Ripeness is All

N. Raghunathan, whose memorywe cherish and to whom we pay our homage on the occasion of the centen­ary of his birth, belonged to the intel­lectual and spiritual aristocracy of the race. Steeped in the Indian scriptures and the classics of the East and the West, he disciplined himself to write precisely and purposefully. In examin­ing “current ideas and development” in the light of the basic values of Indian culture, he brought to bear on his task not only vast learning but a fine sensibility, the “Vichara” of a philospher as well as “Sahridayatva” of a connoisseur. Reserving for his special attention and admiration the mystics of the world, he held up for our emulation the lives of the saints and sages of all times and climes and himself led a life of simplicity and austerity, guarding all the while his in­tegrity like a precious jewel. Scholar he was, a ripe and good one, no doubt, but he was much more, a pilgrim set on the path leading to the goal that is Freedom. He carried the staff of Dharma all through his journey and never for once did he lose sight of the guiding star of Truth. Of such a one like him it could be said: He lived not in vain. He set an example, both by his Spartan life and the high quality of his writings, of perpetual striving stretch­ing its arms towards perfection, moral, mental and spiritual.

Born on the 22nd of December, 1893, of G. Narayanaswamy Iyer and Gouriammal, in the village of Perun­thottam of Thanjavur District of Tamil Nadu, Raghunathan had his early school education at Vishnupuram and Kumbakonam. His grandfather seems to have taken more than ordinary interest in the upbringing of what one can now think of as a precocious child. Hoisting his three-year-old grandson on his shoulders, at four-thirty sharp, the old man everyday walked briskly to the river for the morning bath. And the half-sleepy and protesting boy was not allowed to enjoy the ride and slip into somnolence; he was taught to recite the two hundred verses of Niti Sastra and also learn the names of stars and miscellaneous lore on the borderland between astronomy and astrology. Recalling this childhood ex­perience of instruction in ‘Niti Sastra’. Raghunathan wrote half a century later: “Acorss a gulf of half a century much of it still sticks in the memory, while most of what I have read since has mercifully dropped into oblivion. I little understand the purport of the slokas when I learnt them by rote. But the delighted recognition with which I welcome them when they flash upon the memory on appropriate occasions is a tribute to the profound intuition of the older pedagorg which rightly held that in dealing with the young, sound is more important than sense. The ‘Niti Sastra’ is not only sound ethics but good poetry”.

An uncle, as unfeeling as the old man, took charge of the nephew’s English education. He forced the young one to study Johnson, the Lord Chesterfield and Carlyle. The headmaster of the school in which Raghunathan studied - was it the “famous” Appu Sastriar of the Native High School, Kumbakonam? - pre­scribed, for his part, doses of Cobbet and Goldsmith.

After a somewhat undistin­guished early collegiate education at Kumbakonam, Raghunathan moved to Madras City with a “consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless passion to advance in it”. Never a lover of sports (though he talks of the riotous football matches at Kumbakonam) Raghunathan plunged deeper into the study of books, presumably on Eng­lish literature as he was an English Litt. Honours student, with the only grouse against the hostel authority that it let the library, open “too late in the morning” and close “too early at night”. Such studiousness had its reward - he took a first class in the final examination.

It was also as a student in Madras that Raghunathan found him­self in print for the first time. He made a survey of periodical literature in an article that appeared in Malabari’s “East and West” (1915 or 16). He had also the satisfaction of the news being trumpeted by his life-long friend and the pioneer of the Indo-Anglian novel, K.S. Venkataramani. Venkataramani went about telling everybody, “Here is a new star on the horizon and that the brightest of them all.”

The “Star” fell over Fort St. George and its light lay hidden from view for a few years. And then some­thing unusual happened, unusual as the Southerner would view it in those far-off days when a job with the Sarkar was the alpha and omega of life. The star rose and flew to the sky and remained there a luminous one. It was the journalistic sky that Raghunathan blazoned. He joined the “Daily Express” of Madras in 1921 and moved on the “The Hindu” in 1926. He formally retired from “The Hindu.” For about three decades, Raghunathan blazed a new trail in journalism.

Writes Shri Rangaswami Para­thasarathy in A hundred years of “The Hindu” (1978): “For over 20 years Raghunatha Aiyer was a by word in Indian journalism for his mastery of the pen, of constitutional law. Raghunathan qualified himself for the bar after taking his Honours Degree and his fearless advocacy of the cause of freedom. His written word travelled far beyond the confines of the country to extort admiration and respect for his sharp intellect and virile pen...He had a prodigious memory and could quote and cite arguments from jour­nals and books to buttress his case with an effortless ease and mastery which should always remain a mar­vel. He was equally brilliant in light, short humorous pieces which enlivened the editorial page on most days of the week. When he wrote about saints and music composers and about Gandhiji, when he was in the jaws of death while on a fast and when he was assassinated, his eloquence, the sheer beauty of his prose and the flights of his racy style into a pictur­esque world of love and compassion and goodness, were a feast. (to the intellect and soul). For a man of Raghunathan’s literary eminent it was no wonder that the literary supplement which he created and nur­tured for over 25 years, achieved a national international reputation.”

By one of those fortunate acci­dents of history, Raghunathan started writing a causerie for a weekly not connected with “The Hindu” from February 16, 1946. For thirteen long years, Raghunathan wrote week after week (with an interruption of only six weeks) in “Swathantra” and its successor “Swarajya” (both now defunct Madras weeklies edited by that formidable journalist Khasa Subba Rao) in a style that was delib­erately adopted by him but was char­acteristically his own with no prece­dents and later imitations. The style indeed was the man. It was neither “light and easy” like Addison’s not “majestic and sonorous” like Johnson’s, the two writers with whom he was compared by competent critics. His prose rendered “the murmur of the spirit as purely and faithfully it represents the panoply in which it is set”. When read aloud one caught the continuous echo of a living voice with its individual timbre, strength and virginal integrity.

If one detected the euphony of Sanskrit in his writing, one also found oneself in the delightful company of the choice and master spirits of all ages. One rubbed shoulders with Manu and yajnavalka, Sankara and Socrates, Valmiki, Vyasa, Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti. Quintilian and Polonius, Homer, Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Keats, Shelly and Wordsworth, Burke, Burton, Browne and Berkley – in fact one got acquainted with range of world’s literature and learnt of the best that was known and thought. Each Sotto Voce piece was a largesse of the spirit and not a “shower of isolated thoughts and images”. It had a unity of purpose being integral at the core and drawing its sustenance from a culture that had its source in Satya. Yajna and Tapas.

A perceptive critic wrote about the Sotto Voce in the fifties “Within the cribbing limits of a column or a paragraph, Raghunathan discovers an amplitude of amazing extent. Cradled in Sanskrit and steeped in English literature, he is one of a minority of the elect who make the best of both the worlds – East and West, past and present. Here and Hereafter! He makes the timeless topical, and eluci­dates the enduring in the ephemeral. He can be dignified without posing, and pleasant without being trivial. He has a power of comprehension, an unforced urbanity and an ironic hu­mour which are all vintage virtues. He fits ancient saws to modern instances with a quiet appropriateness which grows on reflection. The Advaitic jargon comes easy enough to every plau­sible actor in this land of immemorial impositions. But he combines the in­tegrity of a practising Vedantin with the scholar’s unwearied pursuit of ex­cellence. How quiet are his paradoxes, and what a tact of style he has impalpable yet unmistakable - the lingering sweetness of old perfume...The curse of his tribe - they are but a handful among us - is that they are martyrs to artistic continence. Nothing but the very best would con­tent them; and diffident of achieving it, they dwell with it platonically in the companionable solitude of their soul”.

Raghunathan’s style indeed, as Gibbon put it, is “the image of char­acter” the “seela” that is held invalu­able in Indian culture. When Prahalda made a gift of his “Seela” to Indra in the guise of a Brahmin, All other val­ues came out of his body reducing the noble Asura to nothingness. The val­ues that followed “Seela” were: Dharma, Satya, Vritta, Bala and Shree. Dhritarashtra told Duryodhana that what the latter lacked was “Seela” which Yudhishtira had and thereby he attracted to his court all wise men.

Ranganathan sought to evoke a particular “rasa” in each piece and the choice of his subjects had an ele­ment of surprise of novelty. But there was no mistaking the object of his comment - to give short shift to at­tempts at abridging freedom, poke fun at lighthearted pronouncements of men in power or in the limelight, to warn against heedless meddling by au­thority with established institutions, customs and traditions and invariably to stress the “Dharmic” basis of society.

Raghunathan left no one in doubt that he was a traditionalist and an individualist. He set much store by the Vedic lore and the puranic tales and lost no opportunity to proclaim the values they embodied. He was prophetic when in the fifties and the sixties, he denounced the authoritar­ian trends in Indian polity and the Indian brand of socialism. He believed in a pluralistic society and argued for professionals – teachers, lawyers, doc­tors and journalists. It is from the point of view of his basic faith in age ­old values, and political convictions based on reason and logic that his criticism of the Communal G.O., the Tanjore Pannayal Ordinance, the abortive Elementary      Education scheme (all of the Madras Govern­ment); the Hindu Code, the Constitu­tion as well as the several Amend­ments to it, nationalisation of insur­ance (in the Fifties), Central plan­ning, the handling of the Kashmir problem, attitude to Chinese aggres­sion in Tibet, the language issue, secu­larism, among other things, have to be viewed. His conservatism was healthy creative and constructive deriving its strength from a life-long study and reflection of the thinkers of all ages. One found an echo in his writings Will Durant’s conclusion in his 10-volume “The story of Civilization”.

“No single man, however bril­liant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of under­standing as to safely judge and di­smiss the customs and institutions of society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history”.

Politics and politicians occupied but a small part of Raghunathan’s wide canvas. He never attempted the familiar journalistics profile of anyone in authority or in the limelight: he had no political heroes. The only lengthy account of the life and work of anyone he wrote, on request, related to the Rt. Hon’ble V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, who hailed from his own district of Thanjavur and who shared his passion for knowledge and precision in the use of the English language. But the warts in the portrait were prominent enough for all to see.

Among men of achievement in the world of human endeavour, Raghunathan reserved his admiration for Dr. C.V. Raman whom he de­scribed as the “Tapasvi orscience”. He did not, however, hesitate, to pick up the guantlet when Dr. Raman let himself go on the anatomy of the human tongue. Raghunathan rose to the defence of the “Chilli” in a matter that would have made even Dr. Raman beat a hasty retreat. (See “Symphony of the Palate” in this volume) Raghunathan chose for his charming cameos saints and scholars, writers, musicians and obscure but gifted men who lived quiet but dignified lives.

It was not without reason that K.S. Venkataramani dedicated his booklet “The Nature of Creative Art” (1950) to “Raghunathan the Ra­sikan”. The Rasikan, by definition, is one who gets at the essence of things, artistic and literary, and exults in the joy of his discovery. Like the bee that sucks honey from flowers of a varied hue, he transforms it into the concentrate of much greater sweetness and leaves it to others to savour it. The Rasikan too imparts something of his own joy to others. Raghunathan did precisely the same in many of his Sotto Voce Papers.

After his retirement from “The Hindu” in 1957 Raghunathan settled down in Bangalore to devote all his time to the work of translating Srimad Bhagavatam and Srimad Valmiki Ramayanam into English - the one he looked upon as the Bhakti Sastra and the other as the Dharma Sastra. Any­one else of his age would have found the translation work too daunting to be taken up and completed within a foreseeable time-span. Raghunathan looked upon the work as a Rishi Rna, a debt to the seers of the past.

            Srimad Bhagavatam in two vol­umes came out in May, 1976. The Darling of Brindavan held Raghu­nathan in thrall and in his writings on Sri Krishna, he makes his language glow in all the colours of the Roman candle. “The supreme art”, he says, “that makes righteousness readable scatters its largesse with a lavish hand in these illuminated pages’ (of Sri­mad Bhagavatam). Krishna, in his view, is most emphatically not a God cast in the image of man. The Bhagavata Purana makes us appreci­ate the co-existence of the charm of the human and the truth of the super human. The Bhagavatam holds out hopes even for the chronic sinner if only he will open out his heart to the gentle influence of love and the irresistible charm of the Divine Child. In his love and adoration for the Lord of the Gita, Raghunathan was in the good company of his fellow-Tanjurean Sir P.S. Sivaswami Iyer (1864-1946), who had “Gopala” on his lips as his life was ebbing away.

Raghunathan’s translation of the Ramayana in three volumes (1981) is a work of scholarly labour spread over many years. Raghunathan’s approach to the Ramayana was philosophical though he did not under-estimate its poetic felicities and its message of Sarangati Rama uphold Dharma as the axis of the universe which revolves round the twin poles of compassion and renunciation - the two dominant notes of the Ramayana. “The Ramay­ana has something pertinent to say on all aspects of Dharma - its relevance to the social order, the cosmic order, the sense of mutual obligation that binds the universe together with the Karmic ties, the religious impulse which is the parent of that ethic and lastly the Adyatmic reality to the reali­sation of which Dharma finds its crown and consummation.”

In his Madras University lectures (Prof. L. Venkataratnam lectures for 1962-63). Raghunathan examined the relationship between reason and intui­tion in Indian culture. He emphasized “Viveka” as the key to the under­standing of the relationship, as well as the secret ofthe continuity of Indian culture.

The lectures contain rich mate­rial on all aspects of Indian culture and are notable for an effective rebut­tal of Schweitzer’s view of Indian ethi­cal concerns.

Raghunathan was a lover of all languages and in particular, made little distinction between English and Tamil. When the language controversy was at its height and a widespread tendency to denigrate English was in evidence, he pleaded for full develop­ment of the Indian languages beforeEnglish was jettisoned. “Catch the (childern) young and turn them loose into the flower-garden of Tamil” was his advice. He translated into English of six long poems of the sangam Age of Tamil literature (150-250 AD). In doing so he also broadcast the mes­sage of sangam poet. “All the world is my home and all men kin”. Raghunathan was proud of his native district of Thanjavur, of which he said: “I was born in the Tanjore country, which is totally innocent of elevations other than those of the mind and soul”. Who would not, if one remembers even the single fact that the Trinity of Karnatic Music, Tyaga­raja, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri belonged to this dis­trict? But Raghunathan was anything but parochial though he gave the misleading impression in his talk, af­fecting as he did the Tanjore lingo especially when he was in a temper, that he was a Tanjorean first and everything else next.

Steeped as he was in the clas­sics of Sanskrit he looked upon his country as a sacred land but he also viewed the world as the common in­heritance of mankind. “Milton and Shelly sang to some of us long before they spoke”, he wrote in 1946. His staunch belief in “adhikaribheda” and to which he gave unequivocal expression, led many to associate some measure of intellectual arro­gance with him. Perhaps, he could not help being arrogant.

Were he alive to-day, he would have been amused by the spectacle of a hung parliament at the Centre? President’s rule in a few States, Marxist rule in West Bengal and unstable Governments in most other States. Did he not say that adult franchise was a blunder? He would have chuckled at the talk of “reform” in the economic field. Reform what? Did he not protest against the Avadi brand of socialism? Though he would not say, “I told you so”, he would remind you of his re­lentless fight against communism and the scorn he poured on saw-dust Caesars. Tibet, China, Kashmir, Russia - did he not make fun of Hindi-­Chini and Hindi-Russi bhai-bhaism ?

Yet, instead of gloating over his pro­phecies, he may feel rather sad over the developments in the polity - a weak Centre, malpractices in elections, the pervasive corruption in all, and especially in high places, the misde­meanours of judges, the steep fall in the standards of bureaucratic effi­ciency and the sickness of sycophancy afflicting the bureaucrats, the Bofors Deal and the Securities Scam, the apathy of the intelligentsia and the pronounced herd-instinct of the masses. So long as he was alive, he lost no opportunity to shout like Vyasa of old:

            Urdhvabaahuviraubheysha na cha kachchit-srunoti mae
            Dharmad-arthachcha kaama­chcha sa kimartham na sevyate?

With upraised arms I shout, and no-one heeds me, “In Dharma is profit and pleasure, why then will they not cleave to it?”

Raghunathan played the role of Vyasa in his day – vast was his learn­ing huge was his written output and great was his passion for righteous­ness that is Drama. It may be right to describe him as a gadfly but his pur­pose was not merely to irritate but remind us of a tradition that set much store by propriety in thought, word and deed. When will another of his kind come?