Mainstream Weekly

November Revolution : Some Reflections

Hiren Mukerjee — 2008-11-11T21:52:36Z

Sixtyone years have passed since the November Revolution, “the ten days that shook the world”—in the American eye-witness John Reed's memorable words—almost in literal fulfillment of the prophecy in the International hymn—-

The world will shake to its foundations

And we who are nothing shall be all!

Students of history will recall the exhilaration of the English radical, Charls Jams Fox, when he learnt of the fall of the Bastille (July 14, 1789) in Paris after assault by revolutionary masses: “How much the greatest event that has happened in history and how much the best.”

Such words could, with greater warrant, he said about the Great October Socialist Revolution, the creator under the dynamic direction of Lenin and his Bolsheviks, of the first state of workers and peasants in the history of man, the progenitor of a new era of historical development and of the struggle, that has taken place, of “all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism” (Lenin), the signal indeed of a brave, new shift in world forces bursting as under the integument of world capitalism and facilitating, on a growingly global scale, the exproporiation of the expropriators.

“To the old world, the world of national oppressions, national bickering and national isolation,” wrote Lenin in those stormy days, “the workers counterpose a new world, a world of the unity of the working people of all nations, a world in which there is no place for any privileges or for the slightest degree of oppression of man by man.” With firm, closely reasoned faith in the revolutionary potentialities of the masses, Lenin averred that when toiling people “see and feel” that practical measures to transform all life along socialist lines are being taken, “our Government will be invincible”.

When the hopes, vivid and vibrant in the first post-Revolution years, of strong and sustained mass upsurges in Europe failed, the Soviets had to fight virtually alone the world bourgeoisie's concerted effort to strangulate the infant state of socialism. Even the cruelest tests, however, saw the Soviets unvanquished—neither Civil War nor Intervention nor blockade nor engineered famines nor international quarantining could daunt the new phenomenon.

Driven inexorably to building “socialism in one country” (which dogmatists derided), the Soviets moved the mountainous obstacles in the way, built a new economy by their own sheer exertion and inspired all over the world a concrete confidence in the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism. Even the hideous trials of World War II, when the forces of fascism, earlier nursed and nurtured by imperialism, were hurled in all their fury against the Soviet land, ended in the triumph of the great historical process which the October Revolution had begun.

In the decades following World War II, the ideological-political arsenal of the monopoly bourgeoisie has displayed many intriguing anti-Soviet weapons, constantly but vainly being sharpened by Sovietologists, and one has heard of “convergence” and “the end of ideology” of “the industrial state” and of varieties of “neo-Marxism”, and of the crude bogey of a socialist “military threat” and the ballyhoo on “human rights”.

Some cardinal changes have occurred, however, in the world balance of forces and even the American Time magazine (March 13, 1978) was constrained to admit “the global advances socialism has made”. This journal estimated that “self-proclaimed” socialists of one variety or another and the supporters of socialism “rule 53 of the world's sovereign states, controlling 39 per cent of its territory and 42 per cent of its population”. Of course, not in all these countries, power is wielded by believers in scientific socialism, but it is important that fewer and fewer people in the modern world are attracted by the capitalist path of development.

Criticism and self-criticism have always been essential to worth-while work in the cause of socialism. Warding off criticism is, for an individual or an institution, a disservice to itself. “One who is no longer responsive to criticism,” said Brezhnev the other day, “is incapable of good work.” No serious Leninist even remotely claims perfection for the Soviet achievement. There can be no bar, thus, on legitimate criticism of the USSR or of other Socialist States, provided always that it is honest and not so perverse and misguided that it distorts and damages the positive world trends in faovur of the advance of freedom and peace and their fulfilment in socialism.

Till People's China returns to the mainstream of history where it belongs, tirades against the USSR and other Socialist countries will be heard—and even worse, imperialism will be enabled to take objective advantage of such foolish fissures in the world movement—but it is apity, a tremendous pity that a new stirring of the freedom-loving spirit alone can overcome. Meanwhile, also imperialism will exploit situations where “Right” and “Left” extremism fairly coincide and conceptions suitable to imperialism are advanced. “New philosophers” (!) as in France, and certain “Right” and “Left” opportunist “neo-Marxists” find themselves in the same boat with reactionary ideologists and question even the international significance of the October Revolution. The queer Chinese formulation about the USSR being the “main enemy” today, strangely echoed in certain Indian “Left” circles, with entirely imaginary and esoteric arguments or with none, presages danger which the anniversary of the October calls on all People of goodwill to overcome.

India and the Soviet Union are linked in a friendship that the facts of our life uphold. As Indian independence set in train the freedom of a long subjugated Afro-Asian countries, her emergence in truly popular-democratic strength would change the climate in our part of the world. It is this historicity which sustains Indo-Soviet amity.

Unless one chooses to be blind, one cannot but see that, in an often cruelly involved and intricate situation, the Soviet Union, to the full extent of its powers, befriends the forces of freedom in Africa, in the Middle East, in South and South-East Asia and in Latin America. The People's Republic of China has, in this regard, a record which is bleak, and everything is subordinated to the perspective of China putting her own house in order and getting to her feet by 2000 AD, till when, it seems, world advance towards socialism should not be worried over and objective assistance to the US-West Europe-Japan syndrome (with dreadful consequences, specially to Afro-Asia) not grudged! It is a curious, anomalous and even vile recommendation which almost substantiates the charge that China, once a glorious component of world socialism, is turning traitor to it.

Such thoughts are unpleasant and it is the task of all friends of freedom and of socialism to see that the world picture changes and changes as soon as ever it is possible. For such change nothing is more important than the faith that Lenin had in the creative power of the working people. The October Revolution and the Soviet Union, through the ups and downs it has encountered, remain the effulgent witness and confirmation of that faith.

(Mainstream, November 4, 1978)

Violence and Our Youth

Hiren Mukerjee — 2007-12-25T22:16:02Z

FROM MAINSTREAM FILES

This year marked the birth centenary of Prof Hirendranath Mukerjee (November 23). While remembering the veteran CPI parliamentarian (who also functioned for some time as the Leader of the CPI Group in the Lok Sabha) and distinguished scholar-historian, we reproduced the following that appeared in this journal in 1970—this was based on a speech he delivered in the Lok Sabha.

There is a completion lack of a sense of proportion and a fundamental irrelevance to basic issues that are confronting not only our country but the whole world today.

I shall disregard many of the things which are said in season and out of season, specially about West Bengal, the favourite whipping boy of certain sections of our people. History will give its verdict some time or other in regard to which way the wind will blow, as far as the people are concerned, in every part of our country. So, I shall disregard the footling little things said from time to time about West Bengal.

There is no doubt today that there is a lot of violence around. It is in the air, so to speak, whether we like it or not. Some of that violence might even be thought to be subversive, but the main point is that we cannot wish it away. There are fundamental reasons for such social distemper, and our job is to tackle those fundamental reasons, and not merely to beat our breast and shout from the housetops about Naxalites, or what have you. That is not the way in which we have to proceed if we are to settle this problem.

At one time the expression, “divine discontent”, used to be fashionable. Now the discontent of our people, divine or secular, has reached a certain stage and those who are in power must respond to the basic urges indicated in that discontent, or they will quit the stage of history.

Young people everywhere in the world today sense a sort of helplessness about their existence and about the future of man. I would not go into expatiating the reasons for it but the fact of the matter is that the younger generation to whom the world belongs—we are not going to be here in 2000 AD or even earlier than that—who will take charge of creation, and we have to take note of what is agitating their minds and not to think of the antediluvian ideas which someone might have imported from somewhere. From that angle we see how the youth of today in this country as well as in most other countries, sense a sort of helplessness in the air.

Naturally, being young they are more sensitive. They understand how the misery of the people is something avoidable, and, yet, is not avoided. They are faced with the problem of unemployment with nothing whatever to do, nothing to sustain their physical being, nothing to sustain their spiritual dreams, visions and aspirations. They look at the farce of the plans in India which, in spite of having done a certain amount of infrastructural and super-structural apparatus building, have not touched the heart of the problem, the core of those things which really matter to the people of our country. The result is that the masses, except where they can be led away by easy demagogy, which also flourished in this kind of atmosphere of desperation, are astir in one way or another, in a creative way or in a destructive way. This is not a matter of political infighting; this is not a matter which one can ascribe only to something which has been done by some foreign agency. One cannot merely say that the Communist Parties—Right, Left, Middling or whatever they are—are to be put in the same damn box and sent out of the country. We cannot solve problems that way because problems have now become so acute that one just cannot deal with them in that kind of authoritarian fashion.

I have heard Gandhiji's name bandied about. Gandhiji preferred violence to cowardice. In 1920-21 Gandhiji was on record—one can consult Tendulkar's biography of Gandhiji—as having told the Muslims who were joining the movement in enormous numbers in those days that if Swaraj was not achieved by the Gandhian method in a year, they were free to follow their Quranic tenets which did not adhere to the idea of non-violence. In 1942, when he gave the slogan, “Do or Die”, he was ready to say, “Leave India to anarchy and to God.” He was ready for certain things because he was a creative personality.

I cannot enter into a discussion on this but let us not bring Gandhiji's name and damn all violence. What is the good of saying, all violence is rotten? It is a part of life; there is no doubt about it. Our merely saying that violence is rotten will not help eliminate the fact of violence being practised by all and sundry. You have terror of all sorts—red terror as well as white terror of even more dastardly description. If these are facts of life which we have to tackle, let us not merely say that we are against violence.

I have heard so much being said that the Constitution is being subverted. But I have said before and I repeat it: Did not Abraham Lincoln, the very high priest of democracy, say that the people have an indivisible right, their constitutional right, of amending the Constitution, and, if they so choose, their revolutionary right to overthrow and subvert it? He said this in that very famous Geettysburg speech which must have been read by everybody.

One may want a revolution in as gentlemanly a manner as possible. That is a different thing. Can one do it? Let us hope we can do it. Let us get together in such a fashion, mobilise all progressive forces in such a fashion, that we can eliminate all avoidable violence. We can go ahead in that manner if we have some ideological orientation. If one has no ideological orientation, then one will have politicking of the sort which everybody is practising, from Smt Indira Gandhi downwards in this country. Every political party is practising political manoeuvring. They have not a touch of ideological thinking. If we have no ideology, the people would call us back to ideology.

Grapes of Wrath

WHAT exactly is happening in my State? Many have read the book The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck. The grapes of wrath are stored in my part of the country. They could be grapes of beauty, too. Their juice is the life-blood of the people. What do we want? What sort of grapes do we want? Do we want grapes of beauty or grapes of wrath? What are we going to give to our young people? Nobody cares to answer this kind of question.

That is what worries the youth of today. It is no good dealing with footling little political problems that came up from time to time, and winning one's point and gloating over it, because after gloating over it, one will have to wallow in the misery of defeat. What are we going to do about it? Violence is in the air, one cannot just stop it. The politicians of every hue have grievously failed and it is no surprise that our people are in a towering rage.

Talking of West Bengal, I do not want to claim any primacy for my part of the country as to what is happening there. If we cannot tackle it creatively and successfully, that will happen in the rest of the country tomorrow or the day after. There is no stopping it. One cannot merely shout from the housetops about Naxalites and other menaces. One cannot just stop it. There was a well-known writer Franz Fanon. He has been connected with the Indian Council of Africa. This is what Fanon has said inone of his most beautiful books, The Wretched of the Earth:

This irrepressible violence is neither sound nor fury nor the resurrection of savage instincts. It is man recreating himself.

One may differ from it. Maybe, we are at a stage of life when this kind of statement comes to us as a shock. Maybe, most of our people get a shock at the sight of blood, specially at the sight of our own blood. Maybe, that is the way in which we are constituted. But that is no reason for thinking that the problems of the world would come to be solved easily and in the way we like it.

Winds of Change

WHEN that sort of thing has taken place in different regions and in different periods of history, a new mystique is in the air today and you have to tackle it. What is that mystique? It is a kind of celebration in the manner of that thinker Sorel, of “cleansing” violence which will “rejuvenate the earth and transform former slaves and masters into full human beings”. This is the kind of feeling which at one time used to inspire us also. I remember Jawaharlal Nehru writing in his book, The Discovery of India, that there were many people in our country for whom the Bastille had not fallen and that for them the great convulsions like the Russian Revolution or the French Revolution or the Chinese Revolution had not taken place.

Winds of change are blowing not only in other parts of the world but over our country also. These winds of change are blowing furiously which it is necessary to understand. When I see people suffering in the struggle for Afro-Asian freedom demand what they call “equal humanity or equal annihilation”, when I find this new mystique also operating here, I have to grapple with it. I wish somebody like Gandhiji could understand what the temper or the spirit of the age was like.

Here is an age which is distracted beyond description. Can we meet our children, talk to them face to face and ask them moralisingly to follow this tenet or that? Are we not aware of the guilt that is in our soul today? Where is it leading to? This is leading to the outbreak of violent activities. This is leading to impatience, to a frantic frenzy for breaking our bonds.

I know that the non-ideological mind will be allergic to any statement which has nothing whatever to do with the miserable job which may be on hand at a particular moment. But you have to have an ideological approach to the problem. If we do not, all this talk about what we are going to do to Bengal, martial law or no marital law, will lead us nowhere. That is the warning. That is the handwriting on the wall which we have to see. Seeing that, possibly one would like to have the other kind of dictatorship which some of our people would like to have. They are talking about Generals taking over. They are talking about shutting up of the Parliament shop. All that is not violence to some persons, but what I say is violence because what I say is based on ideological conviction and historical understanding.

I would like, therefore, to say: please do think of the basic presuppositions of an Indian living today. Please do not run away from the fact that the country is facing problems that cannot be tackled by normal methods, please do not forget that if violence is not channelised in a creative fashion, it breaks out in orgies of brutality as have taken place in Ahmedabad, Bhiwandi and elsewhere. Please do not forget that the young people of today are depressed beyond words and that is why, all over the country, they are getting the sympathy of the common man. When a bus is brunt or something is done to anybody, the people do not intervene because they have come to believe that all politics is today a game of blackguardry, that politicking is going on, that corruption is rampant, that morality is nowhere in the picture, and some sanctimonious people talk in moralising tones to the youth of our country. That is why the youth of our country is in revolt. That is why so much violent manifestations are taking place.

If one does not take note of it, if one merely tries to apply some remedy from the outside, it will not cure the disease. One has to go to the root of the matter. Merely talking in terms of law and order being subverted is not tackling the problem. Something very much bigger than that is happening all over the world and also in my country, because, we are not an anchorite peninsula separated from the stream of world events. We have to be in the stream of world events. We have to solve our problem which also happens to be the problem of the world. [Based on the author's speech in the Lok Sabha on November 7, 1970]

(Mainstream, December 5, 1970)

Reminiscences of Radhakrishnan

Hiren Mukerjee — 2007-12-03T16:11:20Z

November 23, 2007 marked Prof Hirendranath Mukerjee's birth centenary. The veteran parliamentarian, CPI leader, distinguished scholar-historian and eminent Marxist intellectual passed away in Kolkata on July 30, 2004 at the age of 97. Remembering him on this occasion we are reproducing an article he wrote in Mainstream (April 26, 1975) following the death of Dr Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan. We are also reproducing two pieces written by distinguished parliamentarians Prof Madu Dandavate and Rabi Ray (that appeared in the Mainstream Independence Day issue in 2004) and a tribute by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the present Governor of West Bengal, that was published in The Hindu around the same time.

—Editor

The first awardees of Bharatratna were three eminent Indians—Raman, Rajaji and Radhakrishnan. I remember once having written somewhere that those were the three Rs of Indian sensibility. With Radhakrishnan's passing away, all three are gone—a loss to India that can hardly be measured.

Death, of course, is inexorable. And death at ripe, old age, much beyond the biblical span, is not to be unduly grieved over. For a considerable time now, Radhakrishnan was virtually non est. Yet his death is a wrench; it means a gap in India's life which can be filled by none else. A Bharatratna, in every sense of the term, has left us for ever.

“This world of ours,” Radhakrishnan once wrote, “is not the natural home of perfection.” No men is perfect nor can be, nor even wish to be, for perfection is dull, like paradise, a full stop to things and therefore abysmally dismal.

There were chinks in the armour of greatness which Radhakrishnan could claim he could put on, but in his own very individual way he did have a certain greatness. Once in 1940 or 1941, speaking in his presence before a small and select crowd, I had presumed to say some impishly critical things about him, adding, however, that he was the only great man I knew to whom I could say anything to his face—since then, I have known a few more, of course, but that is another story. Perhaps the provocation was an English friend's whispering into my ears that he had felt bowled over by Radha-krishnan's “words of superb wisdom”, making me retort that the “words”, doubtless, were fine but were somewhat phoney. This kind of thing never made a difference to the affection which Radhakrishnan had for me, for he knew that while I admired him tremendously, I did have my reservations about much of what he thought important.

I came to know him from a distance when I was a student of Calcutta University and he was one of the luminaries on its then, truly bejewelled Faculty. He would often take the chair when some foreign academic celebrity gave a lecture, and he would speak scintillatingly at the end, making us all so proud of our India, then unfree and very much in need of such patriotic salve. He had a hand, I learnt, in my selection, through many channels, as a Government of Bengal scholar for study abroad. I was at Oxford when in 1929-30 he gave his celebrated Upton Lectures at Manchester College. I can easily recall the pride I felt at his speaking with grace and power, not a scrap of a note assisting him, words flowing sonorously and effortlessly for a full hour, eastern and western lore felicitously drawn upon to fortify his formulations.

Once, in his audience, I found myself next to E.B. Havell—then a hero to all of us for the great work he had done for Indian art studies—who asked me why the “professor” had translated anandam not as “bliss” but as “perfection”. Even now, I remember Havell's question but not whatever answer I must have given, for that could have been of little value. Celebrities in Oxford's academic life, I remember, listened almost with astonishment to Radhakrishnan's exposition which was unique, not only because of his apparent mastery of Indian thought as well as of Western learning, but also for his easy and colourful handling of a language to which he had not been born.

With my friend and teacher, J.C. Ghosh, then lecturing in Bengali to ICS probationers in Oxford, I met Professor Radhakrishnan often in Oxford and also more rarely in London. Shedding his turban but not his long coat, he would board a bus with me to come to my digs for a meal and a chat, and of course his room in Walton Street were always open to us—he would sit by the fire, take off his socks, and perhaps sip coffee holding the cup in characteristic fashion, his fingers all around it. Could one believe it, but it is a fact that one day Dr Ghosh joked: “Ah, professor, it's a lovely May morning, with girls in beautiful summer frocks, wandering in the streets, but you are a bigwig and you can't accost any of them!” And Radhkrishnan at once replied: “D'you think I can't go and fall in love with the next girl? I can, but I won't.” These words have remained stuck in my memory, words, to my mind, redolent of the peculiar combination in the cultivated Indian thinking, of attachment and detachment at the same time.

In the summer of 1930, when Gandhiji's Civil Disobedience movement was at its height, Radha-krishnan was called upon to give a sermon in the chapel of Manchester College, Oxford, a Unitarian foundation which saw no anomaly in a heathen speaking from the pulpit. He took as the text of his sermon a passage from Ezekiel: ”I will overturn, overturn, overturn it; and it shall be no more until he came whose right it is and I will give it him.” (Ch 21, verse 26) We knew later that he was, when he spoke, feverish and unwell, which perhaps lent his speech—an unforgettable one—a kind of agonised intensity, the voice of his country hungering and thirsting for freedom from foreign subjection.

A couple of years later, when Radhakrishnan gave the Hibbert Lectures in London, Bertrand Russel was in the audience and told him, as one eminent expositor of philosophy to another, that he had never heard philosophy better expounded—a truly significant tribute. It was characteristic of Russell that when Radhakrishnan tried to get him to come to India, perhaps to Mysore, for a while, he said he did not relish the idea of witnessing the Middle Ages in the twentieth century!

Manchester College is somewhat on the periphery, as it were, of Oxford, but it was not long before Radhakrishnan's reputation got him honourable admission to the University's “holy of holies”. A perceptive benefaction created for him the Spalding Chair of Comparative Religoin, and Radhakrishnan became a full-fledged Professor of the University, a Fellow of All Souls and Honourary Doctor of Civil Laws, the University's highest distinction. When Oxford tried belatedly to make up for an ealrier (and imperialist-motivated) indifference to Rabindranath Tagore by sending three of its distinguished alumni to Shantiniketan with the scroll of an honorary doctorate, it was appropriate that Radhakrishnan did the honours. The very first book that Radhakrishnan had published, when barely thirty, was on The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (1918) and he had grown to be the Poet's successor, so to speak, as India's first cultural ambassador to the world.

It was characteristic of the man that he did not hesitate, when he was a member of the League of Nations' Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and his luggage as he travelled was immune from Customs examination, to bring back from Europe every time in the early and middle thirties a collection of valuable books on socialism which British Indian Customs would never have permitted entry in this country. I recollect vividly how some of my friends, like the late Sajjad Zaheer, helped in this matter. When Radhakrishnan grabbed me affectionately for a job, my first, at Andhra University, I found that the Professor had dumped the contraband in Andhra University library which was thus endowed with the best single collection anywhere then in India of socialist literature. It is with some chagrin that I discovered that some years later, when he and I had left Waltair, his successor in office, Sir C.R. Reddy, had, with a zeal worthy of a better cuase, handed over the priceless collection to the “authorities”, presumably the police.

RADHAKRISHNAN was never a socialist, but he had tremendous intellectual curiosity and an innate liberalism of thought. “Cut out your class war stuff and I am with you,” was the sort of things he would and did say from time to time, and that was the furthest he came to Marxism. But at Andhra he encouraged me because, as he said once publicly, I was perhaps sowing what used then to be described as “dangerous thoughts” in the minds of my students but that, according to him, was good work since it “stirred the soil” of yong people's brains and made them fruitful! Once, during my eighteen month stint at Andhra University, his international stature helped me against the wrath of the British Collector of Vizagaptanam, a powerful member of the university Syndicate, who had seen a letter of mine in The New Statesman and Nation and thought I was a sedictious character who should be outside the University's portals.

His British Knighthood notwithstanding, Radhkrishnan was a patriot to the core, and though, understandably, aloof from national struggles wished them well. During the August 1942 movement, he was the Vice-Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University and developed for a time a certain allergy towards communism because he thought the policies of the party and the alleged activities of some of its members were deterimental to the nation's intersts. Even so, he never could descend to being a full-throated antagonist to the revolutionary ideology of the modern age. It was a good job, indeed, that as freedom came he was inducted into the Constituent Assembly and then sent to Moscow as India's Ambassador. He was no diplomatist, but his personality and his accomplishments gave him a unique position in the diplomatic corps—he would not dine and wine in the usual way, his social graces were different from those of the West (compare, in this connection, C.E.M. Joad's book on him, Counter-attack from the East), perhaps in the midst of conversation he would hum to himself Sanskrit hymns while the other fellow wondered what had happened, but he was accepted as a highly worthy representative of India, in some of his ways a bit of a freak but a magnificent person. No wonder Stalin, who had cold-shouldered his predecessor in the Indian Embassy, Smt Vijayalakshmi Pandit, received him with great respect. Radhakrishnan spoke to Stalin on a level of easy equality which no politician in his place could imagine possible, and as he left his host, wished him well and tapped him gently on the shoulder, a typical Radhakrishnan gesture, which startled Stalin and nearly brought tears into his eyes. The man of steel, tempered and perhaps somewhat twisted in the protracted fire of revolutionary ordeals, had not experienced such a gesture as man to man for a long stretch of years.

FROM 1952 to 1962 Radhakrishnan was the Vice-President of the Republic of India, chairing the Rajya Sabha with unmatched grace and authority, bending a sometimes turbulent House to his will in a manner that remains unique. From 1962 to 1967 he was the President of India, a position which Jawaharlal Nehru had wished him to occupy even earlier, and it is a pity that for some time the Philosopher-President did appear to develop some symptoms of alienation from the Prime Minister, a doubtful episode which is better forgotten, for it was irrelevant to the basic theme of their friendship. Perhaps the trouble, if it can be said respectfully, with Radhakrishnan was that with his endless interest he was even drawn a little towards political power and some taste for it, and it was a good thing that the phase was very transient. As head of state, he symbolised powerfully the spirit of our India and the golden words that flowed like a felicitious torrent from his lips when he spoke at world gatherings left most foreign dignitaries somewhat dazed and spellbound.

If one had heard him often, one came to feel, however, that there was a certain much-of-a-muchness quality to his orations. There is no doubt at all, however, about their superlative excellence, just as there is no doubt about the power and beauty of his written work—The Hindu View of Life (1926), The Idealist View of Life (1932), Eastern Religion and Western Ethnics (1939) and, above all, his magnum opus, the two volume on Indian Philosophy (1923, 1927), apart from many other remarkable books flowing from his pen. He did have at one time his share of detractors who slyly hinted at his alleged unoriginality, and once or twice, even insinuated charges of plagiarism. Perhaps sometimes, as I have known, his stupendous memory scooped up what somebody else had said or thought, and in the fluent felicity of his exposition unconsciously reproduced it, but no carping criticism could affect the quality of his truly stupendous scholarship and his unequalled mastery of language. One could quarrel, of course, with some of his ideas, his predilection, for example, for an eclectic ensemble of idealist thought. I told him once, doubtless presumptuously, that the title of one of his Oxford lectures, “The World's Unborn Soul”, was a terrible irritant! His fixation about religion would make him say, for instance, that “the mechanism of the world is a problem for science, but not its mystery which is the subject of religion”, a very strange statement indeed, from a twentieth century philosopher. When he contested Albert Schweitzer's dictum that Indian thought, in the main, suffered from “world-and-life-negation”, he appeared to be doing some special pleading—but of course, in whatever he did, his manner was impressive and elegant. Someone has formulated the basic grouse against him picturesquely by pointing out that Radhakrishnan's work inspires rather than instructs the reader, but alas! we have had in India “an unwholesome surfeit of inspiration from Yajnavalkya to Vivekananda”.

Wherever he was, his books would also be there. And so, thinking of him, one visualises Radhakrishnan, whether in Rashtrapati Bhavan or in a friend's house alongside the Lakes in Calcutta, half-stretched in bed among masses of books and papers, turning pages even as he gossiped—yes, he enjoyed gossip, sometimes also with an ironic twist, gossiped about men and things, about cabbages and kings or what have you, all with an unmalicious, but also a frank unsanctimonius human curiosity that nothing could kill till his sight declined and the partings from his beloved books made the salt of his spirit lose its savour and he lost all zest for life. For months on end he was alive but dead to the world. Even so, as he returns to the elements the Indian earth shakes and heaves with a loss that is irreparable.

(Mainstream, April 26, 1975)

This was a Man

Hiren Mukerjee — 2007-05-30T22:57:56Z

For four decades and more, this gentle colossus strode our Indian world and his place among the great figures of our time is secure. But his uniqueness lay in the unobtrusive opulence of endowment which gave him, in the thick of politics and in the face even of frustrations, a peculiar refinement and grace of spirit. It was not only that he was “a man without malice and without fear” but that he carried an ache in his mind and heart, an ache which betokened kinship with the whole wide world. It was this, more than any particular tangible quality, which marked him out from the world's politicians. Some of the latter have made a more powerful impact on contemporary history. They have been big men, no doubt, in bulk if not always in essence, but perhaps one should hesitate to call them great. They have had stature, but unlike Jawaharlal, hardly the soul commensurate with it. They scarcely knew what was the very breath of Jawaharlal's being—an innate charity in the sense in which St. Paul expounded it to the Corinthians, and something of the compassion which the Buddha preached. Jawaharlal was no maker of history, for he had neither the strength nor the crudity that was needed, but in his own way he was peerless. There is thus a depth of meaning in the tribute paid to his memory by one of India's acutest thinkers, C. Rajagopalachari:

… a beloved friend is gone, the most civilised person among us all. Not many among us are civilised yet.

Jawaharlal's smile, the red rose on his button-hole, the easy enchantment of his manner, whether with children or with adults, his love for the sights and sounds of Nature, attested an aesthetic bent of mind. Often in moods of introspection which, even when overwhelmed with continuous work he could never entirely shed, he felt the injustice, the unhappiness and the brutality of the world darkening everything about him and saw no way out, but there was in him also something of the pagan who knew the rich and tolerant variety of life and gloried in it—for life had not only “swamps and marshes and muddy places” but also “the great sea and the mountains, and snow and glaciers, and wonderful starlit nights, and the love of family and friends and the comradeship of workers in a common cause, and music and books, and the empire of ideas”. It was his sense of this beauty which was revolted as he heard life itself, as it were, “wail for the world's wrong”. And when, with Gandhi as his guide, he had seen at close quarters how his people had to live, he knew he was to be for ever with those “to whom the misery of the world is misery and will not let them rest”. He is no mere politician who comes to politics on account of the compulsion of his whole being and not for the usual trivialities. And Jawaharlal, though in many ways very much a politician, had a vital part of himself utterly untainted by the peculiar squalor of political life… Jawaharlal Nehru cannot be judged, by reference only to what was achieved during his tenure of power, the economic advance of the country and the place of India in the comity of nations. He is entitled to be judged by history in the light of what he did and sought further to do “to free the minds of men and set them in movement, to release his people from the grip of a parochial nationalism and choking allegiances that diminished man”. He made many mistakes, no doubt, but they were due, in general, to the defects of his qualities. In pre-independence days, when fighting the fissiparous forces that, with the blessings of imperialism, brought about the Partition of India, he was not realist enough to see what he did not wish to see in the communal picture. However, even as he chided the then Muslim League for its misguided petulance and asked it to “line up” with the Congress in the struggle for freedom, his generosity and patent sincerity was never in doubt. In the post-independence period he placed before his people the vision, the ideal and the perspectives of socialism, but he was not realist enough to call sternly for the social discipline and even austerity which an underdeveloped country had necessarily to practice on a wide and somewhat egalitarian basis if the requisite economic advance was to be achieved without unconscionable delay. Too often the native hue of his resolution was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and he thought also in flashes that came to him naturally and without the cool and collected concentration which could have been a corrective to the somewhat loose and tenuous poetic quality of his conclusions. He had a horror of orthodoxy of every sort and the doctrinal dogmatism which, as a factor in social evolution, has a great deal to answer for, but often a certain amorphousness and lack of positivity, which could be pretty but was none the less banal, crept in to his thought and inhibited action. Even so, whether in the right or in error, there was in him a luminous quality, for in whatever was evil he never would acquiesce, and to the end he was the non-conformist, determined to find the answer to the problems of his India, gifted with vision that is life-giving and a passionate concern for its fulfilment, moving forward, even in his most passive moments, on account of his own dynamic commitment to ever widening perspectives. “I am sorry in a way I will not be there to see and share,” he once said, “the new dimension to the human mind” introduced by the stupendous recent advances in science and technology. And yet, without self-pity or false pride, he spoke to students of Allahabad University:

I may have only a few years to live and the only ambition I have is that to the end of my days I shall work my hardest and then when I have done my job there is no need to bother about me further.

To the very end he laboured, taking on burdens that would have broken the back of most other people. And he worried, particularly as he felt he might not have much longer to live, that he had “promises to keep” to his people and to posterity, and there were miles and miles to go before he could call it a day. No less than his critics he was conscious of vast tasks still undone, but he knew no way, consistently with his convictions and his view of men and things, along which he could go ahead faster and without damage to the values that he cherished. Here, indeed, lay his historic failure—the failure to achieve change for fear of the price that might have had to be paid and in deep concern for the right means so that the future was not to be garish and crude. More than most people in positions of power, he gave thought always to the paramount problem of our age, that of the transition to the new society. He knew that in class society one finds release of the spirit in falling back into worlds of one's own, in art and in the illumination of knowledge and of sensitive perception, but that when society is purged of the dross of ages, one wakes, as it were, into a common world of air and light, a world which is the patented preserve of no elite but belongs to all. He knew also that the transition was difficult and prolonged and painful and yet had to be made, for the very meaning of history lay in such human, and often necessarily fallible, endeavour. H e knew he had great authority, which he could not run away from nor could lay aside like a wad of notes, and this authority needed to be wielded for helping, in India and abroad, the advance of man towards a world awake. Here, again, his knowledge and his sensitive perception proved a drag, for he was timorous of the zigzags in the road to revolution, the chasms that from time to time gaped along the way, and the cost involved in making the toilsome journey. It may be that history will judge him harshly, but for his own people who have known something of his mind and heart the task of judgement is not so simple. If he shrank from jobs set him relentlessly by history, he did it not by reason of guile and petty calculation but by reason of the love he bore mankind.

(Excerpted from the author's book on Nehru, The Gentle Colossus)

The author, a distinguished parliamentarian, functioned in the Lok Sabha as the Leader as well as Deputy Leader of the Communist group.