Dr. S. Radhakrishnan

Let me start with a personal confession. I am a bit of an iconoclast–(that is) one who is more inclined, in the presence of idols, to smash them than to bow down in abject humility before them: in particular, when those idols are living idols, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. As Falstaff was given to running away from the battlefield “on principle”, so am I, in my own humble fashion, tempted to avert my gaze from the glittering spectacle of illustrious personages being paraded unblushingly in full public view as though they were so many gorgeous mannequins. In other words, I am not, any more than the redoubtable Mr. Khrushchev is, a believer in the “personality cult”. I think I can make my point clearer by a quotation from Thackeray. Contrasting Goldsmith with Dean Swift he said:

“I think I would rather have had a potato and a friendly word from Goldsmith than have been beholden to the Dean for a guinea and a dinner.”

So, to be sure, would I! That, I am certain, expresses the genuine democratic sentiment in a nutshell. It will be seen that I have been groping my way towards intimating that I am more than somewhat allergic to brazen hero-worship, to abasing genu-flexions before those who, when all the smoke has cleared away, stand revealed to us as mere mortals, bleeding when we prick them and laughing when we tickle them.

‘Egghead’

All this having been stated, however, it is incumbent on me now to hasten to say that I must make some (appropriate) allowances: one such (appropriate) allowance being our worthy ex-President, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, who, in sheer intellect, in sheer mental grace (what the ancient Greeks used to call Sophrosyne), towers above everyone else in the country as Everest and Kanchinjunga overshadow the other mountain ranges.

It is not the easiest thing in the world to write on someone on whom so many have already written–and written, too, so much more ably than I can hope to do even in my wildest dreams, Dr. Radhakrishnan has led a variegated life and has touched nothing that he has not adorned. “Versatile” is a terribly over-worked adjective and is lavishly applied to anyone who has, on howsoever modest a scale, “made the grade” in any branch of human endeavour. In our own hapless country, especially, it pullulates to an unimaginable extent. This adjective, therefore, has become like a rubbed coin: whatever significance it may originally have possessed has been considerably eroded by its persistent and indiscriminating use. But it is the one adjective that instantly springs to the lips in the case of Dr. Radhakrishnan: it fits him, as the saying is, like a glove. In the (not-so-easily-forgotten) Kennedy days the occupant of the White House was widely reputed to have surrounded himself with the Harvard “eggheads’. Mr. opinion is that if our late lamented Prime Minister, Mr. Nehru, can ever be said to have been hemmed in during his tenure of the highest office in the State, that unique distinction belonged, unquestionably, to the subject of my present disquisition. Ever since his selection as our Ambassador in Moscow, he had been the guide, philosopher, and friend of Mr. Nehru: and much more naturally, after his relinquishment of that arduous assignment. But, until and unless he publishes his Memoirs, the public will be in no position to assess at its true worth, at its meridian splendour, his sage counsel to his Chief.

Watershed

That, of course, marks a sort of watershed in Dr. Radhakrishnan’s meritorious career. Until then he had been only a savant: a scholar to the manner born. Personally I wish he had remained such all through: politics is not the appropriate milieu for one who habitually lets his imagination roam in the illimitable empyrean, who requires for the proper functioning of his mind “an ampler ether, a diviner air,” than politics normally provides. There is, if one cares to delve into the past, the classic instance of the late President Woodrow Wilson: he was a tragic misfit in that dark and dangerous realm. Fortunately, Dr. Radhakrishna’s guardian angel has never deserted him. Being a scholar has, in no way, weekened his position as a politician. It may even be contended that his earlier training in “the humanities” has consistently stood him in good stead in the trials and tribulations of a sterner and a more practical vocation.

As (more or less) the same variety of earlier training had, as indicated above, acted so disastrously on the distinguished proponent of the famous “Fourteen Points”, the only valid inference must be that there is something in the temperament of the ex-Indian President –some kind of mental prophylactic, if I may say so, that has steered him clear of the manifold snares and pitfalls of politics. Never having been in the thick of the fight, never having been in the very centre of the maelstrom, so to speak, has also been of no little assistance to him. Of him it can truly be said that, though he has been inpolitics, he has not been of it. Poor Woodrow Wilson’s lot, on the contrary, had been distinctly harder in that it, not seldom, precipitated him into the toughest spots imaginable, as at Versailles. His life had been a sheltered one until then–he had not been mixed up with Nature “red in tooth and claw” in the shape of the Lloyd Georges and the Clemenceaus–and, understandably, he came a cropper. But though, in the latter part of his career, Dr. Radhakrishnan has strayed ever further and further away from the groves of Academe, the stars intheir courses have contrived that his life shall continue to be a sheltered one to the maximum degree possible.

Which is not to suggest that I am prepared to resile from my stated position that a savant of Dr. Radhakrishnan’s stature should never have allowed himself to be persuaded to step down his eerie “built in the cedar’s top,” his philosopher’s tower, into the dusty arena of politics. Nor, to my mind, is any useful purpose served by dragging Plato into the argument: the two instances are not in pari materia. But there is no disputing the fact that, if a philosopher had to be appointed as the President of India, Dr. Radhakrishnan’s was decidedly the best choice. Certainly was a very worthy successor to Dr. Rajendra Prasad. In a sense it can be maintained that Amurath to Amurath succeeded: for the former is, as the latter was, essentially a philosopher–a person who, in the poet’s words, “looks before and after.”

The Philosopher

And thus, by easy stages, I come to the philosopher “prisoned” in the ex-President as “the sculptorperceives the angel prisoned in a block of marble.” This, of course, is the aspect of him that stands foursquare to all the winds that blow. It has been said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men: the same may, but with a slight exaggeration, be said of Dr. Radhakrishnan also. He never seems to have regarded philosophy in the light of a task-work: in his hands it has become a plaything, rather. Its subtleties and intricacies have, obviously, no overpowering, terror for him. The remarkable thing about him is that he is perfectly at ease in Zion, in both Eastern and Western philosophy. I am well aware that, in certain “high-brow” circles, he is credited with a more thorough grasp of the latter than of the former. There is a persistent charge against him that, for all his stupendous reputation, he is shallow to a degree in contradistinction to some others that are supposed to be awe-inspiringly deep. This criticism has its origin in the undisputed fact that, whatever his theme, he writes in such a pellucidly clear and trenchant manner that, as it were, he who runs may understand him.

In addition, he has fashioned for himself an extremely flexible and attractive style. It may be contended that that Philosophy which can be learned “without tears” is no philosophy in the strictest connotation of the term. I strongly demur to this. My own confirmed opinion is that a person who, whatever his laurels in the academic field, cannot descant interestingly on his subject does not understand that subject as well as he is expected to: he merely pretends to do so. Obfuscation is not profundity: dullness is not depth. Learning, if it is to justify its august name, must be worn lightly. This is the greatest merit of Dr. Radhakrishnan. He sheds the marvellous clarity of his intellect on the most abstruse problem in the heavens above, the earth below, and the waters underneath the earth.

Now I come to point that interests me most. Both as a writer and as a speaker of English he is facile princeps among his countrymen. Like Wordsworth he can, if he so wishes, boast of himself:

“...I have not paid the world
The evil and insolent courtesy
Of offering it my baseness as a gift.”