Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan had just become President of India when some of his students and friends asked a simple favor. They wanted to celebrate his birthday, the 5th of September. He turned down the party and proposed something else. In his words: "Instead of celebrating my birthday, it would be my proud privilege if September 5th is observed as Teachers' Day." India has marked that date as Teachers' Day ever since. The request says a great deal about a man who spent decades in lecture halls before he ever held public office. How did a student who wanted to study mathematics become one of the best-known scholars of comparative religion? What ideas did he carry from a classroom in Madras to Oxford and then to the highest offices of a new nation? And why do scholars still argue over those ideas today?

  812143433

• 2. A Philosopher by Chance

  ›

  Philosophy textbooks handed down by a cousin settled what Radhakrishnan would study. He had wanted mathematics, but money was tight. The cousin had graduated from the same college, and the borrowed books quietly decided the course of his studies.

  He was born Sarvepalli Radhakrishnayya in Tiruttani, in the North Arcot district of the Madras Presidency. His parents were Sarvepalli Veeraswami and Sithamma, and he was the fourth of six children. His father held a modest post as a revenue official serving a local landlord, known as a Zamindar. In 1896 the boy moved to the Hermansburg Evangelical Lutheran Mission School in Tirupati. Later he attended Voorhees College in Vellore. Scholarships paid his way throughout his schooling. At the age of 16 he entered Madras Christian College, graduated in 1907, and finished his master's degree there too.

  His bachelor's thesis was titled "The Ethics of the Vedanta and its Metaphysical Presuppositions." It answered the charge that the Vedanta tradition had no room for ethics. Professors William Meston and Alfred George Hogg praised it, and it was published when he was only twenty. Yet the same Christian teachers who admired his work also criticised Indian culture. Radhakrishnan later said that this criticism "disturbed my faith and shook the traditional props on which I leaned."

  He described the effect in his own words: "The challenge of Christian critics impelled me to make a study of Hinduism and find out what is living and what is dead in it." He added that his pride as a Hindu, roused by Swami Vivekananda, was hurt by how missionary institutions treated Hinduism. He still spoke warmly of Hogg, calling him "one of the greatest Christian thinkers we had in India." Another teacher, the acting principal William Skinner, wrote a testimonial calling him "one of the best men we have had in the recent years." That letter helped him land his first job, and he later dedicated an early book to Skinner.

  The thesis rested on an idea Radhakrishnan called the Spirit of Abheda, or non-difference. He quoted the philologist Max Muller, who found "ethics in the beginning, ethics in the middle, and ethics in the end" of the Vedanta. From non-difference, Radhakrishnan argued, follows an ethics of love and brotherhood. Every other person is to be treated as a co-equal and "as an end, not a means." In his summary, "The Vedanta requires us to respect human dignity and demands the recognition of man as man."

  519222372

• 3. Chairs and Lectures

  ›

  In April 1909, Radhakrishnan joined the philosophy department at Madras Presidency College. In 1918 the University of Mysore selected him as Professor of Philosophy at its Maharaja's College. There he worked with M. Hiriyanna and A. R. Wadia to train M. Yamunacharya, who later became a professor at the same college. By then he had written for journals such as The Quest, the Journal of Philosophy and the International Journal of Ethics.

  His first book, The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore, appeared in 1918. He judged Tagore's thought to be the "genuine manifestation of the Indian spirit." A second book, The Reign of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, followed in 1920.

  A professorship at the University of Calcutta came next, in the King George V Chair of Mental and Moral Science. In June 1926 he represented Calcutta at the Congress of the Universities of the British Empire. That September he attended the International Congress of Philosophy at Harvard University. In 1929 he gave the Hibbert Lecture on the ideals of life at Manchester College, Oxford. It was published as An Idealist View of Life. That year he was also invited to fill the post left by Principal J. Estlin Carpenter at the same college, which let him lecture to Oxford students on comparative religion.

  King George V knighted him in the June 1931 Birthday Honours. The Governor-General of India, the Earl of Willingdon, formally invested him in March 1932. After Indian independence he stopped using the title and preferred to be called Doctor.

  From 1931 to 1936 he served as vice-chancellor of Andhra University. In his first convocation address he told his audience: "I firmly believe that if any part of India is capable of developing an effective sense of unity it is in Andhra." He closed his praise of the region with the line, "Love of the mother-tongue binds us all."

  In 1936 Oxford named him Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics, and he was elected a Fellow of All Souls College. That year and again in 1937 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though such nominations were secret at the time. In 1939 Pt. Madan Mohan Malaviya invited him to succeed him as vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University, a post he held until January 1948. Throughout, he held to a conviction that "teachers should be the best minds in the country."

  53722631

• 4. The Calcutta Dispute

  ›

  The Modern Review, a journal that opposed giving posts to non-Bengalis, became the main outlet for resentment of Radhakrishnan in Calcutta. As a southerner, he had been appointed to what was described as "the most important chair of philosophy in India." Some in the Bengali intellectual elite disliked this. Soon after he arrived, the journal began regularly criticising his writings.

  When his two-volume Indian Philosophy appeared, in 1923 and 1927, the journal questioned his sources and noted that Bengali scholars went uncited. Its editor admitted, however, that the book had never been sent to the journal for review, so it could form no opinion of it.

  The quarrel sharpened in the January 1929 issue. The Bengali philosopher Jadunath Sinha claimed that parts of his own 1922 doctoral thesis, Indian Psychology of Perception, had been copied into Radhakrishnan's chapter on the Yoga system of Patanjali. Sinha's thesis was published in 1925, and Radhakrishnan's second volume came out in 1927. Sinha and Radhakrishnan traded letters in the journal, and Sinha listed 110 instances of "borrowings."

  Radhakrishnan replied that both men had drawn on the same classical texts. He said standard translations will naturally look alike. He added that he had lectured on the subject before publishing, and that his book was ready in 1924, before Sinha's thesis appeared. The scholars Kuppuswami Sastri, Ganganath Jha and Nalini Ganguli confirmed that he had been distributing the notes in question since 1922. The editor, Ramananda Chatterjee, declined to print Ganguli's letter while continuing to print Sinha's. The publisher's general editor, Professor Muirhead, said the book had been delayed three years because of his own stay in the United States.

  In summer 1929 the argument reached the courts. Radhakrishnan sued Sinha and Chatterjee for defamation, demanding Rs. 100,000. Sinha countered with a copyright suit seeking Rs. 20,000. The two cases were settled in May 1933 on undisclosed terms, and every allegation made in the pleadings and in the journal was withdrawn.

  723180795

• 5. Intuition and the Ladder

  ›

  "The Vedanta is not a religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance." With that sentence Radhakrishnan summed up his philosophy. He was among the foremost voices of Neo-Vedanta. His thinking rested on Advaita Vedanta, which he reinterpreted for modern readers.

  He accepted that the world of ordinary experience is real and varied, and he saw it as grounded in the absolute, or Brahman. He also recast Shankara's idea of maya. For him it was not strict absolute idealism but "a subjective misperception of the world as ultimately real."

  At the center of his thought stood intuition, which he used as a synonym for religious experience. It is a source of knowledge not mediated by conscious thought. He described it as self-certifying, self-evidencing and self-luminous. His interest drew on William James, F. H. Bradley, Henri Bergson, Friedrich von Hügel and Vivekananda. In An Idealist View of Life he argued for intuitive thinking over purely intellectual thought. He recognised many kinds of experience, from sense experience and reasoning to aesthetic, ethical and religious experience.

  Creeds and theology, in his view, are only intellectual formulations of religious intuition. He ranked religions on a ladder by how well they grasp that experience. At the top stood the worshippers of the Absolute. Next came worshippers of a personal God, then followers of incarnations such as Rama, Krishna and Buddha. Below them were those who honour ancestors, deities and sages. At the bottom stood the worshippers of petty forces and spirits. Advaita Vedanta took the highest place.

  He also called Hinduism a scientific religion resting on facts that intuition perceives. The ancient seers, he wrote, were pioneer researchers of the spirit. When the Vedas are called the highest authority, he said, "the most exacting of all authorities is the authority of facts." In his 1926 lectures at Manchester College he put it this way: "the sage finds his God in his deeper self." He rejected charges that Vedanta teaches quietism or world denial. Instead he stressed social service.

  He was not uncritical of the West. Western philosophers, he said, claimed objectivity but were shaped by the theology of their own culture.

  4065757981

• 6. From Campus to Capital

  ›

  In 1928 Radhakrishnan attended the Andhra Mahasabha and seconded the idea of renaming the Ceded Districts division of the Madras Presidency as Rayalaseema. His political career began "rather late in life," after his academic success, and his international standing came first. In 1931 he was nominated to the League of Nations Committee for Intellectual Cooperation. Afterward, in Western eyes, he was "the recognized Hindu authority on Indian ideas."

  After independence in 1947 he represented India at UNESCO from 1946 to 1952. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly of India. There he opposed state institutions giving denominational religious instruction, which he saw as against the secular vision of the Indian state. From 1949 to 1952 he served as India's ambassador to the Soviet Union.

  He also took part in world affairs beyond diplomacy. With Albert Einstein, he sponsored the Peoples' World Convention, also called the Peoples' World Constituent Assembly. It met in 1950-51 at the Palais Electoral in Geneva, Switzerland.

  In 1952 he was elected the first Vice President of India. In 1962 he became the second President, serving until 1967. He had no background in the Congress Party and had not been active in the independence movement. The text calls him "the politician in shadow." His motive was pride in Hindu culture and a wish to defend it. The historian Donald Mackenzie Brown wrote that he "had symbolized the pride of Indians in their own intellectual traditions."

  He also worked on charity. With G. D. Birla and other social workers before independence, he formed the Krishnarpan Charity Trust. He was one of the founders of HelpAge India, a non-profit organisation for elderly people who are underprivileged.

  2728376472

• 7. Bridge and Critics

  ›

  The philosopher Paul Artur Schilpp wrote that it would be hard to find "a more excellent example of a living 'bridge' between the East and the West than Professor Radhakrishnan." Another scholar, Hawley, noted that he drew on both Western and Indian sources. That made him a representative of Hinduism to the West in academic circles. His many books shaped Western understanding of Hinduism, India and the East.

  His influence ran in two directions. In India, his ideas fed into the formation of the nation-state, and his writings helped make Vedanta the accepted essential worldview of Hinduism. In the West, his stress on spiritual experience made Hinduism easier to approach and shaped modern spirituality.

  Criticism has followed from several angles. Radhakrishnan believed in a divine unity running from the seers of the Upanishads to Tagore and Gandhi. He also believed in a commonality among all the world's traditions. Since the 1970s this perennialist view has been faulted for essentialism. Social constructionists argue that religious experiences are shaped by culture and learned in childhood. Rinehart adds that modern Hindu thought is a product of history. Radhakrishnan himself was educated by missionaries and answered Western critics with the Western picture of India.

  Richard King observed that colonial Indologists and neo-Vedantins alike raised Advaita Vedanta as the essence of Hinduism. Hindu nationalists then used the idea to unite Hindus against colonial rule. Rinehart also faulted Radhakrishnan's inclusiveness for placing religious differences under Vedantic truth, a path that can lead to communalism. Hawley questioned his picture of a spiritual East and a rational West, a division built in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since the 1990s scholars have debated how colonial influence shaped images of Hinduism.

  Rinehart cautioned against drawing a straight line, though. He wrote that there is no neat line of causation from Rammohan Roy, Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan to militant Hindus.

  185817577

• 8. Family and Honours

  ›

  In May 1903, Radhakrishnan, then 14, married his distant cousin Sivakamu, who was 10, in an arranged match. They had five daughters named Padmavati, Rukmini, Sushila, Sundari and Shakuntala. Their youngest child was a son, Sarvepalli Gopal, who became a notable historian. Descendants have gone into academia, public policy, medicine, law, banking, business and publishing. Sivakamu died on the 26th of November 1956, after about 52 years of marriage.

  Honours came from many countries. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1938 and a Permanent Member of the Institut International de Philosophie in 1947. In 1954 he received the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award. That year he also received the Collar of the Order of the Aztec Eagle and the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts. Frankfurt gave him its Goethe Plaque in 1959, and the German book trade awarded him its Peace Prize in 1961. He became an honorary member of the Order of Merit in 1963. Finland granted him the Grand Cross of the Order of the White Rose in 1965. In 1968 he became the first person to receive the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship. A portrait of him hangs in the Rajya Sabha chamber. He was nominated sixteen times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and eleven times for the Peace Prize.

  In 1975 he won the Templeton Prize, a few months before he died. He donated the entire amount to Oxford University. He died of natural causes on the 17th of April 1975, at the age of 86, in Madras, now Chennai.

  In 1988 the Films Division of the Government of India produced a documentary about him, directed by N. S. Thapa. The next year Oxford started the Radhakrishnan Scholarships in his memory. They were later renamed the Radhakrishnan Chevening Scholarships.

  16545672