Dr. S. Radhakrishna - As a Man of Letters

DR. S. RADHAKRISHNAN-AS A MAN OF LETTERS

Every man is a philosopher of some kind. More so, every Lndian. as we know very well in our day-to-day social intercourse. But he is not necessarily a man of letters, not to the same extent. at any rate. But then, what is “Philosophy”? Derived from the Greek roots “philo” (love) and “sophy” (wisdom), it literally means “The Love of Wisdom”. It represents the quintessence of the wisdom of the ancients. It is reputed to deal in abstractions, as it has to grapple with the imponderables.

Literature, on the other hand, deals, in general, with life in the concrete, reflecting the world as we see it; rather as the poet or crea­tive writer sees it, with a keener sensitivity than his or her fellow-men and fellow-women. It lays greater store by beauty of form, aesthetic appeal and emotional effect.

There is no writer, or man of letters, worth mentioning, with­out a philosophy of his own. But every philosopher of note, irrespec­tive of his originality or profundity, is not necessarily a man of letters, if you will. There have, however, been thinkers and interpreters, who represented in themselves a happy blend of the philosopher and the artist – Plato. Sankara and in more recent times Bertrand Russell and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.

Radhakrishnan was among the most unusual teachers of Indian philosophy. He was a rare master of the word – the written word as well as the spoken word. He had a deep sensitivity to the beauty of form and a keen awareness of the contemporary world in all its complexity. In spreading the message of the East, with its creative intuition, to the West with its critical intelligence, his has been a signal triumph of communication, as well as of interpretation. He was a man of letters, in a very real sense, as Nehru the historian was though neither of them chose to treat of specific literary themes, nor set themselves up as professional men of letters.

To the exposition of the principles of Indian philosophy and the spirit of Hindu religion, he brought the latest idiom of modern (Western) thought and the scientific methods of analysis and synthesis. The metaphysics of Advaita Vedanta appear in altogether new light in the logical patterns of Hegelian Idealism. In the alchemy of Radhakrishnan’s expository art, religion becomes creative, philosophy turns dynamic, and, as Prof. Joad puts it so aptly, righteousness is rendered readable.

Readability is the unfailing characteristic of everything writ­ten or spoken by Dr. Radhakrishnan through the half-a-century and more of his working life. But he achieves this quality, not at the expense of depth of thought or accuracy of expression or the recourse to any popular devices of rhetoric, humour or oversimplification. He combined profundity of thought with lucidity of exposition and emphasis of statement with elegant expression. His spoken word has all the polished brilliance of a written piece chiselled in the quietness of a scholar’s study.

The following passage, taken from his address at the Seven­tieth Birthday Celebrations of Tagore in Calcutta, illustrates his style at its best – most vivid and eloquent:

“It is the peculiar glory of great literature that it lasts much longer than kings and dynasties. History hears witness to the power of the human spirit which endures longer than dynas­ties and creeds. The political world of Homer is dead, while his song is living today. The splendour of Rome has vanished, but the poetry of Virgil is yet vital. The dreams of Kalidasa still move us like the cry of a living voice, with their poignant sense of tears in human relations, while the Ujjiain, of which he was the ornament, has left her memory to his keeping. When our Lords and Leaders pass into oblivion. Tagore will continue to enchant us by his music and poetry. He has added to the sweetness of life, to the stature of civilisation.”
The sentences are so beautifully balanced and the contrast between the ephemeral nature of temporal power and the lasting appeal of literature provides the antithesis which could not have been worked out more effectively by a Gibbon or Macaulay. In short and clinching phrases, which sound like straight-from-the-shoulder shots, he exposes the hallowness of modern civilisation with an almost Shavian trenchancy:

“It has become more easy to get into a college and more diffi­cult to get educated. We are taught to read, but not trained to think.”

And again:

“The nations plead for peace and prepare for war.”

There is a favourite sentence of his, which was originally spoken by a Russian peasant, quoted by Maxim Gorky, which repre­sents a recurring manner of his style, as well as his trend of thought:

“We are taught to fly in the air like birds, and to swim in the water like fishes, but how to live on the earth, we do not know.”

It might not have been actually written by him, but sentences without number, equally vivid and effective are scattered all over his works. Here is a happy blending of the pithiness and brevity of Bacon with the antithetical vigour of Macaulay:

“.......The unity of civilisation is not to be sought in uniformity, but in harmony.....
......The faith of the future is in co-operation and not identi­fication, in accommodation to fellow-men and not imitation of them, in toleration and not absolutism. Progress happened in the sub-human world; it is willed in the human. Self-finding is the essence of all perfection. By seeing life steadily and whole, we find our place in it.”

Humour of the breezy, commonplace sort is, perhaps, cons­picuous by its absence in Dr. Radhakrishnan’s writing, which is ele­vated in its key, impassioned in its tone and impersonal in its app­roach. But, the style is always well-knit and is sometimes reminiscent of the verbal wit of Oscar Wilde, as in:

“The soul of all improvement is the improvement of the soul.” Sometimes, he can be paradoxical like G. K. Chesterton:

“Gentleness is not necessarily the quality of a gentleman. The real greatness of man is due to his failure, to his moving about in a world unrealised, with vague misgivings.”

A penchant for aphorism lends a new edge to the broadest of his generalisations, which never fail to be convincing:

“A reconciled foe becomes a good friend; a beaten antagonist is a sworn enemy.”
“Love is not a passing sentiment or a feeble emotion, but an attitude of life involving mind, feeling and will, strong, deep and enduring.”
“The work is becoming outwardly uniform. The outer uni­formity has not, however, resulted in an inner unity of mind and spirit.”
“It is good to be devoted to the moral code, but it is wicked to be fanatic about it.”
“Nationalism is not a ‘natural’ instinct. It is an acquired arti­ficial emotion.”

Scintillating epigrams roll down the mine of Dr. Radha­krishnan’s mind – epigrams which might well excite the envy of Philip Guedalloe, who knew the value of the wastepaper basket:

“The next stage of evolution is not in man’s physique, but in his psyche...”
“We have to fight for the new order first in our own souls, then in the world outside. Man the destroyer is man the buil­der too. This Kurukshetra may well become a Dharmakshetra. The end of our civilisation is not the end of history; it may well be the opening of a new age.”

One of the main advantages of Dr. Radhakrishnan’s over other philosophers and moral teachers of his time is that he was as cosmo­politan in his reading habits as he was broadminded in his spiritual outlook. If be followed the teachings of the Acharyas devoutly and delved into the great depths of the Gita, the Upanishads and the Dharmasastras (with the bewildering number of commentators) with great care, with equal diligence did he keep track of the latest works of significance of poetry and fiction, history and culture, besides reli­gion and theology, available in the English language; Not only the contemporary masterpieces and the ancient classics available in English, but the outstanding works in Sanskrit.

Radhakrishnan was a classicist with a deep-rooted belief in the universal appeal of literature just as he was a universalist in the interpretation of the philosophy of religion. He stressed this point in his general introduction to the critical edition of the works of Kalidasa, brought out by Sahitya Akademi.

In this, he observed:

“Great classics of literature spring from profound depths in human experience....The deeper one goes into one’s own experience facing destiny, fighting fate, or enjoying love, the more does one’s experience have in common with the experi­ences of others in other climes and ages. The most unique is the most universal. The dialogues of the Buddha or of Plato, the dramas of Sophocles, the plays of Shakespeare are both national and universal. The more profoundly they are rooted in historical traditions, the more uniquely do they know themselves and elicit powerful responses from others. There is a timeless and spaceless quality about great classics.”

From the manner in which his speeches and writings are liberally strewn with quotations from the Sanskrit classics, not all of them religious or philosophical, but poetic, it would not be difficult for a careful reader to gauge Radhakrishnan’s love of the Kavya literature. His special preference was for the Kavyas and Natakas of Kalidasa and those of Bhavabhuti, his Uttara Ramacharita in particular.

Small wonder then that he has the highest praise for the poetic genius of Kalidasa, though his understanding was not stereotyped, and appreciation uncritical, like that of some of the traditional, orien­tal Pandits. He recognizes in Kalidasa India’s archetypal national poet: Kalidasa is the great representative of India’s spirit, grace and genius. The Indian national consciousness is the base from which his works grow. Kalidasa has absorbed India’s cultural heritage, made it his own, enriched it, given it universal scope and significance. Its spiritual direction, its intellectual ampli­tude, its artistic expressions, its political forms and economic arrangements, all find utterance in fresh, vital, shining phrases. We find in his works at their best a simple dignity of language, a precision of phrase, a classical taste, a cultivated judgement, an intense poetic sensibility and a fusion of thought and feel­ing. In his dramas, we find pathos, power, beauty and great skill in the construction of plots and delineation of characters. He is at home in royal courts and on mountain tops, in happy homes and forest hermitages. He has a balanced outlook which enables him to deal sympathetically with men of high and low degree, fishermen, courtesans, servants. These great qualities make his works belong to the literature of the world....”

As a sensitive student of the cultural heritage of the East and the West, with a flair for reconciling the two, wherever possible, Radhakrishnan sees in Kalidasa a philosophy of harmony and integrity. And he says:

“For Kalidasa the path of wisdom lies in the harmonious pursuit of the different aims of life and the development of an integrated personality. He impresses on our mind these ideals by the magic of his poetry, the richness of his imagi­nation, his profound knowledge of human nature and his deli­cate description of its most tender emotions. We can apply to him the words of Miranda in The Tempest:

O Wonder.
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world.
That has such people in’t.”

Among India’s modern philosophers, he was the most politi­cal as also the most philosophical of her statesmen. He had a keen awareness of political and other trends of the contemporary world, which only served to invest his general observations with a new urgency, without restricting his vision or warping his judgement.

His insatiable curiosity about men and things was like that of a journalist, at his best. But the casual observer, could not, per­haps, suspect the insight of a poet and his love for beauty in this seasoned philosopher.

Who, but a poet, can claim his wealth of imagery, soaring into the heights of imagination?

“Any serious pursuit of ideas, any search after conviction, adventure after virtue, arises from resources whose name is religion. The search of the mind for beauty, goodness and truth is the search for God. The child nursing at the breast of its mother, the illiterate savage gazing at the numberless stars, the scientist in his laboratory studying life under a microscope, the poet meditating in solitude on the beauty and pathos of the world, the ordinary man standing reverently before a star-lit sky, the Himalayan heights or a quiet sea, or before the highest miracle of all, a human being who is both great and good, they all possess dimly the sense of the eternal, the feeling of the heaven.”

Dr. Radhakrishnan could grow lyrical, not only on lofty themes like the search for the Absolute, but on the more familiar, but no less human, subjects like love and marriage. The voices of Jayadeva, Keats and Tagore seem to merge in a pleasant harmony in words which reflect our most elemental yearnings:

“When the sky is overcast with clouds, the path of the future lies through a thick forest, and when we are utterly alone in darkness, without a single ray of light, when all around are difficulties, we place ourselves in the hands of a loving woman.”

Also, these observations, notable alike for their truth of nature, and beauty of expression:

What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is the delight of the senses, the fruitful contentment as well as the fatal passion of love.”
“It (marriage) is an adjustment between the biological purpose of nature and the sociological purposes of man.”
“...It can lead us to an early paradise, or in certain condi­tions, it may turn out to be an organised hell...”
“...The tempests of the heart are taken over into the calm of the soul. Love is not merely the flame meeting flame, but spirit calling to spirit...”

Not many today might be aware of the, fact that Radha­krishnan contributed an essay on “Indian Philosophy” to the Ency­clopaedia Britannica some half-a-century ago. It still remains a master­piece of the art of assimilation and condensation, interpretation and presentation. A literary craftsman could be seen to have been at work here, as elsewhere.

It is worth recalling that Radhakrishnan had a deep-rooted interest in literature from the early years of his adult life. To this was allied a sustained elegance of expression, which always went hand in hand with clarity of thought and lucidity of interpretation.

Even in his student days at the Madras Christian College, he gave enough evidence of these qualities. For the M.A. degree of the University of Madras, he wrote a thesis on the Ethics of the Vedanta, as was obligatory at that time. The main argument and conclusion of this thesis were in the form of a direct refutation of the Christian missionary position that Vedanta was devoid of ethics. His teacher, Professor A. G. Hogg (who shared allegiance to that position) com­mended the thesis with no reservation. Not only for the author’s capacity to rebut one argument and sustain another, but also for an extraordinary command of the English language. (Unfortunately, copies of this thesis are not easily available in any library in this country; this writer was, however, glad to learn from a knowledgeable friend that a copy of it is preserved in the British Library in London, previously known as the British Museum Library.)

One of Radhakrishnan’s earliest published works was Philoso­phy of Rabindranath Tagore (1918). Apart from projecting the image of Tagore as a philosopher more than the poet himself could imagine, it helped to start Radhakrishnan’s own brilliant career as a writer no less than as a philosopher. In this book, he was interested in picturing Tagore as a pure product of Indian culture, especially as envis­aged in the Upanishads. While its writing served to sharpen the author’s tools as a literary craftsman, its success encouraged him to dive deeper into the sources of Indian thought.

It is well known that many of Radhakrishnan’s established works are enjoyed by the general reader as models of composition as much as they are valued by the student of philosophy as examples of interpretation and insight. His address in London on Gautama the Buddha (1938), in the mastermind series, was hailed as the inter­action of one mastermind on another. Here again a rare felicity of expression (Curiosa felicitas) was the hallmark of this tour de force, which was delivered entirely from memory.

His literary skill, marked by the happy phrase and the apt expression, sometimes by an inspired utterance, is evident in some of the shorter works and collections of essays and addresses like Eastern Religions and Western Thought (1939), Freedom and Culture (1936), Religion and Society (1947), Kalki or the Future of Civilization (1929), The Spirit of Man (1936) more than in the voluminous magnum opus “Indian Philosophy”.

It is also true unfortunately (as even his most ardent admirers must admit) that the speeches and writings of Radhakrishnan, after Independence, especially after his choice for high offices of State (Ambassador, Vice-President and President) are less notable for their style or substance than those in the earlier period. This might be primarily because of an inevitable dilution of content and quality, as a result of repetition and elaboration, because of the excessive demand for performance and the growing pressure on time, and secondarily because of a possible falling off in his powers in his Sixties and Seventies.

If criticism, however, is to be made, Radhakrishnan’s style is open to the same criticism as that of Gibbon and Macaulay – an excess of symmetry, based on balance and antithesis, and a too fre­quent tendency to make use of quotable quotes from far and near. An incredible photographic memory, in his case as that of Macaulay, gives the impression of having adversely affected spontaneity and sensitivity.

Apart from the primacy of spiritual values for the salvation of an unquiet world and the need for a religious basis for the settle­ment of political and economic problems, there are one or two other things that a reader of Dr. Radhakrishnan’s works cannot help learn­ing, probably for the first time in his uncommercial ramblings. One is that philosophy is not a remote, mysterious, isolated subject to be cultivated in the retreat of a recluse. The other is that philosophy need not be a recondite preoccupation with metaphysical obscurities and, therefore, dull and dry to the general reader. It can, in fact, be vigorous like the Prefaces of Shaw, stimulating like the novels of Aldous Huxley, provocative like the science fiction of C. P. Snow, and noble like the meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

It was not merely the inescapable compulsions of his diplo­matic or political office that were responsible for Radhakrishnan’s comprehensive interest in all the contemporary problems of the world – political, social and cultural, no less than philosophical. The position, in fact, was the other way about. It was his lively interest in world affairs, without his being a political activist, that drew him to the centre of public life, thanks to the initiative of a kindred spirit in the person of Jawaharlal Nehru. He was no narrow nationalist; and did not hesitate to describe nationalism as “a collec­tive form of selfishness”. “We have to lift the world off its hinges and transform the national man into a universal” he would say. “Either we live together or die together. It is either one society or no society”, he affirmed, in outlining the shape of the Emerging World Society.

If Shelley described poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world, Radhakrishnan might have looked upon philosophers as the acknowledged conscience-keepers of the world. He himself could be seen to be “an enlightened humanist”, (more than an insu­lated academic philosopher) for whom nothing human was alien. He not only believed in the Platonic ideal of philosophers becoming kings and kings becoming philosophers, but was able to exemplify it in his own life. His political philosophy was described by Professor Humayun Kabir as “Enlightened Humanism”.

In our own day, there is hardly another savant dead or alive, who wore his learning so lightly and who adorned his originality with such incisive wit and felicity of expression as Dr. Radhakrishnan. In the West, one could think of a few like Russell in philosophy and Trevelyan in history. He was that rare bird among philosophers, who exemplified Montaigne’s dictum: “The style is the man”. Here was a man whose best works could be read by the educated layman for his pleasure, as by the academic specialist for his profit. I, for one, can’t say the same thing of any practising Indian philosopher in our midst.