Triveni Journal
1927 | 11,233,916 words
Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....
CHARISMA AND DYNAMISM
A Profile of C. P.
Scene Number One
Time: Sometime in December 1941, around 5-30 in the evening
Place: Courtyard in front of the Rangaswami Iyengar Memorial Hall at the Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha premises in Thyagaraynagar, Madras.
Occasion: Birth Anniversary Celebrations of Rajaji (then serving a prison sentence in the Individual Satyagraha Campaign).
Person: A well-proportioned figure of medium height, clad in well-cut sherwani-like long-coat, spotless white dhoti and turban, and a silk angavastramthrown casually around the neck, one of its ends flying in the air.
Fulsome tributes were being paid to the Chanakya of Indian politics (not yet elevated to the rank of Socrates of the twentieth century) by speaker after speaker in indifferent English of different kinds, and flowing sing-song Tamil that never seemed to have a stop. At least one speech was in Hindi, a language that had then an aroma of patriotism about it in the South, without the response of all-round intelligibility, and another in Telugu, which, for a few, stuck like a fly in the ointment.
The present writer, then a college student, patiently sat through all the laudatory speeches, but he has now only the foggiest notion of the content of most of them.
The only thing of which he still retains a clear picture is the impressive presence of the turbaned figure, who presided over the celebrations. He had a personality that stood out from the rest, and drew instant attention. He was the centre of attraction like the lamp-bearer who dominates the human Rembrandt’s famous painting, “The Night Watch.” The spectator had an optical illusion, without realising it, that this figure had managed to capture the glow of sunlight, while the rest of the crowd were lost in the penumbra of dusk and could only be seen by candlelight, as it were.
Not that he said anything memorable (like Julius Caesar on his landing on the soil of Britain or Srinivasa Sastri at the Guild Hall in London or Radhakrishnan in the Albert Hall), but his words were accentuated with a sense of drama and reinforced by the mystique of personality.
He answered to the name of SachivottamaDr. Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyer (none in his senses could think of omitting the honorifics in those beknighted days of British Imperialism).
Scene Number Two
Time: Sometime in January 1946, around 6-30 in the evening.
Place: Vivekananda Assembly Hall in the Ramakrishna Mission High School in Thyagarayanagar, Madras.
Occasion: Observance of the Gita Day.
Person: The same as before; this time he was the main speaker–theme of his address was “The Message of the Gita.”
In the chair was Mr. Justice P. V. Rajamannar (not yet become Chief Justice or Doctor of Laws and Letters).
There were other speakers too, of some eminence, judges, lawyers, professors of English, philosophy and the like.
As a judge and as a speaker, Mr. Rajamannar was a balanced person, not given to hyperbole or overstatement. Equable by temperament, he never let himself go in his compliments. If such a man chose to indulge in high praise, it must be for a good reason. In introducing Sir C. P. (who needed no introduction, as the saying goes) Rajamannar referred to him in superlative terms. “There may be many Ramaswamis,” he said (there were, in fact, at least two of them, quite well-known, and no less eminent in the public life of Madras, each in his own way, and many others less eminent), “but there is only one C. P.,” he added, to a resounding burst of applause. There was little difficulty for any member of the Madras audience in identifying the best-known of the other “Ramaswamis.”
He then proceeded to describe Sir C. P. as a fascinating personality, who, in his time, had fascinated High Court Judges, Governors, Viceroys and the Indian Princes, not to speak of Lawyers and clients, in fact all the people who had ever come in contact with him. In his reply, C. P. made a half-hearted show of taking umbrage at the “semi-feminine description” indulged bythe Chairman, young enough to be his son. But he must have known that it was not off the mark. He was, in fact, conscious of the charm he had been exercising on a wide variety of intelligent men and women (including E. S. Montague, who hailed him as the cleverest man in India, Mrs. Besant who drew him into her fold as her right-hand man in the Home Rule Movement, and incidentally, the vocalist, Bangalore Nagaratnamma, who used to address him with the endearment, “Lavanya Rama”).
C. P.’s address, delivered with his characteristic blend of earnestness and aplomb, was heard in pin-drop silence He spoke with the wonted eloquence of a skilful orator, who, like Winston Churchill, might have rehearsed his impromptus as well. He never read from a prepared manuscript, though he might, on occasion, have carried a slip of paper or two to remind him of an obscure quotation as an aid in illustrating his point. On this occasion, the speech lasting nearly an hour, was enriched with quotations from Sankara’s Bhashyaas well as from the original text–with special emphasis on Karmayoga, the supremacy of Nishkama Karma (action without desire) and the concept of Sthitaprajna.
It was also embellished with Western paralles from Meister Ekhart and Max Mueller to T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley and Indian opinions from those of Lokamanya Tilak and Sri Aurobindo to Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Radhakrishnan. He threw his net wide in the extensive waters of Indian philosophy, Hindu metaphysicst English literature and Western thought. He cast a spell on the audience, which included a fair sprinkling of Law students like myself, which could only be compared, in a way, to the impact left by Swami Vivekananda at the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1892. Some of us were young enough to fancy ourselves as sceptics, and though we did not go there to scoff, we certainly remained to pray, and longed for a copy of the Bhagavadgitain our hands.
Ever since, I do not remember to have consciously missed any of the speeches of Sir C. P. in the city. He should have spoken fairly often, forever since his final return from Travancore, he even used to spend at least ten days or a week in the month in Madras, when he was Vice-Chancellor of Annamalai and Benares Universities. A few of the occasions come to mind. One was the speech he delivered in Rajaji Hall (around 1950) giving the impressions of his American tour, part of which was spent as a Visiting Professor at Stanford and as a Delegate to the World Philosophical Congress at Honolulu. Another was the one he gave a couple of years later at the Sastri Hall in Mylapore on his return from People’s China, where he went as a member of the Indian Cultural Delegation.
His comments on the American way of life, with its disarming informality of address between pupils and professors were not only pertinent, but spicy and enjoyable. He had occasionally a few friendly digs at the American craze for advertisement, along with their anxiety to do the world some good. He had reserves of humour, marked by irony, and he could exploit the sense of the ridiculous without doing violence to his exalted rhetoric. This was even more in evidence in his picturesque impressions of China, where he had seen the giant loud-speakers blare out warnings against the American Imperialists alternating with exhortations to achieve the patriotic targets in roadlaying and building constructions, under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism, according to the book of Mao! He could, like the seasoned platform speaker that he was, relate a side-splitting joke with a straight face and proceed to the next, as if he had no time to watch its impact!
“Anecdotage is an inalienable privilege of dotage,” was a favourite remark of C. P., who never lapsed into dotage. One of the anecdotes he was fond of relating was about his student days at Presidency College. It so happened that his father, while riding along the Beach Road in his victoria, on an early afternoon, saw him playing tennis, instead of attending classes during the working hours. The outraged father duly complained against this to the British Principal, who understood the ways of the boys, and advised C. P. not to play tennis during college hours, “when hisfather as passing by!”
As for his public speeches, the one he delivered at the Sastri Hall, while presiding over a lecture by Prof. Arnold J. Toynbee, e author of A Study of History was indeed a remarkable performance. The rapid survey that he made of the theories of Toynbee, based on his lifelong study of world civilisations, was so lucid and masterly that the professor, none too articulate, was left dumbfounded and his own remarks sounded rather like incoherent mumblings to the bulk of the home-spun Mylapore audience.
Mastery of the spoken word was but a part of the charisma that pervaded the personality of C. P. There are other notable elements that went into its make-up, like courage, personal loyalty and breadth of mind. Unlike most of the Indian intelligentsia of his time, softened by their easy way of life, C. P. retained a high degree of physical and moral courage. He was a man of strong nerves. He had real guts. He showed it in his early days as an aspiring Municipal Commissioner (as a councillor used to be called in those days) when he rode into a hostile constituency in George Town and began to address the sullen crowd, after pulling out a revolver from his pocket and placing it on the table. All attempts of the mischief-makers to disturb his meeting seem to have gone up in smoke, without his having to fire a single round!
As for the quality ofpersonal loyalty, he not only evinced it in practice, but evoked it in others. He believed in sticking to his personal staff and other aides and standing by his friends through thick and thin. His Private Secretary, S. Chidambaram, who always looked upon him and spoke of him only as “My Master,” first joined his office as a steno-typist around 1915 or so, and stayed on with him till only death did them part in September 1966. He used to recall how early in his service, his master gave him a sum of Rs 2000 (now at least 20 times the value) to be remitted in the bank, but he lost it on the way. He was woebegone and afraid to face him, but C. P. told him not to worry but forget all about it, as if it were just a couple of rupees! His juniors at the bar, like M. Subbaroya Aiyer and N. Chandrasekhara Aiyer and their juniors like T. V. Viswanatha Aiyer, ever remained thankful to providence for the phenomenon that was called C. P. in their time.
There were many others, who had reason to be grateful to him for the good turn he had done them at one time or another. C. P. was liberal with his purse, as long as he could afford to be so. Speaking at the inauguration of the Ethiraj College (endowed by the Barrister, V. L. Ethiraj, with a donation of Rs. Ten lakhs), C. P. revealed to the public that his own donations would also add up to a like amount. But they were widely scattered in time and space, unlike those of Sivaswami Aiyer and Ethiraj. He was born with a silver spoon and his legal practice, for less than two decades, was lucrative enough for him to sup with a golden spoon. But he did not believe in saving like a miser. That would have been against his nature, which was to do everything in the grand manner. He lived like a prince and died like a prince.
His sunny disposition was another essential ingredient of his charisma. Through ill fortune as well as good, he could hold his head up and walk with his nose in the air. Even in his seventies and eighties, he walked with a spring in his step and talked with a ring in his voice. Comparing the styles and temperaments of C. P. and S. Varadachari, who sometimes appeared on opposite sides, Mr. K. Chandrasekharan makes an interesting point in his “Persons and Personalities.” While Varadachari, even when after winning the case, would come out of the court room, head bowed, as if he had lost it, C. P. would come out with a smile and stride along the corridors jauntily as if he had won it! His success at the bar was essentially the success of vigorous advocacy, aided by a winning personality. Where river water disputes were concerned he won sensational victories against the giant Alladi in the Court of Sir Maurice Gwyer.
Charisma, in these days, is the end-product of sophisticated techniques of personality build-up by a network of official agencies, with the aid of all the available media of mass communication. These techniques were as yet almost unknown, certainly undeveloped in the early ’Twenties, when C. P. made his entry in public life with a bang.
In his case, it owned more to his innate dynamism and mastery of the spoken word than to any adventitious aids at the disposal of politicians in power. And this dynamism found expression in his primary role as a man of action, and his secondary role as a man of words and as also tertiary and peripheral role as a man of thought.
C. P.’s dynamism, as an administrator, was inspired by such models as those of Sir K. Seshadri Iyer of Mysore and charged by the vision of a new India, in which the Ganga is linked with the cauvery and industry is propelled by electricity, without leaving agriculture behind. He was the hero as an advocate and administrator, who brightened the era before independence. He desrves a high place in public memory, though the likes of him may be out of place in the Age of the Common Man.
Rare Exemplar
“I regard Sir C. P. as one of the very rare exemplars in our country of the genuinely educated man, whom education has helped to develop a fully-integrated personality. The scholar and man of culture in him does not cramp the active enthusiasm and constructive thinking of the elder statesman, nor does the man of affairs in him tone down the expression or befog the operation of his intellect as a cultivated individual. Reading his addresses and writings, and conversations with him, have been a very rewarding experience to me.”
–DR. C. D. DESHMUKH