The Philosopher - President of India

Philosophers in public authority are rare. Marcus Aurelius was the philosopher-king; Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan became the philo­sopher-President. The cupola of a white turban hiding an abundant crop of unruly hair, a deep penetrating Calvinistic look, a striking sensitive nose, a rich, resonant voice, and a spare ascetic frame–this has become a familiar ensemble in this country and in several others. Radhakrishnan’s life has been like a loud incantation; his merest gestures, benedictions.

Radhakrishnan contains contrasts. The philosopher who has expounded the idealist view of life with prophetic fervour is not a bore; he is a writer of power and eloquent elegance, an orator of charm, a scholar who has lived life richly. In public he stands as an oracle of wisdom; in private he is a sparkling conversationalist. He is devoted to books and seclusion, but the world of living men at­tracts him. He talks of the soul and the spirit, but lie has not forgotten the miseries of the world. He has preached unceasingly to people–and worked for their material advancement.

Many vivid vignettes can be drawn of Radhakrishnan striding across the world, addressing parliaments, academies, political bodies, statesmen, scholars and students.

As Vice-President, he would, at eleven in the morning, walk from his room to his high seat in the Council of States, and his first utterance would be like a prayer. The day’s business would then begin. As member after member rose to ask questions and to put halting, irrelevant or troublesome supplementaries, and ministers struggled to give their answers, there would be crisp, curt interruptions from the Chair. Members would be encouraged to go on and falter­ing ministers would be prodded to complete their answers, and the house would rock with sallies and laughter. There would be high seriousness and excitement and amusement. Even the boisterous Bhupesh Gupta, after being shown the utmost latitude, would be made to sit down–and he would settle down with a smile of immense satisfaction. There was no false note in the house; rarely a walk-out: there was never a protest against the Chairman’s ruling. In atmos­phere, it was a senate worthy of Brutus and Cato, or Chatham and Brougham; at all moments it was like a classroom dominated by a patriarchal and teasing teacher.

Radhakrishnan had been a superb performer in the classroom in Madras, Mysore and Calcutta, in the Andhra University Senate, in the Varanasi University Court, as Chairman of the University Education Commission, as Hibbert Lecturer, and as Spalding Professor.

There is no deviation from dignity; there is self-possession in thought, word and gesture. His lectures were not confined to the curriculum or the text-book. It is still recalled how in his early days at Mysore, he would come into the class a quarter of an hour late, talk of the day’s events, entertain the students with his wit, discourse on the day’s theme in a few sentences, and close the period a few minutes before time.

Radhakrishnan made memorable his first public utterance in till country on his triumphal return from England after the Upton Lectures in 1926. The hall of Presidency College, Madras, overflowed; there was not even standing space for eminent public men and High Court judges. The meeting had to be adjourned to the open, and, there, standing with his hands in the pockets of his long coat, as if defying the elements, a sculptured, statuesque figure, he delivered an extempore address of exquisite diction and unceasing music, mesmerising the audience, till he broke the spell with a salute. This was the beginning of a tradition.

Radhakrishnan’s theme, his diction, his accent, and his into­nation became familiar in many parts of the world. The spell conti­nued. It was extended by broadcasting networks. His is among the commanding voices, a voice that admonishes, that warns, that soothes. Early in life he showed that philosophers need not be bores, that philosophy is not dull. That has been the secret of his success. He has spoken so much and so often that little that he says seems to be new, but like Upanishadic thought, all the best that has been thought and said in the world can be reduced to some basic wisdom, and on this Radhakrishnan has made many elaborate variations, giving every utterance of his force of conviction and musical quality. Among Indian speakers of English, he is the one who has invested Anglo-Saxon speech with the tonal quality of Sanskrit. He remains an artist in the manner he says what he has to say. There is no speech of his with­out a beginning and a finish without its trumpet notes.

In November 1960, at UNESCO’S Tagore Centenary Celeb­rations, in Paris, he achieved near perfection in speech. He was delivering the commemoration address to a packed audience of distinguished scholars, thinkers and writers in UNESCO’S Conference Hall at the Place de Fontenoy. Though he had known his subject for more than forty years and spoken on it several times, he made the occasion memorable for faultless diction, for sustained elevation of thought, for exhaustive mastery, for apt quotation and for melodious language. Some in the audience had heard him speak on Tagore before, but it was an address impeccable in style and substance. English on that day sounded like Spanish, French, Persian or Sanskrit at its best.

Radhakrishnan, though a seasoned speaker, is not just like a record that can be played to please an audience or to make an occa­sion memorable for the nobility of his presence or for even flow of his eloquence. He can use his eloquence to new purposes at short notice. Whether he welcomed Khrushchev or Eisenhower in the Central Hall of Parliament, he did it in short brilliant speeches, in the most appropriate possible words, with wit and grace, and with understanding of other peoples, without yielding in his Indianness. It is Radhakrishnan’s habit to pat the most famous of statesmen on the , an act of confident familiarity. He patted even Stalin, when communism’s Peter the Great wanted to meet an ambassador who, he had heard, read twelve hours a day. Radhakrishnan’s Central Hall performances were physically and intellectually pats on the s of distinguished visitors.

Radhakrishnan’s diction is his own, formed early in his life. He does not shun rhetoric. He has the capacity to condense his thought and his style is epigrammatic. It was said of Arthur Balfour that whenever he uttered an epigram, he ‘made. it sound like a conundrum. There is no mystery or paradox in Radhakrishnan’s epigrams. They are simple, short and swift, and come in cascades. They are Baconian in their crackling aphoristic wisdom, with the flavour of Pascal’s Pensees.

Radhakrishnan has an inner side, which through the years of his sadhana has been known only to him and which is barred to the world, leading it to speculation about his true self, and a personal side, which, free from the burden of philosophic message or the dignity of public demeanour sparkles every moment. He is one of the best conversationalists of the time, a wit, a raconteur, one who any moment may indulge in mild devilry of fun and impish delight at anyone’s expense. He unbends–and he is engaging even in his most casual remarks. He pricks pomposity and invests the most serious subject with raillery. There must be few cases of such un­philosophic humanity among philosophers. He strips himself of holiness. A recluse in spirit, no one is denied access to him. Often he is seen in his bed which is his study, surrounded by heaps of books and straggling visitors. Nothing in manuscript or print is beneath his notice, and he condescends to read the immature outpourings of the struggling writer as much as he would like to keep himself familiar with the latest classics of philosophy and literature. He is one of the most widely read people and what he has read includes much miscel­laneous literature. His philosophy takes into account the intuition of the artists, the discoveries of the scientists, and the insight of the saints. His humanity is based upon true and generous understanding, and he is prodigal in the prefaces, forewords and introductions he appends to the outpourings of even unknown writers.

Among philosophers of modern times, he has been the most internationally known. He is a philosopher neither of the East nor of the West; he has brought about a synthesis of the cultural values of the two parts of the world. There is nothing archaic about him or his philosophy. He has written with great humility of himself, and called his writings no more than fragments of a confession. He is not a philosopher of the woods or books. He matured even before his forties, like Raman in the world of science, and, while his best writing was nearing completion, he found that his philosophy was deeply concerned with the world around him. His scholasticism ripened early into humanism. He is probably the first among non-­Marxist philosophers who mix philosophy with economics and stress repeatedly that there can be no God in conditions of penury and that there is no salvation without improvement in material conditions. Whatever the reign of philosophy in contemporary religion or the reign of religion in contemporary philosophy, Radhakrishnan has, while bringing the country’s rich heritage into relation with its poor undeveloped economy, sought to bring together contemporary Indian philosophy and contemporary Indian economics. He may be consi­dered to have given a philosophic foundation to Indian Socialism.

Radhakrishnan’s place in modern philosophy is like philo­sophy’s place in the modern world; Joad called it “Counter-attack from the East”. He grew in the atmosphere of a traditional Hindu home and of Christian mission schools where the unseen was a living reality. He was deeply immersed in the Bhagavadgita and the com­mentaries on the Brahma Sutras, in Plato and Plotinus, in Bradley and Bergson. Later he was a close friend for many years of Gandhi and Tagore. He does not reject science or evade it; he absorbs it. To a traveller in spirit like him, the universality of religions and the oneness of the world are living realities; eternal religion is not irration­al or unscientific, escapist or asocial. This philosophy has served him in the severest tests “in sickness and in health, in triumph and in defeat”. According to one student of philosophy, “Radhakrishnan is less ponderous than Royce, less meticulous than Bradley, less involved than Hegel; he has made idealism flow from a deep spring. By com­parison Eucken is provincial and Keyserling is trivial. Not since Fichte and Schelling has there been such a precipitate stream of inspiration.”

Radhakrishnan has contributed considerably to the Indian Renaissance and to modern humanism. He has been one of the chief architects of UNESCO and a pillar of the Indian Republic, and was a close and understanding friend of Nehru and his policies. To him, the political process is a part of the cosmic process. He has under­stood the significance of the social revolution; and he is one of its good-humoured mentors.

Even philosophers are not perfect. Such men would be monsters. Radhakrishnan may be right or wrong, but he has the courage to express himself freely. He has few doubts, and is quick in his decisions. The philosopher in action can aim only at perfectibi­lity, not perfection. Nobody has the sincerity of Radhakrishnan’s purpose, the freedom of his spirit, or the fineness of the instrument that he is. He is in tune with the revolutionary processes, a Savona­rola-like figure, who does not reject life, who has a memory for the humblest faces, who is capable of loud laughter, who is constantly cheerful yet contemplative, and who expresses eloquently the human spirit, is troubled at times but remains bare and serene at the summit like the mountain tops.