CHARISMA AND DYNAMISM
A
Profile of C. P.
D.
ANJANEYULU
Time: Sometime
in December 1941, around 5-30 in the evening
Place: Courtyard
in front of the Rangaswami Iyengar
Memorial Hall at the Dakshina Bharat
Hindi Prachar Sabha premises in Thyagaraynagar,
Occasion: Birth
Anniversary Celebrations of Rajaji (then serving a prison sentence in the
Individual Satyagraha Campaign).
Person: A
well-proportioned figure of medium height, clad in well-cut sherwani-like
long-coat, spotless white dhoti and turban, and a silk angavastram
thrown casually around the neck, one of its ends
flying in the air.
Fulsome
tributes were being paid to the Chanakya of Indian
politics (not yet elevated to the rank of Socrates of the twentieth century) by
speaker after speaker in indifferent English of different kinds, and flowing
sing-song Tamil that never seemed to have a stop. At least one speech was in
Hindi, a language that had then an aroma of patriotism about it in the South,
without the response of all-round intelligibility, and another in Telugu,
which, for a few, stuck like a fly in the ointment.
The
present writer, then a college student, patiently sat through all the laudatory
speeches, but he has now only the foggiest notion of the content of most of
them.
The
only thing of which he still retains a clear picture is the impressive presence
of the turbaned figure, who presided over the celebrations. He had a
personality that stood out from the rest, and drew instant attention. He was
the centre of attraction like the lamp-bearer who
dominates the human Rembrandt’s famous painting, “The Night Watch.” The
spectator had an optical illusion, without realising
it, that this figure had managed to capture the glow of sunlight, while the
rest of the crowd were lost in the penumbra of dusk and could
only be seen by candlelight, as it were.
Not
that he said anything memorable (like Julius Caesar on his landing on the soil
of Britain or Srinivasa Sastri
at the Guild Hall in London or Radhakrishnan in the
Albert Hall), but his words were accentuated with a sense of drama and
reinforced by the mystique of personality.
He
answered to the name of Sachivottama Dr.
Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyer
(none in his senses could think of omitting the honorifics in those beknighted days of British Imperialism).
Time: Sometime
in January 1946, around 6-30 in the evening.
Place: Vivekananda
Assembly Hall in the
Occasion: Observance
of the Gita Day.
Person: The
same as before; this time he was the main speaker–theme of his address was “The
Message of the Gita.”
In
the chair was Mr. Justice P. V. Rajamannar (not yet
become Chief Justice or Doctor of Laws and Letters).
There
were other speakers too, of some eminence, judges, lawyers, professors of
English, philosophy and the like.
As
a judge and as a speaker, Mr. Rajamannar was a
balanced person, not given to hyperbole or overstatement. Equable by
temperament, he never let himself go in his compliments. If such a man chose to
indulge in high praise, it must be for a good reason. In introducing Sir C. P.
(who needed no introduction, as the saying goes) Rajamannar
referred to him in superlative terms. “There may be many Ramaswamis,”
he said (there were, in fact, at least two of them, quite well-known, and no
less eminent in the public life of Madras, each in his own way, and many others
less eminent), “but there is only one C. P.,” he added, to a resounding burst
of applause. There was little difficulty for any member of the
He
then proceeded to describe Sir C. P. as a fascinating personality, who, in his
time, had fascinated High Court Judges, Governors, Viceroys and the Indian
Princes, not to speak of Lawyers and clients, in fact all the people who had
ever come in contact with him. In his reply, C. P. made a half-hearted show of
taking umbrage at the “semi-feminine description” indulged by the
Chairman, young enough to be his son. But he must have known that it was not
off the mark. He was, in fact, conscious of the charm he had been exercising on
a wide variety of intelligent men and women (including E. S. Montague, who
hailed him as the cleverest man in India, Mrs. Besant
who drew him into her fold as her right-hand man in the Home Rule Movement, and
incidentally, the vocalist, Bangalore Nagaratnamma, who used to address him with the endearment,
“Lavanya Rama”).
C.
P.’s address, delivered with his characteristic blend of earnestness and
aplomb, was heard in pin-drop silence He spoke with the wonted eloquence of a
skilful orator, who, like Winston Churchill, might have rehearsed his
impromptus as well. He never read from a prepared manuscript, though he might,
on occasion, have carried a slip of paper or two to remind him of an obscure
quotation as an aid in illustrating his point. On this occasion, the speech
lasting nearly an hour, was enriched with quotations from Sankara’s
Bhashya as well as from the original
text–with special emphasis on Karmayoga, the
supremacy of Nishkama Karma (action
without desire) and the concept of Sthitaprajna.
It was also embellished with Western paralles from Meister Ekhart and Max Mueller to T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley and Indian opinions from those of Lokamanya Tilak and Sri Aurobindo to Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Radhakrishnan. He threw his net wide in the extensive waters of Indian philosophy, Hindu metaphysicst English literature and Western thought. He cast a spell on the audience, which included a fair sprinkling of Law students like myself, which could only be compared, in a way, to the impact left by Swami Vivekananda at the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1892. Some of us were young enough to fancy ourselves as sceptics, and though we did not go there to scoff, we certainly remained to pray, and longed for a copy of the Bhagavadgita in our hands.
Ever since, I do not remember to
have consciously missed any of the speeches of Sir C. P. in the city. He
should have spoken fairly often, forever since his final return from Travancore,
he even used to spend at least ten days or a week in the month in
His
comments on the American way of life, with its disarming informality of address
between pupils and professors were not only pertinent, but spicy and enjoyable.
He had occasionally a few friendly digs at the American craze for
advertisement, along with their anxiety to do the world some good. He had
reserves of humour, marked by irony, and he could
exploit the sense of the ridiculous without doing violence to his exalted
rhetoric. This was even more in evidence in his picturesque impressions of
“Anecdotage
is an inalienable privilege of dotage,” was a favourite
remark of C. P., who never lapsed into dotage. One of the anecdotes he was fond
of relating was about his student days at
As
for his public speeches, the one he delivered at the Sastri
Hall, while presiding over a lecture by Prof. Arnold J. Toynbee,
e author of A Study of History was indeed a remarkable performance. The
rapid survey that he made of the theories of Toynbee,
based on his lifelong study of world civilisations,
was so lucid and masterly that the professor, none too articulate, was left
dumbfounded and his own remarks sounded rather like incoherent mumblings to the
bulk of the home-spun Mylapore audience.
Mastery
of the spoken word was but a part of the charisma that pervaded the personality
of C. P. There are other notable elements that went into its make-up, like
courage, personal loyalty and breadth of mind. Unlike most of the Indian
intelligentsia of his time, softened by their easy way of life, C. P. retained
a high degree of physical and moral courage. He was a man of strong nerves. He
had real guts. He showed it in his early days as an aspiring Municipal
Commissioner (as a councillor used to be called in
those days) when he rode into a hostile constituency in George Town and began
to address the sullen crowd, after pulling out a revolver from his pocket and
placing it on the table. All attempts of the mischief-makers
to disturb his meeting seem to have gone up in smoke, without his having to
fire a single round!
As
for the quality of personal loyalty, he not only evinced it in practice,
but evoked it in others. He believed in sticking to his personal staff and
other aides and standing by his friends through thick and thin. His Private
Secretary, S. Chidambaram, who always looked upon him
and spoke of him only as “My Master,” first joined his office as a steno-typist
around 1915 or so, and stayed on with him till only death did them part in
September 1966. He used to recall how early in his service, his master gave him
a sum of Rs 2000 (now at least 20 times the value) to
be remitted in the bank, but he lost it on the way. He was woebegone and afraid
to face him, but C. P. told him not to worry but forget all about it, as if it
were just a couple of rupees! His juniors at the bar, like M. Subbaroya Aiyer and N. Chandrasekhara Aiyer and their
juniors like T. V. Viswanatha Aiyer, ever remained
thankful to providence for the phenomenon that was called C. P. in their time.
There
were many others, who had reason to be grateful to him for the good turn he had
done them at one time or another. C. P. was liberal with his purse, as long as
he could afford to be so. Speaking at the inauguration of the Ethiraj College (endowed by the Barrister, V. L. Ethiraj, with a donation of Rs.
Ten lakhs), C. P. revealed to the public that his own donations would also add
up to a like amount. But they were widely scattered in time and space, unlike
those of Sivaswami Aiyer
and Ethiraj. He was born with a silver spoon and his
legal practice, for less than two decades, was lucrative enough for him to sup
with a golden spoon. But he did not believe in saving like a miser. That would
have been against his nature, which was to do everything in the grand manner.
He lived like a prince and died like a prince.
His
sunny disposition was another essential ingredient of his charisma. Through ill
fortune as well as good, he could hold his head up and walk with his nose in
the air. Even in his seventies and eighties, he walked with a spring in his
step and talked with a ring in his voice. Comparing the styles and temperaments
of C. P. and S. Varadachari, who sometimes appeared
on opposite sides, Mr. K. Chandrasekharan makes an interesting point in his
“Persons and Personalities.” While Varadachari, even
when after winning the case, would come out of the court room, head bowed, as
if he had lost it, C. P. would come out with a smile and stride along the
corridors jauntily as if he had won it! His success at the bar was essentially
the success of vigorous advocacy, aided by a winning personality. Where river
water disputes were concerned he won sensational victories against the giant Alladi in the Court of Sir Maurice Gwyer.
Charisma,
in these days, is the end-product of sophisticated techniques of personality
build-up by a network of official agencies, with the aid of all the available
media of mass communication. These techniques were as yet almost unknown,
certainly undeveloped in the early ’Twenties, when C. P. made his entry in
public life with a bang.
In his case, it owned more to his innate dynamism and mastery of the spoken word than to any adventitious aids at the disposal of politicians in power. And this dynamism found expression in his primary role as a man of action, and his secondary role as a man of words and as also tertiary and peripheral role as a man of thought.
C. P.’s dynamism, as an administrator, was inspired by such models as those of Sir K. Seshadri Iyer of Mysore and charged by the vision of a new India, in which the Ganga is linked with the cauvery and industry is propelled by electricity, without leaving agriculture behind. He was the hero as an advocate and administrator, who brightened the era before independence. He desrves a high place in public memory, though the likes of him may be out of place in the Age of the Common Man.
“I
regard Sir C. P. as one of the very rare exemplars in our country of the
genuinely educated man, whom education has helped to develop a fully-integrated
personality. The scholar and man of culture in him does not cramp the active
enthusiasm and constructive thinking of the elder statesman, nor does the man
of affairs in him tone down the expression or befog the operation of his
intellect as a cultivated individual. Reading his addresses and writings, and
conversations with him, have been a very rewarding experience to me.”
–DR. C. D.
DESHMUKH