Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan – The Man and his

Dr. SARVEPALLI RADHAKRISHNAN
The Man and his Evolution

I

IT IS ON THE EVIDENCE furnished by history, in no niggardly measure or feeble tenor, that I salute Radhakrishnan as one of the most unusual men of his time, if not of all time. Today, he is a Titan-perhaps even on a global scale-but his rise to the present patriarchal position is replete with revelations that both illustrate and establish the uniqueness about him.

There was no paucity of giants when he was yet to build himself up. Cast in different moulds but all heroic, each in his way, war-lords like the Kaiser earlier and Hitler later, ideologues like Lenin and Stalin, liberators of the stature of Churchill and Roosevelt, and luminaries in the respective realm’s of science and literature, Einstein and Shaw, were names reverberating across the vast spaces of the earth, when Radhakrishnan was quietly wrestling, alike with the problems of universities and the secrets of the universe. In a country contemporaneously swayed by the spiritual splendour of Sri Aurobindo, the intellectual effulgence of Rabindranath Tagore, the moral grandeur of Mahatma Gandhi and the political dynamism of Jawaharlal Nehru, we find Radha­krishnan unobtrusively but decisively emerging as a cultural ambas­sador, in his own right, and in a stride as authentic as it is synthetic. If, by the time of the Armistice, at the end of the First World War, he distinguished himself as the author of the philosophy of Tagore, by the time the Second War ended, he shattered the acade­mic calm of the universities in India as well as abroad, by his exposition of Gandhism as the only answer to human hatred and violence, without prejudice to his purely individual contribution to contemporary thought in philosophy and religion.

His arrival on the diplomatic scene in Free India was a turning ­point both in his own life and in the history of the country, for it was only when the Arctic snow visibly thawed under his feet, that he found his tryst with destiny. His return to India as Vice-President-designate was truly suggestive of a springtide. The world had not to wait long, for the happy consummation of the hoary Platonic conception of philosophers being crowned kings. The rise of a philosopher with a religious ground, as the Head of a Secular State, handsomely illustrates how rarely in a long, long way across the ages, things “by season, seasoned are to their right praise and true perfection.” And while philosophy-only perhaps incidentally–is, in Browning’s memorable phrase, “pedestalled in triumph”, we find the man, clad in its armour and enthroned without the customary trappings, waving to us from the pinnacle, with an almost unknown friendliness, benevolence and compassion.

One could see that the Indian universities could not keep him within their confines for long, nor could one miss in him, even in those now far-on days, the spark that ignited the celestial fire. His first leap was from Madras to Mysore, but the migration from one university in the South to another, was to him something like the Vicar’s from the blue bed to the brown. It was the call from Cal­cutta in 1921–the great Asutosh Mookerjee’s–that he (Radha­krishnan) should join the University as King George V Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy–that tended to wake him up from any lingering doubts about his future eminence–I say, lingering, as he did seem to linger on assuring himself that he was the man for the place. The idea of succeeding a giant like Brajendra Nath Seal and too, while he was but thirty, was possibly holding him . I recall what the dazzling C. R. Reddy, one of Radhakrishnan’s earliest and greatest admirers and highly valued friends, told me:

“I had literally to bundle him out of Mysore”. It was indeed an export that meant for the South “more than elephants laden with gold, and camels bearing precious stones and rare spices”, could ever fetch!
His twenty-year association with Calcutta was perhaps the most eventful period in his life, first in bringing him on the all­ India stage and then gradually projecting him on the international screen, whether as a philosopher or a cultural ambassador, or as a writer or a speaker. When he took up the Vice-Chancellorship of the Andhra University and later of the Banaras Hindu University, he was given all the facilities by the Calcutta University while for three years in succession, from 1938 to 1941, he could get leave in Calcutta so that he might hold, at Oxford, the Spalding Chair of Eastern Religion and Ethics. He felt he had given the best part of his life to the University of Calcutta and gave public expression to his feeling more than once while, on their part, the Calcutta University and the Bengalis as a people, have taken him into their bosom with a certain warmth.

Between the exit from Calcutta in 1941 and the assignment on the diplomatic front that he took up in Free India, Radha­krishnan’s great work was confined to his Vice-Chancellorship of the Banaras Hindu University and Chairmanship of the Education Commission, both in the cause of the re-orientation of Indian education. But as always, of considerable significance were his exhortations to the youth and the nation. Few in our country had delivered more convocation addresses or more stirring ones. A voice so thrilling never was heard, from the ranks of the country’s academicians. It was not merely the form but the content of his addresses that came as a revelation as much to Indian politicians unaccustomed to political fervour on academic platforms as to British Chancellors only accustomed to listen to pious sermons. I remember how, on hearing Radhakrishnan as Vice-Chancellor of the Andhra University, my old Liberal Chief. C. Y. Chintamani was lost, both in admiration and despair, firmly, if a little bluntly, said: Let me at once tell you that I have at last come across an Indian who can beat Srinivasa Sastri in his use of the English language. As for his ideas, I would unhesitatingly describe Radhakrishnan an academic extremist.

Not many know that, long before it became a practice to talk in terms of a new social order, Radhakrishnan raised the cry that “a new sense of social wholeness alone can stem the rot in our present condition” and that “no State is stable unless it procures for all the members the essentials of a good life.” Some may still recall that in 1934, Malcolm Hailey, Chancellor of the Allahabad University (by virtue of his office as Governor of U.P.) was red with rage, as Radhakrishnan dared to euologise the Mahatma in terms of finality: Gandhi’s appeal will be written not only by the side of the utterances of the great national leaders like Pericles and Cicero, or Washington and Lincoln, but also of the great religious reformers, as that of one of the immortal voices of the human race in all that relates to the highest effort of men and nations.

It was during the Second War that, in his address to the Agra University Convocation, he declared:

Are we to stand up for Britain simply because we must avoid the worse alternative of Nazi despotism? Before it is too late, I hope. Britain will establish her good faith at the bar of history, by implementing her many pledges and declaring that India, not at some undated future but immediately after the war, be a free and equal country in the commonwealth of nations.

And one heard the voice of a prophet of a new world order in his appeal to the alumni of his own University at Banaras:

Wherever men lave reason, shun darkness, turn over towards light, praise virtue, despise meanness, hate vulgarity, kindle sheer beauty, wherever minds are sensitive, hearts generous, spirits free, there is your country. Let us adapt that loyalty to humanity instead of a sectional devotian to one part of the human race.

It is of the utmost significance that Radhakrishnan, for all his emphasis on the spiritual side of life and moral values, has not only not neglected, but shown supreme concern for, a new social order which alone could ensure material contentment and healthy all-round development. Let us hear his words at the Asian Relations Conference in 1946:

Let me tell you that there is no such thing as a spirit working in a vacuum and it is impossible for us too have any kind of spiritual life or development where our bodily health is so weak and when society is so unhealthy. Unless you build up a great social world, where all ordinary men and women irrespective of their status and economic posi­tion are given the fundamental rights which are open to all human beings, it will be impossible for us to have any kind of spiritual development.

It was not so much because of his great standing as an edu­cationist or unexcelled power of eloquence but because of his advanced thinking and evangelical zeal for a new world order and his evolution as cultural ambassador, in the line of Vivekanada and Tagore, that, on the attainment of Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru happened to fix his eye on him, first as the man who alone could possibly make Stalin smile and then as the one man who could well take up the Vice-Presidency and, in God’s good time, fill the enlarged stage, to the manner born.

Towards the close of the first half-century (the twentieth) and at the beginning of the second half, it was given to Radhakrishnan to be moving between the Oxford University as a Professor and the Chancellery in Moscow as the Indian Ambassador, without any strain at either end. It must be set down as one of the miracles in modern diplomacy that one who never concealed his horror of a godless system, won the confidence and respect of the Soviet. It had not taken him long to be on friendly terms with Stalin whom he used to address as ‘Marshal’ while Stalin was known to call him ‘Professor’, not contemptuously as Bismarck used to refer to Gladstone, but with due deference to his learning and wisdom. From my personal talks with Radhakrishnan, I could know that he found himself on the right side of Stalin, by just being frank and treating him as a man, not as a monster. It was just like Radhakrishnan to have told Stalin that, in his view, Soviet Russia was two States–a Police State and a Welfare State, and that his country (India) would not like to have anything of the former but everything of the latter. It was a joy to Radhakrishnan to have had it from Stalin that they (the Russians) were, what they were, because of what they had to go through, and that India was under no obligation to copy from Russia anything that did not suit her. And nothing made him happier than that on one occasion when he found the Marshal rather pale, he could ask him to take care of himself, just pat him as a fellow-human being, and find him visibly moved. The typical Radhakrishnan way did the trick. It was his great triumph that he pleased Com­munists all over, without ever placating Communism!

Naturally none was happier than Prime Minister Nehru who had earlier been baffled by the Soviet neglect of, or indifference to, the Indian Embassy at Moscow. His own appreciation of Radha­krishnan’s record and role abroad found concrete expression. When early in 1952, Maulana Azad–always on intimate terms with Jawaharlal Nehru–gently raised question of Vice-Presidentship of the new Republic and suggested the name an ex-President of the Congress, he was as gently told by the Prime Minister that “I have already offered it to Radhakrishnan and he has accepted my invi­tation.” Not even the ex-President of the Congress whom the Maulana suggested could question the wisdom of the Prime Minister’s choice. Indeed (let me say this in fairness to him) he joined the rest with alacrity in hailing the appointment. A politically astute man, he said to me: He will make an ideal Vice-President indeed, we have in him a future President.

The first impact of the Vice-President was felt only when he took the chair to conduct the deliberations of Rajya Sabha. The dignity, ease and authority with which he handled the House were a revelation to those who were not familiar with his way and manner when, as Vice-Chancellor, he used to command “the applause of listening senates.” Rajya Sabha meant Radhakrishnan, and it was because of him that the House vied with the other in commanding wide attention.

It was a tribute to his personality that he was bigger than his office, that he made it really big and that it was because of him, it came to acquire a new importance. It was to him that the Prime Minister invariably turned, for carrying to the different parts of the globe the message of India, as a Secular State with Socialist goals, and as a country pledged to Peace, on the basis of non-alignment.

In a four-week tour of the United States, Radhakrishnan spoke on a variety of subjects, ranging from global democracy to the future of modern civilisation and exhorted the American nation, particularly the youth, to produce the creative minority which will reveal to the American conscience the ideals which have animated this great people from the time they asserted their independence down to today.

He regretted that “there are times when America’s voice is not heard in clear tones” and wanted the universities to do their duty by standing as sentinels of Democracy, with the full knowledge that Democracy means the reconciliation of difference not the obliteration of differences.

He also defined Democracy as “spiritual good manners.” He made no secret of his apprehension that of the people who professed to believe in Providence denied God in practical life and he rebuked them for the contradictions in life so manifest in the ways of “theoretical believers and practical atheists.” The keynote of his utterance was wakefulness to the challenge of stark, if ugly, realities. Warming up to his theme in a broadcast from Toronto (where he hopped to, from Washington) he raised his voice on behalf of the Asian and African nations struggling to emancipate themselves from bondage–political, economic and racial–and said:

There is a world revolution in progress, and it is utterly independent of Communism. The hungry, diseased, des­pised inhabitants who form the bulk of the non-Com­munist world demand economic progress and development. If we hesitate to attack and answer these problems, others will exploit our inertia and inefficiency. What we want today is not the American way or the Russian way but the human way.

This is the voice of a man whose place is with the great political philosophers in history who insisted on applying “the test of eternal principle” to the momentary task or the immediate problem. There can be no question of misunderstanding–or of not understanding–a man with a message: The world needs a soul: it may not be an identity of outlook but it must be a unity of spiritual aspirations.

Everyone who knew that, for all his regard for Rajendra Prasad as an unsullied patriot and estimable man, Jawaharlal Nehru had not thought of him but of Rajagopalachari for President­ship, also knew that in 1957 he was definitely thinking in terms of Rajendra Prasad’s retirement and Radhakrishnan’s succession. Yet current Congress thinking asserted itself in the manifestation of Rajendra Prasad’s second-term hegemony, in a way, to the disappointment of both Jawaharlal Nehru and Radhakrishnan.

The story has not so far been told at length by any, of those exciting days when till the last minute, Radhakrishnan was hoping to be sponsored as President, with Rajkumari Amrit Kaur as his own successor in Vice-President’s gaddi. It was doubtless a great strain to Radhakrishnan to have been kept in suspense, and a greater strain it was to have been subsequently made to feel, much like Curzon in 1923, that be was dodged of his destiny. The dif­ference was that while in such poignant moments, Curzon easily broke down at the end and literally wept, Radhakrishnan took it all, with an imperturbable equanimity and in an undisturbed com­posure, worthy of a philosopher’s reconcilement to the ways of the world.

The aftermath was not without tensions and trials. Not accustomed to the rough-tumble of active politics, unreconciled to the manoeuvres and machinations of seasoned politicians, and disinclined to put up with the drudgery of a second term while extended Vice-Presidentship could hardly add a cubit to his stature. Radhakrishnan was in no mood to continue. His mind, a little tired of serious diversions from cloistered seclusion, turned to the academic pastures and Parnassian springs. He resisted a second term with all his might and despite untold pressure. Dhebar, Pant, Azad, Rajendra Prasad and Jawaharlal Nehru–all of them indi­vidually failed to carry conviction to him and persuade him to relax. It seemed that he was packing up.

Luckily, Jawaharlal Nehru was not the man to let him go. He knew that he would miss the presence of the one man who not only talked to him always without inhibitions but gave him wise and disinterested counsel and who alone among the higher hierarchy, could keep the image of India abroad, untarnished. From oral talks it came to commitments on paper –and a stage arrived when Jawaharlal Nehru and Radhakrishnan set their stenographers aside and one wrote to the other in one’s own hand–and too, in the “yours affectionately”–spirit. To both, there was no relief yet. It was the feminine touch that brought it at last. It was when Radhakrishnan received a touching letter from Indira Gandhi that her father was visibly upset and that Delhi without him (Radha­krishnan) would be “unthinkable” that Radhakrishnan felt moved to the core of his being, sat up in a prayerful mood and at once wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru that he decided to place himself in his (Jawaharlal Nehru’s) hands. The tremors having all gone, everyone found the earth solid again.

As President he is, by virtue of what he is, the only one of his kind in the world-setting, for as the late K. M. Panikkar epigramatically put it, Radhakrishnan is, apart from being Head of the State, Guru of the Nation, Here is a President who, with unwearying solicitude and unfailing concern for the welfare of the people not only advises the Government but also admonishes it when he feels he must. He has never ceased to think of the ills of the world and of his major work in life, for everything, not the Presidentship of India excluded, comes to him, next to the establish­ment of the greatest religions, the Religion of Spirit.

To what extent, or in what measure, Indian Presidentship can be effective in the creation of a new world order, depends perhaps less on the man who wears the Presidential mantle than on those who having found the man, are disposed or not, to profit by their own choice.

India, now so lamentably dwarfed, can ask for no greater benediction than for his pre-eminent primacy in the scheme of things.

II

Nothing stands–or can ever stand–in the way of one, born to achieve things, however difficult or seemingly impossible. Of this dictum, Radhakrishnan is a shining, indeed outstanding, example. “Do you know where your greatness lies in? – I asked him, on his efflorescence into President and, without waiting for an answer to the question which naturally amused him, I said:

Here it is: you came from the South which is politically non-strategic; you are a Brahmin when to have been born as one is to suffer from a grave handicap in the peculiar Indian climate; as an academician you have been far removed from, or far too remote to, the seats of power; you were not in active politics, to have found yourself behind prison bars to your advantage; you have never sported a Gandhi cap; you wear no khaddar and, above all this your speak no Hindi Q and you have arrived where the gates of the Rashtrapati Bhavan are flung open to you. Is this not something undreamt of?

There was something more than a smile playing on his lips; he heartily laughed. Well, the fact is that Radhakrishnan rose to be President, by sheer gravitation.

Radhakrishnan’s birth in the hamlet of Tiruttani, in the religiously sensitive belt of Tirupati-Tirumalai, had a profound in­fluence on him from childhood. In his early years he was not above want but the home was not wanting either in piety or wit. He had to look after himself since he was cut off from his parents at nine. Though he was precocious as a pupil, he was rather indifferent to studies, his mind having begun to be agitated by the far more serious problems of life, into which he was to probe later.

Nothing helped to stir his mind more than his early education in Christian institutions, for it was then and there that, because of his sharp reaction to the subtle, it deliberate, attacks on Hinduism,he assiduously laid the foundations of “the counter-attack from the East” which he was later to lead, with astonishing success. By the time he took his Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy, he acquired all the confidence that he needed to influence his generation. How revealing it was that while undergoing training as a teacher, it was his proud privilege to have been invited by his Principal–it was Hensman, I think–to handle the class (to which he himself belonged) in Psychology! Such academic sway continued to be his, till other realms beckoned to him as smilingly, and with a ready welcome awaiting him.

Twenty years of his allegiance to Calcutta against the above ground, tended to widen the basis, and enliven the spirit, of his cultural synthesis. There are things more enduring than dhoti on the body and rice in the gullet, that unite the Andhra and the Bengali-the influence of Brahmo Samaj, the cult of Swadeshi, the spirit of renaissance in art and letters. It is comforting to think that Radhakrishnan has helped his Andhra to repay, in no small measure, its debt to Bengal–the Bengal of Ram Mohun Roy and Keshab Chunder Sen, of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, of Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore,

Yet, it was Oxford that gave him his first great chance in life to command the world’s attention. One of the two Honorary Fellows of the Oxford University, among Indians, it was there that, by his intimate association with it and his incandescent ex­position of Hindu Philosophy and Eastern Religions, he blazed a trail of his own, so much so that to him at any rate Oxford was emphatically not “the home of lost causes.”

Whether it is in regard to outlook on life or in the matter of emphasising its essential values in a declining moral order, nobody has so decisively been the very embodiment of Hindu Dharma as Radhakrishnan. It is also characteristic of him to have brought to his utterances the breath of Sanskrit and invested them with its classical dignity and authority.

The world is quite familiar with the public image of President Radhakrishnan as an Acharya of patriarchal eminence and universal veneration. Yet far more lovable is the man at the fireside, on whom sits so lightly all his greatness and to whom nothing is more repugnant than a sense of importance. By his side all class distinc­tions disappear; indeed, in his presence there is no room for ‘gradations’ and ‘degradations’. All are equal: it is a true Socialist society in a spiritual sense. Rarely do we come across another who can so readily put a visitor at ease, whether he is a dignitary or one from the proletariat.

He finds time in the course of the day, to go through a large number of newspapers and periodicals with an alert mind, so much so that nothing of any importance escapes his attention. His voracious reading is hardly confined to journals. Amidst the day’s manifold engagements and pressing pre-occupations, he finds time to look into the latest books.

And it is amidst the unavoidable interviews, or despite them, that Radhakrishnan finds time, not only to dispose of such official papers as call for his attention but also his personal correspondence which is by no means slender or negligible. Scores of letters from men of different ranks in life he clears each day, dictating replies, however short, out of the humane consideration that even a mere acknowledgment from him will mean some relief to the recipient. God knows how many inquiries flow from the letters he is flooded with, each passing day, for such is his large-heartedness that no person is too humble, or no matter too trivial, for his kind attention.

Vastly receptive indeed is the mind of the man who has perforce in the course of a single day to talk about myriad things, from the tremendous to the trivial and from the grave to the gay. Both a good listener and a charming conversationalist, he is good company for those who would like to do the talking as well as for those who love to hear good talk. For, nothing is more striking about Radhakrishnan than that he, whether in conversation or speech, talks often with a deep understanding, sometimes in noble indignation, and always with clarity.

It would be too much to claim that Radhakrishnan has always been able to stand the test of his own pontifical wrath and moral chastisement. Possibly there were occasions, however few, when he softened on being confronted with cases of deviation from the code at levels higher up or in quarters nearer home. This is certainly something short of perfection, but we can all be sure that Radha­krishnan is the type of man who, by paying the penalty with his tears for the lapses of those whom he is sometimes obliged to condone, certainly creates a moral climate wholly uncongenial to the growth of evil. May be that his is more the Satyagrahic than magisterial approach to wrongdoers. By nature, he is forgiving while forgiveness has its limitations. “Why does so and do like that?”, is his way of expressing displeasure mingled with surprise.

It was not without sweat and toil, or without effort and disci­pline, that he had risen to great heights. He had his trials in life, and some very severe ones too; he had to reckon with men whose pleasure lay, at one stage, in obstructing his path and impeding his march; and with situations which chilled his spirits. But never did he allow his sense of dignity to suffer or his sense of self-reliance to falter.

He has achieved whatever he has–from giving status to Hin­duism in the world to annexing the highly coveted Order of Merit (which is neither a title nor a decoration but a mark of the highest distinction within the gift of the British throne) –with a quiet strength and he unceasingly strives to bring the world nearer, which is his life’s ambition, As said of a great 18th century man of letters, “no one among his contemporaries gathered so large a store from the records of the past; no one toiled with such steadfastness to enrich his age,” Radhakrishnan is fully conscious his eminence, but never do we find him flaunting it in our face, with a view to overpowering us.

It is but given only to the world’s elect to endure adversity without bitterness and meet triumph without intoxication. I have seen Radhakrishnan in moments of depression but never found him morbid: I have also seen him in moments of elation but never found him excited. His is a face hardly ever furrowed by frowns Anger, rancour and pettiness are foreign to his nature. One never misses in him the kindly smile, the soothing word, and the healing touch. He is both a charmer and a healer, for perennial in him are the springs of benevolence. I have known other great men with equal intimacy and have received their affection in abundance but I can think of no one who could approach Radhakrishnan in the two sovereign qualities–which single him out from all the rest­–serenity and sweetness.

As my thoughts reminded turn to Radhakrishnan, I am irresistibly reminded of Whittier’s beautiful lines which, are so eloquently suggestive of the Man:

An inborn grace that nothing lacked
Of culture or appliance–  
The warmth of genial courtesy
The calm of self-reliance.

September 1966