Many-Faceted C. P.

A Tribute

“Sachivottama Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar!” The name carried a regal amplitude and sonority, but “C. P.” was handy, had a tell-tale ring and released vast undertones of Dhwani, Like “C. R.” for example. And C. P. he remains, even in the year of his birth centenary.

Recapitulating the C. P. phenomenon, one vainly tries to reduce to a pattern the sixty or more years of his many-faceted career. He was lawyer, Congressman, Home Rule Leaguer, Advocate-General, Executive Councillor, Indian delegate to the League of Nations, Dewan of Travancore, Vice-Chancellor of the University at Trivandrum, Member of the Central Government, Visiting Professor in American universities, Vice-Chancellor of the Annamalai University, unofficial cultural ambassador to the West, Vice-Chancellor of the Benares Hindu University! And, at a time, when Vice-Chancellorship was becoming a security risk, C. P. managed to be, Vice-Chancellor simultaneously of the Annamalai University in the South and the Benares Hindu University in the North, both chronically problem-ridden for the administrator, This was audacious brinkmanship indeed, and he did that balancing feat too. Nor was C. P. apologetic about his versatility, for he said blandly on one occasion:

“I have not only been a member of the Congress myself, but also a non-official member of every type of legislature in India, and in addition the official leader of every kind of legislature in the country.”

He said on another occasion:

“It is true that I am perhaps one of the few in India who have been in active and even controversial political life and a member of every variety of legislature in India as well as member of a local Government and, for sometime, of the Central Government and, in addition, it has been given to me to be an adviser of many Indian States, large and small, before I repaired to Travancore.”

Such reminiscing he would sometimes dismiss as “anecdotage,” the inevitable concomitant of “dotage”; but actually C. P. never grew old, never felt old, never ceased to grow, never ceased to hanker after fresh goals and further summits of striving and achievement.

What a marvelously charmed life C. P.’s was–so rich and with such unexpected turns and unbelievable scores! And yet, although he had lived in the limelight for close upon four decades, post-independence India caught him rather off his guard, he retreated from Travancore, and he sulked like Achilles in his tents. But the discomfiture was strictly temporary. His native resilience and buoyancy asserted themselves again, and the last fifteen years of his life saw him as a seasoned educationist and as a writer who had lived intensely and thought things out, and hence had something really to say. The lawyer and administrator and statesman was also an educator, a philosopher and a humanist.

C. P. was afflicted with brilliance and self-assurance from the very outset of his career. A student of mathematics and the physical sciences, he won the Elphinstone Prize with an essay on the Nebular Theory. But he was responsive equally to Sanskrit and English literature. French attracted him too, and he learnt it under a private tutor and accumulated, as he said, “a library of French books and fancied myself widely read in French!” Legal and constitutional studies led him to explore politics and economics, and sooner or later philosophy and history were bound to cast their fascination upon him. He was particularly attracted to the subtle and sensitive art of biography, especially biography in miniature. As early as 1918, he reviewed in the Everymans Review (edited by his friend V. V. Srinivasa Iyengar) the just published beat-seller, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. There had also been a journalistic interregnum when he edited New India for a time during Annie Besant’s internment by the Madras Government. When the Montford Reforms came. C. P. plunged into the electioneering fray, wooing the Madras urban electorate in conquering-hero fashion, and gate-crashing into the Legislative Council. But soon he became the Advocate-General, and not long after, the Law Member of the Madras Executive Council.

For the ordinary run of political careerists, such an elevation would have meant merely a settled salary, liveried peons, luxurious saloons and somnolent and blissful inactivity. But C. P. decided to make the best possible use of even the Dyarchic worst of circumstances, and he crowded into a few hectic years the achievements of a couple of decades. A new C. P was forged into being on the testing anvil of responsibility, and the scintillating lawyer became a master builder. But let C. P. himself speak:

“It was my privilege to have been one of the originators of the great Mettur Project which had been bandied about between the Secretariat of the Government of India, the secretariat of the Mysore Government and the Secretariat of the Madras Government for about fifty years. I made up my mind–I then thought to be a little rash–that the fight should see a termination. Mettur has an irrigation scheme and not only that, it has become a hydro-electric project of great prospects. Later on, it fell to my lot to consider the possibility of developing electricity, utilising the natural resources with which the Madras presidency is richly endowed...It was also my good fortune to have initiated what is now known as the Pykara Project.”

An “electrical fanatic “, as C, P. claimed himself to be, he left the Madras Province these rich legacies, and, in addition, the promise of other irrigation schemes such as the Coleroon Project, the Cauveri Project, the Papanasam Project and the Bhavani Project. Thanks, then, to C. P., it became a part of public opinion that “so far as we are concerned in South India, deprived as we are of coal resources, we have no alternative in the matter of industrial development to the use of white power or electricity.”

When later C. P. shifted to Travancore, first as Constitutional Adviser from 1932 to 1936, then as Dewan for eleven years, he carried his electrical fanaticism to his new sphere of activity as well. The Pallivasal Hydro-electric Scheme at Munnar was to become an accomplished fact and be a forerunner of other similar projects. He continued to dream of a time, envisage “a period when power distributed to rural centres will bring into existence small industries, side by side with certain big industries, which will avoid the possibility of those great congregations of men and of labour resulting in the slum problems and building problems of the world at large.” Production of cheap electricity has since become one of the priorities of National Planning, and it is to C. P.’s credit that he saw this clearly fifty years ago.

Whether as lawyer, politician or administrator, taxing as these professions were, C. P. also found time for other things–to look for the roses beyond the cabbages. He was elected to several of the chief lectureships in the country, and he gave the Sir P. Ramanathan Lectures at Jaffna. He spoke on “The Federal idea” in Mysore, “Planning for the Future” at Ernakulam and “Post War Reconstruction” before the Reconstruction Committee of the Government of India. He took Convocation Addresses, of course, in his easy stride throughout his life. In the midst of all this activity he somehow found time to read and master almost every crucial new book–be it a popular treatise like Lancelot Hogben’s Mathematics for the Million or a specialist study by Nils Bohr or Professor Whitehead. While he managed to preserve unsullied his love for Sanskrit, English and French literatures, he also probed with undiminished zest the new worlds of Relativist Physics ad Behaviourist Psychology. Massive in his intellect, unrelenting in his industry, a demon of administrative efficiency, C. P. was at the same time a connoisseur of the arts of civilisation and a taster of the ineluctable fruits of culture. He was never too old to learn new things, and he started learning the Malayalam language in his sixtieth year. His mind did not work in terms of exclusions or inhibitions, but preferred to respond to all and comprehend all the multifoliate opulence of the human experience. He had no use for perverted sensibility or mere propagandist asceticism, but loved the good things of life, and enjoyed good food, good books, good music, good conversation and good sports, and even in his ripe old age looked very handsome indeed in his impeccably worn good clothes.

For all the apparently combative life that C. P.’s had been, he was able by means of his generous understanding to make and retain friendships spread over the entire spectrum of his times. He had to cross swords with many prominent people, but those verbal duels and political skirmishes left uneffected the more abiding elan of mutual esteem and affection. He wrote or lectured on the Nehrus, father and son, on Mahatma Gandhi, on his contemporaries at the Bar and in Indian public life. And he discoursed perceptively on Valmiki, Sankara and Thayumanavar, on Thoreau, Whitman and Emerson, on Ananda Coomaraswami and Gurudev Tagore. Whether it was a question of seeking the basis of Indian Art expression or isolating and expounding the fundamental truths of the divers world religions or seizing and scrutinising the essence of an eternal classic like the Ramayana, C. P. could adopt the right stance and find the right words to say. And sometimes he forged brilliant bridges of understanding spanning different disciplines and areas of experience. In the essay on Sankara, for example, C. P. said that our ancient scriptures intuitively anticipated what are now coming to be regarded as scientific truths:

“The atomic theory and the existence of a reservoir of incalculable energy in the atoms, the doctrine of the conservation of energy and many of the developments in physics, chemistry and biology regarding the potentialities of the infinitely small and the plenitude ofthe infinitely great–all these demonstrate the transmutations of primal energy into the entities ofcreation and evolution. Such ideas are envisaged in the doctrines of anu (atom), of anna (matter) – and sabda brahman.”

He thought that the Ramayana was an “epitome and compendium of human conduct”, and cited a verse from the Uttara Kanda meaning that “the organs ofsense are like mischievous prancing horses, and human resolve should act as the charioteer for restraining and directing them aright. Much in the same way, Robert Bridges expected “Ethick” to keep under restraint the galloping steeds of “selfhood” and “breed!”

The Bhakta doubled with the Rasika in C. P. made him receptive to the fine arts, especially the music of Mira and of Tyagaraja. Of the latter C. P. said that what the great master of Karnatak music achieved was “the development and systematisation of sangatis or melodic phrases in close assonance with bhava...and he also released musical practice from the grip of the word as such.” And when C. P. spoke of pilgrims of eternity like Ramakrishna paramahamsa, Ramana Maharshi orSri Aurobindo, he could indeed find the appropriate winged words.

When in a reminiscential vein, C. P. was infectiously interesting–as when he spoke of statesmen like Gokhale and Sastri, of lawyer-politicians like V. Krishnaswami Aiyar and Sir Sankaran Nair, Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru and Sir P. S. Sivaswami Aiyar, of political power-houses like Annie Besant, Lokamanya Tilak and Bepin Chandra Pal, of liberal evangelists like Ranade and Telang, of great administrators like Seshadri Iyer and Srinivasa Raghava Iyengar, of pioneering journalists like Kasturi Ranga Iyengar and G. A. Natesan, or of poets like Muhammad Iqbal and Sarojini Naidu, or of educational philanthropists like Sir Annamalai Chettiar and his son Muthia Chettiar. C. P’s flair for summing up in a sentence ortwo may be illustrated by his description of Sir V. Bhashyam Aiyangar as “a combination of concentrated yet vast learning, of analytical skill with essential simplicity, self-respect and kindliness.” If Bhashyam Aiyangar was seemingly slow, “every one of his sentences was not only accurate and lucid but a brilliantly concise statement or proposition.” On the other hand, V. Krishnaswami Aiyar’s “manner of speaking and his advocacy, like a tornado, swept hearers off their feet.” As for satire, C. P. could be devastating, as when he reviewed Katharine Mayo’s Slaves of the Gods in the Hindu under the caption “Further Libel on India.”

It was characteristic of C. P. that he shoutd have embarked upon a fresh adventure of arduous research in his late eighties and died, as it were, in harness. I met him but rarely, once in Annamalainagar at the time of the P. E. N. All India Writers’ Conference, once in Waltair when he was on a visit to the Andhra University, once in Baroda at the P. E N. Conference again, and once at his “Grove” in Madras; every time he was all graciousness. I have heard him speak on a few occasions, though only in the last phase of his extraordinary career. His speeches had usually an electric effect, rather like the orations of Sarojini Naidu. Was a C. P. speech more of a bewitching performance than a sheerly persuasive feat? Perhaps. And yet the heat of the intellect and the glow of the resonant utterance and the aura of the matchless presence teamed always into a marvel that was like no other. Since 1939, letters passed between us off and on. After reading my books on Lytton Strachey and S. Srinivas Iyengar, C. P. gave me the needed long-distance encouragement. Once (2 February 1953), indeed, he wrote to me from Ooty a letter of phenomenal warmth and appreciation for which, as far as I can recollect, there was no immediate reason; it was just one of his sudden generous impulses (“I have been watching your varied activities and reading your publications with the greatest interest, and I regard you as one of the finest personalities of our time...”). Thirteen years after, he wrote offering me his congratulations and good wishes on my appointment as Vice-Chancellor of the Andhra University. That was his last letter to me. In the year of his birth centenary, I can only remember with love and gratitude this great and good man, this wizard of law, life and letters, and this master-builder who built gloriously in cement-concrete as well as in the infinitudes of the Spirit.

“On a certain occasion, a British Police Sergeant would not allow the Law Member (Sir C. P.) to pass along the Marina Road since the Military stationed in Fort St. George were on target practice on the sands. The Member was due in few minutes to be present at a Cabinet meeting, but the Sergeant was firm. “You know who I am,” asked the Member. “Yes, Sir, I know that you are the Member of Government in charge of the Police”, the Sergeant calmly replied, “but an order is an order which I must obey.” The Member reached the Secretariat by a round-about route and, after the meeting of the Cabinet, he instructed the I. G. of police to give the Sergeant a reward for his devotion to duty.”

–S. CHIDAMBARAM
(Secretary for nearly five decades to Dr C. P.)