Sir S. RADHAKRISHNAN

(A SKETCH)

LATE MR. JUSTICE M. SESHACHALAPATI

[The following is a very interesting sketch on Dr Radhakrishnan published in Triveni for September 1936, under the pen name “S. P.”–EDITOR]

In this sketch of Radhakrishnan, I have not attempted to represent him as anything more than what he is–one of Nature’s great gentlemen. The eloquence and the earnestness of his speeches and writings are apt to tempt one to regard him as a messiah. I have, however, avoided regarding him as one, for the obvious reason that he does not promise the striken world a shortcut to the millennium; and also because Radhakrishnan has never professed to be a messiah. Besides, we have at present more messiahs than gentlemen. It is his great human qualities that fascinate me–his serenity of mind, his freedom from the sin of self-righteousness, his deep humanity, his engaging modesty. Even if he were not endowed with the brilliant intellectual gifts that he possesses, the innate delicacy of his mind and character is enough to rank him amongst the chosen spirits of mankind. It is to this aspect of his life that I seek to draw attention.

One of the ways in which the world tolerates men of superior intellect is by making fun of them; and so we have our jokes about the poet, the artist and the scientist. We have our jokes about the philosopher too. We look upon him either as an extremely talkative individual rattling away at some “Great argument–about it–and about,” or an exceptionally absent-minded person who can never be trusted to cross a road without the risk of being run over; in either view a queer fellow, not by any means to be taken seriously.

If with these ideas at the back of our minds, we see Radhakrishnan, our first impression will be one of terrible surprise, for, he is so much unlike the traditional philosopher. He is neither a chatterbox nor a star-gazer. He is a man of the world, steeped from the crown of his head to the toe or his foot in its wisdom and its ways. His manner is alert, attentive and affable. It is neither superior nor sententious. He never talks of anything high or dry. He talks with you as if he had known you all his life. There is not in him even the slightest trace of pomposity. Once I happened to ask him what made him choose philosophy, expecting, of course, to be told that his natural disposition of soul lay that way or some such recondite reason that celebrated men are fond of telling themselves and others. But he told me in the most light-hearted and casual manner that he chanced to take philosophy because he had a relation who was good enough to pass on to him a few text-books on psychology and ethics. That was the reason of his taking philosophy! This is expressive of his attitude to his work. He believes in it, of course: otherwise work is impossible. But he has an engaging, self-deprecatory modesty that rescues him from taking himself and his work far too seriously.

Neither is there anything of the snob in his composition. High and low, rich and poor, the learned and the lay, can mix and mingle with him on terms of ease and equality. I can imagine him talking to an actress with the same courtesy as he would show to an Archbishop. Also one can talk to him what one likes without the least fear of losing caste.

The only disconcerting element in intercourse with him is his uncanny gift of breaking into your thoughts. His reading of your mind is so quick and correct that he seems to reply not to the words that you utter but to four unspoken thoughts. If, in spite of his anticipation, and determined to have your say, you begin a sentence, he will finish it for you much better than you could have done. This is not, however, due to any want of respect or good manners. Few men are more considerate to other’s feelings and few men better mannered than he; but his mind, like a racing engine, cannot brook delay and so it does the work for you because it does it quicker.

This amazing quickness of mind and speed in doing things have given rise to two interesting legends about him; one, that he is a hustler in debate, and secondly, that for a philosopher, he hurries too much; but like all legends they are only half-truths.

Let me take the first thing first. It is said that he is impatient in council, that he stifles discussion and hustles his colleagues to his opinions. That Radhakrishnan, of all men, should have given rise to this impression is unfortunate. But the truth of it is that, as the executive head of an institution, he has always conceived it as his duty to lead, and he leads because he knows how to do it. It is true he is not one of those comfortable leaders who lead by following. He has knowledge. He has dialectical power and diplomatic ability. He can see his ideas through not because they are his ideas (he is not an egocentric individual prone to conjugate his verbs with the personal pronoun I) but because most often his ideas are good. “I dominate the Cabinet,” said the late Mr. Chamberlain, “because, of all the men there, I was the only one that knew his mind.” Such men always lead. They always dominate; and perhaps it is just as well that they do; otherwise, modern democracy would degenerate into a madhouse.

The other legend, that he hurries everything though is seemingly not without point. He has a genius for rushing things through. He can finish a large volume between breakfast and dinner and yet can manage neither to skip over a page nor miss a phrase. He can finish a hundred-topic agenda of the Senate or the Syndicate of a University in even less than as many minutes. He can rush from one end of the country to another as quick as the steam could carry him, doing business of importance at either end. In 1926 when he toured through America, he used to make long journey during the nights and lecture at new places every evening of the few days that he spent there. What others would like to do in a fortnight, he has it in him to do in a day; and where in that thin, spare, lanky frame of his there is all that energy necessary for such strain, no one knows. In a sense, his whole life has been one huge rush. He was a graduate before he was 18, a father before he was 21 and a great leader of philosophy before he was exactly 33.

But this rushing is not by any means a real part of his nature. Few men are at heart fonder of quiet. In fact, his rushing is due to his eagerness to get back to his quiet. For days on end, he can enjoy being left alone at home to spend his days in reading and writing, finding the necessary relaxation in the intimacies of his family circle.

When one sees him confined to his home, one wonders whether he has any real interest in or zest for life. The common thing that conduce to pleasure and comfort seem to be of no significance to him. The manner of his life is simple to the point of austerity. His wants are few and he is content with the most frugal fare. He is not a man to bother about artistic settings for his life. He always describes his house, in a mood of playful sarcasm, as a sort of ‘caravanserai,’ In the large and ultimate sense, perhaps, all houses are caravanserais: man is after all on a brief sojourn on this planet. But how many are conscious of this?

With a view to induce him to take a long walk, I once reminded him of a passage in one of his books, where he poetized over simple pleasures like the ‘silent walks through the country.’ He smiled with an almost a child’s caught out feeling and said he reserved those pleasures for his books. Allied to this is his indifference to places of natural beauty or historical Interest. He would have passed Cairo up and down at least fifteen times by now and never once did it cross him to run up and see the Pyramids. For all his love of Plato and Aristotle, his love of the Greek philosophy and art, it never struck him to see the Acropolis. Neither did he see Venice, at least to be able to talk at garden parties about the gondolas and the Grand canal. He has never felt either the necessity for holidays, for week-ends and all the pleasant lotus-eating and fooling that they mean; none-the-less, he is not, in the jargon of the smart set, a kill-sport. He can be pleasant even at parties where over-dressed aesthetes and under-dressed ladies, vie with each other in prattling nonsense by the hour. He can also, when the mood is on him, rattle and rag a painted beauty and make her sob and smile in turn. With equal nonchalance he can play with a priggish man and pull his leg. These moods show that years and philosophy have not aged his innate youthful spirit. But essentially he is serious in disposition and puritanical in his tastes and mode of life.

This does not, however, mean he is insensible to beauty or unappreciative of art. He is not like the Oxford Professor in the Dark Flower who had lost the power of admiring anything except a few passages of the classics. Radhakrishnan is extremely susceptible to beauty and, the quieter and subtler it is, the more enchanting it is to him. He can admire pictures, plays and music, and latterly even cricket. But he never fusses over these things. Admiration of beauty or the seeking of pleasure are not by any means the major passions of his life. This, to my mind, is due to the fact that his reactions to beauty and pleasure are merely intellectual. He has much of the Greek in him, but not the Greek’s whole-hearted worship of the form and worship of the body. Also he lacks the physical energy and the naivete for complete enjoyment of sensuous delights.

For all his easy and pleasant conversational accomplishments, I am afraid he is not a great talker. His talk is seldom winged with fancy or sharpened with wit. He does not excel in the arts that lend spice to conversation–the sparkling phrase, the banter and the satire. I am afraid Radhakrishnan looks upon such talkers with some suspicion. He sees in them a bit of posing that is offensive to his sense of naturalness–a meritriciousness that jars on his sense of delicacy.

But quite apart from these decorative artifices, one could have humour, which also he does not seem to possess in a large measure. While fully being capable of seeing a joke and enjoying it, he rarely comes off with a gay, light-hearted utterance. Not to speak of his set speeches, even in social functions, he cannot help getting into his usual high tone; and when, to relieve the seriousness of his speech, he resort to something light he always relies on a quotation. While there are scores of sentences of rare wisdom and beauty that he has written and spoken, scores of epigrams that almost bite one with their brilliance, there are not many phrases of his own making to which you could return and smile.

I am not making a complaint of this. His make-up is far too serious for humour and pleasantries. How many of the great men filled with a serious conception of man’s progress through this world could afford to cultivate humour? Humour is one of the asides of life and it does not take away anything from the distinction of Radhakrishnan’s achievements, because in addition to making people think, he has not also made them laugh.

Radhakrishnan is a prodigious reader, one of the greatest readers that one can find. “I hate the man”, laid Dr Johnson, “who has written more than he has read.” Though for a writer of philosophy his output has been considerable, he has never once slackened his reading. He seems to read almost everything except, of course, technical treatises on topics like Electrical Engineering and Soap manufacture and Manuals on breeding dogs and rearing birds. He does not bar subjects or authors. His tastes are varied and catholic. He reads all that comes his way, poetry, philosophy, science, drama, fiction and biography, diaries and even books of travel. His writings bear witness to the range and variety of his scholarship. When the weekly overseas mail brings him a good supply of books and journals, he is as jubilant as a child that receives a box of chocolates.

Radhakrishnan is a man of the most delicate sensibility. There is not even a touch of coarseness in his composition, the coarseness that sometimes is present in successful men who have had also their own way to make in this world. He shrinks from anything loud; and downright flattery or fulsome expression of gratitude jars on his refinement. But like all great artists, he becomes very mellow and human when a sincere compliment is paid.

The most dominant thing in his life is his intellectual sanity which strings together all his qualities and graces and gives his personality an indefinable power and sweetness. The modern intellectual is caught up in a world of dissolving faiths and values. Being driven from pillar to post, he is becoming spiritually neurotic, running after one stunt or another. He has lost his moorings, and, like a ship without a rudder he is drifting. He is losing his balance and losing faith in his vocation. He is fast becoming a hater of reason and a believer in blind chance. But this subversive claptrap hat never affected Radhakrishnan. Through all this crashing of creeds and all this social and moral confusion, he feels there is only one thing that can pull man out–intellectual sanity.

He once spoke to me in a tone of sad concern about a friend of his, a most distinguished scholar himself, of how he started hit life with a glow of promise and how, in the middle, he branched off from the high road of speculation to some esoteric occultism. Radhakrishnan said, “Philosophy is a dangerous thing. If you are not careful, it will lead you into strange alleys.”

Of Radhakrishnan, at any rate, it could never be said that he has not been careful. A robust commonsense and an almost uncanny circumspection rule his attitude to men and affairs and even ideas. He is never expansive and is an adept at keeping his own counsel. While many people confide in him, he confides in none. Into the central chamber of his being admissions are barred, and even his most cherished intimates do not know the lie of the land there. Recently a friend of his said almost in sorrow and judgment: “I do not know really what he thinks of me.” Radhakrishnan shares with his race the quality of inscrutability.

Sometimes, it has struck me that if he was less circumspect, and if his grip over himself was not so firm, he could have got out of life more pleasure; a perpetually vigilant mind in sometimes a handicap. There are some pleasant self-deceptions, some blissful. ignorances which go a long way in making men happy and un-self-conscious.

But those that notice only his intellectuality notice only a part of him. In the core of his being, he is something of a poet, a dreamer. There is a romantic vein in him, a vein that makes for fancy, that makes for rebellion against the dull, drab conformity of our lives. This element invests his spirit with an amount of volatility that is exceptionally rare amongst men, devoted merely to learning and philosophy. There are moments when the vision of a suffering humanity impinges on his mind so much that he feels almost the passion of a revolutionary.¹ In those moods he wants to strike out for himself, escape the tutelage of his intellectual sanity and dare and do so many things. But this element is controlled by his essential sense of equipoise which all but annihilates the ardour and the fire of his passion. He sees in a flash its futility. There is no use crying for the moon. The millenniums cannot be talked into existence. History is strewn with the wreckages of idealisms, that died in merely letting off the steam, of enthusiasms whose career was all too brief. Even if it were given to man to change a man, in his humility, he thinks he is not that man. He feels he is cast for a much quieter and a much humbler role; to do things! is to get mixed up with the world and he is too sensitive for that. Besides, one must believe in oneself–believe it to the verge of morbidity. A sense of humour, a sense of proportion, a sense of one’s own deficiencies is fatal to the mood that breeds the great doers, the builders and breakers of institutions.

Two years ago, I had opportunities of meeting a gentleman at Calcutta who was an important politician or the place. “We have done,” said he, ‘with the sentimental part of our programme. For these twelve years, we have carried symbols, sang songs and filled the jails. That portion of it is over now. We did what emotion could do. We stirred up the roots. We are entering on a new phase. We want a man who can give a purposive direction to the life that has been stirred. We want a great intellectual; a man like Radhakrishnan would do immense good to this coutry.” I wonder if ever Radhakrishnan could care to come into public life. If he should do so, I have no doubt that he will go down as one of the biggest men of this epoch.

In saying that, I am not thinking of his unique prestige–the prestige attaching to one of the first minds of the world. I am thinking of the peculiar deficiency in Indian leadership which he can correct. The men charged with the high command of Indian nationalism have shown some arresting qualities–courage, patriotism, self-sacrifice. But they seem to be lacking in a sustaining intellectual theory, a metaphysic, that reconciles India’s age-long traditions of thought with the insurgent demands of a changing social order. Their counsels alternate between taking the country back to the primaeval Arcadia or making her a vast Socialist suburb when perhaps every cottage will have an electric light and every village a public bath. Radhakrishnan seems to be the only man amongst the men of this generation capable of evolving a creed that is in keeping with the time-spirit and yet not alien to the national mind and temper.

But I am afraid that this prospect is blocked for two reasons. For one thing, democracy–and Indian democracy is no exception–has a fatal habit of ignoring the right sort of men. Two thousand years ago, the crowds voted for the rogue and let the saint hang. ‘Not this man,’ is a cry that has come down to us resounding through the ages. The untaught democracy led by men who are positively unteachable, what chance has it of setting aside the men that offer to ‘serve’ it, and seek out the philosopher to make him king? No; there is not much chance.

For another, Radhakrishnan is not the man to cultivate democracy. He does not have the temper for it. He is far too refined and perhaps also far too sensitive and proud for the job. Again and again, whenever his several friends press him to enter politics, he says that he won’t be happy there and confesses that his heart really lies in his work and in the deep personal attachments that he has established with some chosen spirits of his liking. Denied by his own choice of the destiny which could well have been his, he has chosen to accept the counsel given by Plate of “standing under the wall in a storm of dust and hurricane…...and living his own life clear of injustice and impiety.”

I have said above that in him, there is both the poet and the philosopher, though the frail poet is held in bond by the burly philosopher. But they are not at war with one another tugging his personality in two opposite directions. They blend and coalesce; with the result that he has a head that is rational without being rigid, and a heart that is kind without being sentimental.

That balance between the two elements–between a mind which never flinches from the most remorseless of its revelations and a wealth of compassion that understands and forgives all–is the central directing power of his conduct. There have been a few who meant him harm, who have tried to cut at the root of his reputation, men who have tried to cut at the root of his happiness. Whether they succeeded in their malignant designs or not, they have failed to make an enemy of him. He is incapable of harbouring bitterness, of looking upon anyone in a spirit of implacable hostility. He reels that the root of malevolence is foolishness, the lack of understanding of the utter meanness and insignificance of paltry human feuds and feelings in relation to the immensity and vastness of the universe. Such men who exaggerate the importance of their feelings and vanities are deserving not of condemnation but of forbearing compassion.

The same attitude of humane enlightenment distinguishes his relations with people who have for one reason or other made a mess of their lives. He abhors, with all the passion of his soul, the pitiless self-righteousness that is implicit in man’s craving for what is called retributive justice. “He made his bed; he must lie on it”, is a saying that one hears often, especially from complacent men and women who excel in laying down the moral law for other people. He once wrote to a friend of his–who is now no more–chastising him for taking the high moral tone, and he wound up that exquisite piece of writing with this sentence: “If we should only get our deserts in life, not many of us would escape hanging.”

“The nobler the soul is” says Bacon, “the more objects of compassion it hath.” The failures of life, the broken-hearted people on whom life has turned its back, find in him a great stand-by. His consideration and tenderness for them is about the brightest feature of his character. When he hurts them unconsciously he has the same compunction as one would have in treading upon a child in the dark. He helps them to the best of his power both by counsel and act, and most of all by a sympathetic understanding which is so restful and soothing. But he does so with a tact that preserves the self-respect of those that receive his assistance. When he helps, he is anxious not to humiliate.

Often we find the importance of training and system exaggerated. Who guided Radhakrishnan’s steps in the important years of his boyhood? His parents did not bring him up to any pattern. They could give him neither intellectual stimulus nor hold up to him impelling worldly allurements. He was not sent to a school like Eton and to a University like Oxford, where boys are expected to acquire form and become gentlemen. He was born in a small place, one of the small pilgrim centres of this part of the country. He chummed with boys of his age, played marbles with them in the back streets and perhaps also robbed the orchards. He attended the village school where the shrill monotony of a score of young voices crying together would send both the teacher and the pupils to sleep. He picked up things as he went along, and until he passed his Matriculation, nobody including himself ever fancied he would become anything else than a dashing village politician or, with the best of luck, a prosperous up-country lawyer. It was only when he got into the Mission College at Vellore that its discerning Principal saw what this young stripling was capable of and took him in hand. He and Dr Skinner had much to do in steadying him at the most important period of his youth and making him realise his own possibilities. But all the time the stimulus for progress in his career had always come from himself.

Lady Radhakrishnan, one of the most devoted of wives, once told me that as a boy her great husband was a bit of a Bohemian, impatient of control and getting out of hand of his teachers and parents and doing a good deal of tramping; even as a young Professor, married and settled, he used to be somewhat temperamental and prone to occasional bursts of anger. How came it then that he conquered those early tendencies of his boyhood, those spells of anger of his early youth, and attained to his present serenity and equipoise of mind? It is a story that is, to my mind, charged with the utmost significance to the spiritual evolution of every man. It is a lesson in self-discipline.

Man is advised to go to the lonely hills and eat there herbs and grass, to torture the flesh, and brand it with lashes and burns to acquire the wisdom and the dignity of self-control. One wonders whether these traditional processes are at all necessary. Radhakrishnan’s life, at any rate, shows that in a crowd one could be lonely, that one could participate in the world without sharing any of its wiles, and weaknesses; that the spirit could be chastened and mellowed as well at home as on the mountain tops.

“Wilhelm Von Humboldt, one of the most beautiful souls that ever existed,” writes Matthew Arnold, “used to say that one’s business in life was to perfect oneself by all means in one’s power, and secondly to try to create in the world around one an aristocracy, the most numerous that one possibly could, of talents and characters.” Whether Radhakrishnan has been enthusiast enough to go about raising recruits to the aristocracy of talents and characters or not, his place in the vanguard of that noble order is indisputable; and to the extent to which opportunities have come his way, he has been a power alike for happiness and righteousness.

¹ His sermon ‘Revolution through suffering’ was cast in such a mood. Taking as his text the 26th verse of the 21st Chapter of Ezekiel, “I shall overturn, overturn, overturn it; and it shall be no more until he come whose right it is and I will give it him,” he preached a sermon at Oxford on July s, 1930, which for eloquence and power must rank amongst the greater outpourings of the human spirit. Even in cold print it reads as an inspired utterance. Radhakrishnan told me that he had temperature when he was preaching it, which made one of the distinguished listeners to come up to him at the end and say. “So, you are a rebel–rebelling against the Doctor’s orders!”

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