand and isolated phenomenon in a waste, but a delicate and vital minor scheme in the major. He worked at it both from within and without. If he knew its chemistry, he knew as well its qualities as a whole. He conceived law not merely as a system but as an organic expression of a growing society; He was widely read in the systems of other lands, ever equipping his mind with legal principles for ready application. His command of facts was always quick and sure, and at a flash he saw the truth of a case and struggled with unrivalled success, to body it even against technical difficulties.

And not one judgment is below the mark. There is a complete adequacy. The reasoning is close and clear. The facts are well-arranged. There is an all-round satisfaction. The Bench and the Bar acclaim it. There is a very high degree of conscientious work and a sense of high endeavour.

But it is difficult to say more. Even his best judgment is not a classic utterance. It may turn a corner. But it makes no epoch by doing it in the grand manner. It is, not inspiring. It declares the law by no new and vitalizing process but only by the earnest vigor of the decretal portion which, no doubt, enshrines a sound legal principle. The perception is clear. The conclusion is sound. But the process lacks the intrepid gait and graces, the narrative ease and reasoning of the born judge. For, Subramaniam's genius was essentially intuitive. He suffered from an excessive humility which played false to his own endowments. The reasoning is cogent but parenthetical. The method of narration is by little frog-leaps. The even progress is arrested by intuitive flashes. The presentation is earnest and vivid but not sustained, grand or masterly as it should be. The best portions are under quotation. There is not the customary sweep even of the hand, not to talk of the eyes, with which we are so familiar with Subramaniam as a lawyer or a public man. The truth is that his judicial robe sat tight on him. He wore it as a heavy stuff of honour and never mentioned to anyone that he often experienced hard breathing under this excess of drapery.

His knowledge of case-law was ample. All judicial originality is no doubt usefully controlled by precedents. But to a great judge case-law is but a spring-board for a magic leap of his own. But Subramania lost even his own native elasticity on the fatal, narrow board.

Judged by absolute standards, his achievement as a judge falls even below expectation. This is largely traceable to a break in the chord of expression. The psychology of human relationship appraised without ardour or emotion, and viewed with an architectonic and dry mind is the hinter-land from whose shaded and tangled depths spring most of the fertilising legal principles. Subramaniam knew these hinter-lands thoroughly as no explorer had known before or after. He had also a creditable mastery of current legal principles with their historic growth. But the mastery in each domain remained separate and unrelated. The dynamo worked wasting its power largely, as the line of transmission to the actual factory, well- equipped and ready to start, was feeble. In the relating of the two into a self-luminous and growing whole, which he tried with the instinct of a true jurist, he failed for reasons that are both traceable to his own gifts and to the Time-Spirit. He was not a creative artist. He was not a profound thinker. Without these two excellences, it is not possible to do anything first rate, from tennis play to the founding of a religion, whatever your other gifts may be.

Sir V. Bhashyam, if not a profound, was at least a very absorbed thinker within the narrow lines of his own choice and truly a bit of a creative artist, for he had that rare gift of a sense of economy which is of the greatest art. Sir T. Muthuswami excelled both in both the qualities in a great measure. He was only a foot down the peak, yet sufficiently distant and high to obscure the casual eye from the unascended steps.

Subramaniam's synthetic mind was wholly of a different order. It worked with the aid of instinct and intuition and the flash of a kind of genius somewhat unsuited to the arid atmosphere of the law. He lacked the acute, continuous and sustained reasoning, the intense fervour and the reducing power of his great rival, though he brought to bear upon every point a catholic richness of mind and spirit.

Subramaniam felt the atmospheric depression of the age even in his best achievements. He was not a virile creative thinker in law adding the flux of his own daring genius to the vast and irregular materials before him. He was synthetic and intuitive, qualities valuable to a leader of men but not of much use to a judge. The net result is a lack of distinction and of a touch of immortalitv.

Subramaiam had the insight of genius, the fervour of the reformer and the self-effacing benevolence of a great and evolved Soul. He had all the excellences of a great public worker. Born in the strenuous West, he would have ended as a Liberal Prime-Minister like Gladstone. Born in a non-transitional Vedic India, he would have been a Rishi, a law-giver, and a great ethical preacher. But transitional India under British rule narrowed and kneaded him into an eminent legal luminary and denied him the amber of everlasting fame.

The recipe for immortality is still a secret with the gods. It is a trying trick of Fortune and Fate. It is carelessly given and carelessly withheld. Ages pass by telling hundreds of years and millions of births without one single immortal life. Therefore let none regret that this great South Indian of the last century did not and could not take rank among the immortals of the world. He was almost near it in the sun-lit hours of his highest radiance.