BY K. ISWARA DUTT

Who are the eleven greatest living Indians? But why eleven? Because they usually form a team. Then, to repeat my question, who are our eleven greatest? The question appears to be incredibly simple: yet it is immensely difficult to answer. He alone knows the difficulty who addresses himself to the task of making a list. While it would be easy to mention, say, the greatest statesman, the greatest poet, the greatest scientist, the greatest philosopher or the greatest representative in this or that sphere of human endeavour, it is a tough and hazardous job to record the names of the eleven greatest men, since it hardly admits of so facile a classification. The primary difficulty centres round one’s very conception of greatness.

Happily this is not a matter to be settled by vote. It is not a popularity competition. It will also be admitted that a prominent man is entirely different from an eminent man and that an eminent man is not necessarily–and in many cases emphatically not–a great man. If it is permissible to illustrate my point, Maulana Shaukat Ali is a prominent man, and no more than that. Everyone would agree with Professor Harold Laski when he says, ‘My friend Sir Tej is a very eminent man.’ I can’t say–at any rate I am not sure at this stage–if he will figure in my list of the eleven greatest Indians. Indisputably Gandhiji does. But what is a great man? One can more easily describe than define a great man. I don’t think anyone has done it better than Disraeli whom I would like to quote in this connection. Here is a striking passage from his wit and wisdom:

‘What is a great man? Is it a Minister of State? Is it a victorious general? A gentleman in the Windsor uniform? Is it a Field-Marshal covered with stars? Is it a prelate or Prince? A King or an Emperor? He may be all these. Yet these, as we must all daily feel, are not necessarily great men. A great man is one who affects the mind of his generation.’

Here is surely a basis, and a sound basis, on which one may proceed and indulge in the pleasant pastime of erecting one’s own gallery of the greatest living Indians.

To set down the first name there is no difficulty, for there is no doubt. He is so obvious. With apologies to Macaulay the rhetorician, it may be claimed that the Everest is not more decidedly the tallest of mountain peaks, the Mississipi is not more decidedly the biggest of rivers, the Taj is not more decidedly the most beautiful of marble mausoleums, than Mahatma Gandhi is the greatest of living men. And when one speaks of him one need not restrict oneself to India. He has not only no equal: he has no second. Of him it can be said what was thus said of Shakespeare by a contemporary English writer:

‘He is the greatest thing we have done. He is our challenger in the lists of the world, and there is none to cross swords with him. Like Sirius, he has a magnitude of his own. Take him away from our heavens, conceive him never to have been born, and the imaginative wealth of life shrinks, to a lower plane, and we are left, in Iago’s phrase, "a poor thing".’

Notwithstanding his limitations and mistakes of policy which had strange repercussions on the destinies of at least two nations, his greatness is so self-revealing that beside him all other celebrities look dwarfed. He has convulsed the world with his ideas on the one hand and the manifestations of his moral grandeur on the other; he has made, as Gokhale said, heroes out of common clay, and translated us, in Mr. C. R. Reddy’s inimitable phrase, from oblivion into history. He is, in one word, incomparable.

It is a relief that one can name the second, of our greatest men with equal confidence. There is something peculiarly appropriate in proceeding from the man who is responsible more than any other for the great national awakening to the one who has given that national awakening a voice, arid a voice too which greeted all ears, whether in the East or in the West, with a melody almost divine. There will be general agreement with Pandit Jawaharlal’s opinion that ‘Rabindranath Tagore has given to our nationalism the outlook of internationalism and has enriched it with art and music and the magic of his words, so that it has become the full-blooded emblem of India’s awakened spirit’. The Bard of Santiniketan is, indeed, ‘the laureate of humanity’.

Who comes next? Now is the real difficulty. In sheer despair I give up all pretensions to assigning the order of merit. While I think that the next four places in my list should go to a group of intellectuals, I fail to see how anyone can decide the rank between four such men as Bose and Ray, Raman and Radhakrishnan, who have by common consent raised India’s status in the estimation of the civilised world.

The oldest of them, Sir J. C. Bose, who is now 75, has ceaselessly striven, in his own words, to bring the science of the East and of the West into closer affinity for the benefit of humanity’. To what effect? He has been recognised as the greatest biologist, as the ‘revealer of a new world’, and as one in whom is seen ‘an invincible, perhaps immortal, quality which has given a permanence to the Indian civilisation such as no other nation has produced’. And what more glowing tribute can be possibly paid than was done by the Literary Editor of The Fortnightly Review who is reported to have said that ‘in Sir Jagadish the culture of thirty centuries has blossomed into a scientific brain of an order which we cannot duplicate in the West’?

As a chemist of eminence and a captain of industry, as a teacher and patriot, and above all as one of the most striking examples of ‘plain living and high thinking’, Sir P. C. Ray has a secure place among the greatest living Indians. Barring Gandhiji, there is perhaps none other than the veteran Acharya of whom it can more appropriately be said that ‘greatness never looked so simple’. His ceaseless industry, his inexhaustible energy, his powers of organisation, his patriotic fervour and humanitarian zeal, and his unending battle against the unemployment of educated youth and the poverty of the people are a source of inspiration to his countrymen.

To have won the Nobel Prize for science is no ordinary distinction, while to have won it on the right side of fifty is no small sign of human greatness. It is India’s pride that Sir C. V. Raman occupies a place beside Einstein. He is the author of a discovery which has changed the whole conception of radiation process and already made his name a permanent possession of the world of science.

It is among the obvious limitations of philosophy that in assessing a philosopher’s worth there is nothing specific to which one can point out as an outstanding contribution. Yet it is easy to include Sir S. Radhakrishnan among our greatest living men. He is perhaps the finest example of intellectual refinement and philosophic wisdom and reveals a rare combination of what Matthew Arnold terms ‘sweetness and light’. As a scholar and thinker he has attained an international position, while in interpreting the West and the East to one another he is playing the role of a cultural and spiritual ambassador. His gift for lucid exposition and moving utterance is the envy–and sometimes the despair–of his compeers. Few have his genius for condensing in a sentence ‘the secrets of a life’ or for summing up in an epigram the secrets of the universe.

Five more names are required to complete my list. The difficulty naturally increases as I proceed. Perhaps the difficulty is a trifle less than I have just now feared it is, since I have not so far mentioned him who, with the inevitable exception of Mahatmaji, is the greatest national worker we have. A life-long servant of the nation, one who has stepped into the breach at every crisis, a man of incorruptible patriotism and unsullied honour, and a rare example of the combination of ancient tradition and modern temper, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya is among the indispensables.

Who next? I personally think that the next place goes to the Rt. Hon. V. S. Srinivasa Sastri whose rise is one of the revelations of modern Indian history. As Gokhale’s successor and Gandhi’s friend, as India’s servant and states man, and as the Empire’s orator and ambassador, Mr. Sastri has made history. All over the world he has been received as a ‘humanitarian agent who combines the breadth of, a statesman with the depth of a scholar, and the fervour of an evangelist’ and is as much respected for his character as admired for his calibre. There is no exaggeration in the claim of The Nation and Athenaeum that he is ‘a representative of all that is best in Indian national aspirations–Gandhi’s equal in unchallengeable purity of motive, and immeasurably his superior in practical wisdom’.

It is almost with a sense of inevitability that one turns from the Rt. Hon. V. S. Srinivasa Sastri to the Rt. Hon. Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru. It is true that he is criticised (as Gladstone was said to be admired) ‘by all kinds of incompatible people on all kinds of incompatible grounds’, but there is no denying his greatness. As a lawyer he is distinguished, while as a constitutional lawyer he has few equals and no superiors; as a politician he strenuously upheld the cause of the nation, both at home against communal cliques and conspiracies, and abroad against alien interests and diplomacies; as a statesman he has won Gokhale’s prestige and valiantly fought for the recognition and attainment of the federal ideal; and as a man he is ‘more than the sum of all that he said or did’. With the exception of Pandit Motilal, he is tallest of the Kashmiri Pandits who are, so to say, the ruling race in Northern India. He has learning without pedantry, eloquence without decorative frills, culture which is the product of a happy commingling of Hindu tradition, Western education, and Islamic influence. To the personal ascendancy he has established for himself in Indian politics there can be no greater tribute than that he never depended on parties or groups for his authority to speak in the name of India. People who talk of his political ambitions have the excuse of ignorance, for any day he would be glad to leave the din and dust of politics for the unparalleled recreation provided by his books and collection of pipes. His unique services to the motherland, his great gifts, not the least of which is his genius for hospitality, and that indefinable something in him which distinguishes his presence, entitle him to figure in any list of India’s greatest living men.

I find there are still two more places to be filled for which there is a scramble. I am, however, clear in my mind that my list needs a feminine touch. It is not out of chivalry but out of a sense of fairness that I salute Mrs. Saroiini Naidu as one of the greatest living Indians. She is acknowledged to be one of the world’s greatest Women. Poet, patriot, peacemaker, nurse–(the Florence Nightingale of Parnakuti)–she has played a role not less immense than it is interesting. She is a spell-binder. Who that has an ear ‘to the rhythm of a great melody, to the incantation of a noble oratory’ fails to be charmed and thrilled by her? She is one of the sweetest symbols of Indian greatness.

Now I am in the face of a crisis. There is room in my list only for one more name among the several names that press for consideration. Should the remaining place be assigned to the handsome and refined young prophet, Sjt. J. Krishnamurti who claims to have ‘attained’ and calls upon everyone else to attain likewise, without the aid of priests or of organised religion? Or is it Sjt. Aurobindo who illumined the political firmament of India with a flood of incandescence and is now ruminating on the mysteries of the Universe? If not, is it then Sir P. S. Sivaswamy Aiyer who is reputed and respected as ‘India’s most accurate thinker’?

Great as they are, it is none of them who takes the vacant place in my list. I feel I should give preference to one who is a man of the future and who has already established his hold over, and caught the imagination of, the people of India. Who is he other than Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru? Son of Pandit Motilal of imperishable fame, Jawaharlal has ‘affected the mind of his generation’ more than his father did and much more than the celebrities whom I have just mentioned. He knows his mind; he lives dangerously; he ‘dares and never grudges the throe’. As Mr. Brailsford pithily put it, ‘this man is a fighter’. The militant follower of a mystic leader, Jawaharlal is, in Mr. Bernays’s happy phrase, ‘the prophet of youth’. He is, so they say, a potential Mussolini or a Hitler.

Here is my galaxy then, consisting of Gandhi and Tagore, Bose and Ray, Raman and Radhakrishnan, Malaviyaji, Sastri and Sapru, Sarojini and Jawaharlal, who compare favourably with the eleven greatest men of any nation in the world. All of them are of course not equally great, and in the nature of things can’t be. Further, contemporary estimates can’t stand the test of time. As each year passes the greatness of contemporary celebrities dwindles. Time mercilessly wipes out, certainly some, perhaps many, of the names from my impressive list. A century hence, today’s great men may only be known (to students of research) as Mahatmaji’s contemporaries: Sweet, indeed, are the revenges–or are they the ravages?–of time.

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