Dr. C. R. Reddy-A Portrait from his Letters

Dr. C. R. REDDY

A Portrait from his Letters

There are fewer blessings in life than friendship with the celebrities of one’s own country not merely in terms of extreme cordiality but on those of real intimacy. What more could one ask for than the privilege of sharing one’s thoughts with them on things, near and remote, and peep into the innermost workings of their minds through the sovereign medium of the epistle? Between C. R. Reddy and me there was a fairly regular exchange of letters across the years from the latter ’Twenties till his death, with no mental reservations on either side and sometimes even in a Puckish vein as a tribute to our mutual affection. And among many other things which went together to single him out on the intellectual plane, Reddy was an expert letter-writer–indeed, a master of craft as much as he was a pastmaster in conversation, another of the lost arts of the age.

Myfriendship with Reddy was really an inheritance: he was my father’s friend for half a century. It was social reform that was their common interest, while my relations with him had an intellectual basis. He was generous in the measure of encouragement he gave me as a journalist and writer. Knowing something of my bias for biography he offered me the following counsel in one of his earliest letters to me:

Remember Lord Acton’s dictum that even funeral eulogies should be couched in the temperate and discriminating language of history and that indeed there is no justification for telling lies even in the absolving presence of a corpse. Biography should be written in the spirit of history and not of pamphlet. And that is why it is best written after a man is completely dead inasmuch as he might not like to hear of the severe things that have to be said about him.

A little later when I happened to join The Hindu he wrote:

Glad you have become embedded in The Hindu, more and more, and find it no bed of roses. It is the intellectual standard of journalism and will educate you out of your Andhra vapours…

Those were days when the whole country was agitated over the findings of the Simon Commission. Reddy who could probe into their inner character and hidden implications was on the war-path. Writing to me towards the end of June 1930 he exploded thus:

On the whole I feel that it is the funeral pyre of nationalism that they have proposed to erect. Our nationalism is to be consumed by the sectional fires to be kindled. What will be set up by the Simon Commission is a disreputable Indian oligarchy of careerists very amenable to Government pressure. It shuts the door of hope not only for nationalistic but democratic advance.

This is India’s hour of trial. The call is for more courage and a more sincere devotion to the public good. The way the country rallies round to the support of the Gandhian movement is the test. Whether we gain anything material or not we shall certainly have progressed in the qualities and habits of nationality, sense of honour and the organised display of patriotic action. The inner soul is more than the outer constitutional garb, and it is on that we should concentrate our efforts in all honesty of purpose. If we take care of our character as a people, constitutions will take care of themselves.

I have a feeling that for the next three years Reddy was in no happy mood. I was supposed to be “the only person outside the family” to remember his birthday but during the above period he gave me a peep into the prison-house of his own secret existence when I offered him the usual felicitations:

You are an incorrigible rememberer of an insignificant day. We did not observe the day this year. A nation’s struggle and suffering cannot permit of these rotten festivities.

In early 1935 he opened his heart to me thus:

I have neglected you badly due to mental and moral depression at the great opportunity lost by the country, by people not rallying in sufficient strength to the Congress.

About a year later he again wrote in the same vein from Chittoor:

I have been here for some months past–in a mood of strict and exclusive vegetating–and this vegetarianism is the only thing that agrees with me!

I found that the mood had passed when I was in Madras editing People’s Voice. He was then writing to me in warmer tones. On me return to Allahabad in the latter half of 1937, he cheered me up.

So you are at the Ganges! Any day better than the Cooum. It is a pity you would not journalise in future here. There was a distinction and educative value which we miss now.

And then with playful ease he added:

I shall be visiting your holy place in November. Wonder where I shall put up? I want European comforts. The soul is Swadeshi but the stomach Videshi! Which is the best hotel?

He would not, however, close the letter without saying something, however casually, about the current controversies of the hour. Referring to a divergence of outlook between Rajaji and Nehru (Exactly on what question I don’t remember) he said:

Intellectually I am with C. R., a moderate and anti-Socialist; morally with the more intrepid and straighter J (jawaharlal), the weaker party. J is a man doomed to be a Martyr, and they are Judases enough in his camp who are using him today and will abuse him tomorrow.

As in the case of Morley, even in casual letters or on post cards, his style is “strong and vital” and also often distinguished by flashes of irony and wit. Alluding to Mr. Kripalani’s attack on his “mythical ban on Socialist literature” in the Andhra University, this is what he said:

I suppose an occasional braying is necessary for health and leadership. Yet K is a very nice fellow and highly clever and competent. We have met before and he could have asked for the facta...But his attack on me was charmingly well-written. I read it over and over again enjoying his attractive style. I could have exclaimed in the language of one of Shaw’s doctors: “What a beautiful ulcer! How perfectly ripe!”

Whether he always agreed with Congressmen or not, he had for them on the whole a tender regard. At any rate he had little or no regard for the Liberals though he found them individually estimable. In one letter he dismissed them contemptuously:

All Liberals are rats. They mistake patriotism in careerism.

In one of my letters I passed on to him one of Chintamani’s epigrams which I thought was quite revealing. Diagnosing the political situation Chintamani said: “Government lack honesty, Muslims patriotism, Liberals sacrifice and Congressmen judgment.”

Reddy reacted to this rather fiercely and wrote to me:

I don’t understand your Chief’s epigram. If Government is not honest, why do the Liberals support it? Is it because they too lack honesty and so have fellow-feeling? Liberals lack sacrifice–which translated into psychology meant patriotism and courage. Congress lacks judgment–which similarly analysed means that cowardice is an aid to judgment while courage is not. There is not a more contemptible race on earth whether for judgment or character than the Liberals. Every year on the new moon days they threaten to lose their confidence in Government, but never reach the end of the process, and on full moon days they regain it. Themselves heroes of the verbal order, they are easily won over by words as hollow as their own...Constituted as they are, the greatest service they can do to the country is to hold their tongues which, of course, they cannot.

Again, in another letter returning to the charge he hit out thus:

They proclaim that the Congress is the only power which can deliver the goods and then deliver themselves which is all the goods they can deliver.

It was a sad thing that for all his spirited defence of the Congress, he was at no stage much a persona grata with it. At one stage it accepted many of his ideas but had still let him out of the picture. I expressed both my surprise and regret at the injustice done to him when he poured out his heart:

You are always hankering for gratitude and worrying about its conspicuous lack in our public men. When I made the proposals–which are now Khaddar-wear of the C. R. group of Congressites–I was abused by name, and now my ideas arc used without so much as the most indirect or inferential acknowledgement. But I consider this right, proper, progressive!

1. Origins are generally mean and should be ignored.
2. Gratitude is a ward-looking virtue–a self-contradiction and does not harmonise with forward-looking progress.
3. Governments and parties are agreed in this–they prefer creatures to creators of ideas who are always a troublesome lot. What they want is a sort of blotting-pad to reproduce their impressions and they are getting it in plenty. They come to us for thought-purposes-but for purpose of their organisations they prefer dittoists. That is the law of life–official and non-official.

Again in 1946 he wrote in the same strain with a tinge of regret but none of bitterness. By then the Constituent Assembly had been set up but there was no place for one like Reddy there, if only because the Congress was in no mood to emerge out of narrow grooves. I felt that it was a serious injustice to Reddy and also a big loss to India. What a mark he could have made in that august Assembly by bringing his original, challenging and searching mind to deliberation of the complex and grave problems that it was called upon to deal with! His reply was so frank–and yet so fair. He said:

A great pleasure to have heard from you; and your tones are as warm-hearted as ever for which thanks. Yes: it was a bit of a disappointment to me that I was not given chance to serve on the Constituent Assembly–not tragic anyway, since there is a Providence that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we may–though He takes a deuced long lime to do the shaping! That I would be left out was foreseen, for there was no obligation on the part of Congress to pay me that amount of regard. Their action was natural. The anticipated is never so bad as the unexpected.

Before he bade adieu to the Andhra University it was my privilege to have manipulated an invitation for him to Hyderabad where I was the Public Relations Officer and got for the Andhra University a donation of two lakhs. During the time he stayed there he tried to probe into the intricacies of the Hyderabad problem by talking as freely to Mr. Laik Ali as to Mr. Munshi and Swami Ramanand Tirth with whom we dined. Reddy narrowly missal Kasim Razvi but when he met Nawab Moin Nawaz Jung, Reddy cornered him by asking why Hyderabad needed an army at all without being satisfied with something like a Malabar Special police force!

He entertained the hope that Hyderabad might revive “the traditions of Akbar and Golconda” and prove to be “the cement and synthesis of India” He took the gloomiest view of “the furies and fanaticisms” ravaging this great land and gave anxious thought to the problem. He confessed to me:

My soul’s attention flows in the direction of the communal and other problems that afflict this dear old land–almost too old to last long.

As early as in 1946 he gave me of what was passing in his mind:

My interest in Vice-Chancellorship has waned–these are the last flickers before extinction.

It was at that stage that I suggested to him literary retirement, so that he might leave behind something enduring far posterity. So did some others even earlier, including my brother, Kameswara Pralad, in reply to whose letter he thus unburdened himself:

As regards how best to utilize the few years that may yet remain for me, it is strange that you should have suggested devotion to literature at the same time as a Parsi lady friend of mine asks me to quit the university and enjoy a literary retirement. This coincidence happening to be in the line of my own thoughts and feelings which have been welling up for sometime past, I think, will have an effect. Venkataramani also suggested that I should bring out a collected edition of my English works and that he himself would come to Chittoor and help me to make the selection. It is not even one month when towards the end of my summer sojourn in Chittoor I made a collection of all my old stuff, including the “In Memoriam” in prose I wrote on Viresalingam, and found that they covered 3 or 4 shelves of an almirah. There are also the diaries of my world-tour, which though antediluvian, may yet have some historical and personal interest, certainly historical. So without being very definite about it, I can only say that this blessed seed of your letter has fallen on soil already prepared.

But nothing came out of it. It is our loss.

It was a pleasure to be on writing terms with Reddy who, in his lighter moments or gayer moods, could be simply charming and irresistible as when he said to me that “Even love must be reduced to matrimony if it is to be stable”–himself a gifted bachelor in the line of Balfour. In one of his letters alluding to patronage in this country he hurled this at me:

In India nobody will share patronage with another, whatever else he may share. I am informed by Vyasa that even the Pandavas who shared a wife refused to share patronage with each other.

This incidentally reminds me of his eagerness in his last years to husband his eye-sight if only to read Mahabharata. Such was his love of that classic on which he was supposed to be one of the greatest authorities.

It is a sad and depressing thought that Reddy, one of our finest intellectuals and most gifted men, was among the least lucky–and that in the ultimate analysis he should be regarded as one of the “Splendid Failures” in history, in view of the glaring hiatus between promise and fulfilment. His achievements as an educationist for all their striking quality could hardly make his cup brimful. Even his parliamentary gifts were but confined to a provincial legislature though “a certain mingling of mellow wisdom that is unique” and his own, could have established him at the Centre. In politics he invariably proved to be a receding hero. He was out of tune with his environment and he seemed seek “the palm without the dust” like Rosebery of whom he was reminiscent both in brilliance and temperament. Aristocratic, proud, sensitive and a trifle aloofish he could hardly fit in, in any party mechanism, and was content to take delight in mere intellectual exercise. His speeches were remarkable as much for a coherent body of thought as for splendour of diction while some of his phrases enriched the English tongue. Mr. Ramaswami Mudaliar, no mean judge of politicians, spoke to me of Reddy as the greatest phrase-maker in politics since Disraeli, not excluding Randolph Churchill who, in England, came next to Disraeli.

It is difficult to say if there will be any posthumous publication of Reddy’s speeches, diaries and letters but it will be no small consolation to me if this piece will revive interest in good old Ramalinga Reddy whose memory I cherish with a friend’s love and an Indian’s pride.
–From Swatantra Annual, 1952