Talks With India's Vice-President: Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

by NANCY WILSON ROSS

1

I REMEMBER very well the first time someone spoke to me about Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. I had been taking part in one of those gloomy conversations, so typical of our times, in which Toynbee is reviewed, Spengler is reappraised, where everyone questions if the world situation is or is not hopeless, if it is really the final Untergang. The man who mentioned Dr. Radhakrishnan was a transplanted European scientist, an authority on the behavior of anthropoid apes. He said, “No, I do not entirely despair of the world — not, at least, when I learn that India has sent as ambassador to Russia its leading philosopher, a world authority on comparative religions, Dr. Radhakrishnan.”

It was some years later that I met India’s great scholar. The meeting took place in India in February, 1953 at his residence in Delhi. By the time I met Dr. Radhakrishnan I knew more about him. I knew that he had been for many years Spalding Professor of Religion and Ethics at Oxford University, that he had served on the faculty of many of his own country’s leading universities, both north and south, and that the English had knighted him. (He may be addressed as Sir Sarvepalli as well as Dr. Radhakrishnan.) Finally I was aware that he had managed, in spite of his prodigious research and his scholarship, to participate actively in public life; that he was not only the vice-president of India but had also presided over UNESCO Conferences.

For that first interview my husband and I taxied from the Cecil Hotel in Old Delhi to a villa in the residential section of New Delhi. It was only a thirty-minute taxi ride, but it seemed, as we looked out on the intensely vivid life of India’s sprawling capital, to encompass a far greater time span. Here was the immense faded-red grandeur of Delhi Fort, a city in itself, dating back to the Great Moguls; here were the shiny new government buildings; and, out of sight of our driver’s pointing finger but well within the city’s environs, were countless tombs, temples, cenotaphs, minarets, pillars, palaces, mosques, mausolea, observatories, fortresses, ruined cities — relics of all those conquering waves of Muslims, Persians, Saracens, Afghans, Marathas, Imperial British, and followers of Gandhi’s satyagraha that have swept in turn over northern India.

Laid against this shorthand historical chronicle were the street scenes of contemporary Delhi where the old and the new have a disconcerting way of melting into one another at exactly the same moment in space-time. These constantly shifting paradoxes provide the traveler in present-day India with endless material for amazement and speculation. On our way that afternoon we passed the gigantic Broadway-type advertisement for Jhansi Ki Rani, one of India’s first color films, a supernationalistic “epic" about a hard-fighting Rani who resisted the British to the bitter end. Near the billboard stood a half-naked sadhu, his body painted in black and white stripes, asking directions of a smartly uniformed policeman. We drove along a street with a sign reading No BULLOCK CARTS PERMITTED, but around the corner two carts were pushing their slow, patient way through a melee of taxis, bicycles, and people. People: so many of them! Layer upon unfamiliar layer: beggars, lepers, veiled ladies from the Punjab, a swami in a yellow robe with his begging bowl, turbaned Sikhs, their black beards veiled in colored chiffon, Pakistanis in karakul caps, government clerks in British tweed coats and thin white dhotis, beautiful women like wind-blown flowers in their bright, floating saris . . .

As we slowed for a traffic light a man in a dusty white turban and loincloth ran alongside the car. As he ran he lifted a flute and blew a few thin, enticing notes, supplicating us, as he did so, with his eyes. When we stopped for the red light he removed the flute and called in a high, sweet, faintly eerie voice like a bewitched choir boy’s. What did he want of us, and what did he have concealed in those heavy, braided bags over his shoulders? “Cobras, mem-sahib,”said the driver. “He wants you to see his pet cobras. He is a snake charmer from the hills.” But the light turned green and we pushed on toward the quiet district where the vicepresident of India resides.

Dr. Radhakrishnan met us at his front door. He was wearing the loose, white, hand-woven garment made of khaddar which Gandhi made familiar to the West. After seeing off the Indian visitors who had preceded us, he extended a long, flexible, and expressive hand to greet us vigorously. His voice had none of the almost birdlike timbre that many Indian voices retain even after they acquire an Oxford accent — which Dr. Radhakrishnan does not have.

A servant led us into the drawing room; a room both Western and modern in feeling; the color tones all light and bright in keys of green, blue, and yellow. On the walls were modern landscapes; the inevitable photograph of a smiling Gandhi with the wreath of marigolds around his shoulders. On the mantel was a small figure of a Buddha. Tea was brought and without any preliminary chitchat Dr. Radhakrishnan began to talk.

2

HE spoke first, very kindly and graciously, of a book he had been told I was planning to do — a book on Buddhism for the Western world, (It was this project of mine which had led Madame Pandit, Prime Minister Nehru’s sister, to arrange our meeting.) Dr. Radhakrishnan said he was “glad, very glad” that such a book was being done. When I told him I coidd only dare to embark upon the task by calling it a “primer” of Buddhism he began to speak simply and feelingly of the meaning of Buddha’s message for the world, and also of Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed — the great teachers who have, by their lives and utterances, “brought the world into a new orbit and wrought inward changes,” who have “left a legacy interwoven into the fabric of men’s minds.”

As he talked I noted something I was to note even more markedly at our second meeting: an inclusive rather than an exclusive quality to his thinking, a way he has of raising any subject above the narrowly specific into the philosophically general, without losing direct focus or evading any point. As I observed how he quietly minimized the differences between peoples and cultures, emphasizing always their similarities and the likenesses of the messages of all great world teachers, I began to feel that everything he said was closely related to the teeming Indian life through which I had just driven, the swamis, the sadhus, the “Kipling’s India” policemen, the veiled women, the snake charmers, the Sikhs who do not cut their hair — and also all the vestiges of ancient cultures that lie on every hand to remind one of the long, cyclic history of humanity, serving to check among the people of the Indian subcontinent that characteristic so typical of Western man, the tendency to consider “today” the only “reality.”

Yet in spite of Dr. Radhakrishnan’s air of profound tolerance there is nothing withdrawn or coldly impersonal about him. Indeed his vigor, a certain impression of physical force that he conveys, and his quick, warm sense of humor, lend added emphasis to his tolerance. Listening to his strong, calm voice I felt that I could well understand how he, a man publicly opposed to war, violence, and all forms of subjugation, spiritual as well as physical, had been able to go as his country’s envoy to Stalin’s Russia and there to talk to the Man of Iron as he was talking now to us. Further, I could see how, in the hottest days of Muslim-Hindu violence and antagonism, he dared to speak at Muslim universities — never on the political issues that were so tragically splitting the country, but always on a higher level; lifting young minds for a few moments above the present turmoil to the plane of eternal values — those values that regularly seem to “disappear” but are as regularly “rediscovered.” For Dr. Radhakrishnan — like Socrates about whom he knows so much — might also be accused of “corrupting” minds by insisting that they boldly examine all points of view; and, like Socrates, it is plain that he would not, could not, withdraw from this activity no matter what the penalties or dangers.

Because of the freedom with which he spoke to us we felt able to talk freely in return. I even ventured to question him about India’s Republic Day parade which we had just recently witnessed in Delhi. We had been amazed — even somewhat disturbed — at the distinctly military tone of the festivities; regiment after regiment marching past, fighter planes flying overhead, even Indian equivalents of our WACS — all of which had formed for us an unpleasant contrast to the “cultural floats” depicting the many peaceful and provincial ways of life of this richly diverse land.

Dr. Radhakrishnan acknowledged his own unease. “I, too, questioned myself during that parade: ‘What are we doing? Is this what India stands for?’”

I asked him if he would be prepared for India to go down rather than see her enter the world’s armament race. His reply came without hesitation. “Yes, if India went down for the right reasons, went down, not merely out of weakness, but out of remaining true to some higher ideal.”

And he added, “It is not necessary that India or any country survive. What is important is the soul and heart and spirit of man. What is survival in an armed camp? Can this kind of experience be life’s meaning?” Then, speaking of Gandhi, whom he once described as “that lonesome man who embodies the conscience of humanity,” he said that this great political saint had seen the truth that if man grows accustomed to the “savage excitements and brutalities of war and believes them to be normal there will soon be no humanity left in our race.”

But he made it clear that he did not consider passive indifference any tool for the problems of our day. He has said in writing, “All religions proclaim with one voice, though in many languages, that we are summoned not to a light-hearted saunter or even to a journey where we can always walk with clasped hands of understanding and friendship, but to a battle where we have to fight the forces of stupidity and selfishness.”

And finally, on the difficult subject of India and “preparedness,”Dr. Radhakrishnan made a point which states very aptly his position in the practical world of politics. “From the very lowest point of view,” he said, “from the point of view of sheer expedience, it makes no sense for India to enter the arms race.”

When we left he walked with us to the front steps. It was late afternoon. The birds were already singing their evening songs in the green trees of the small garden. Outside the gates the professional laundry man, who had been using the clean, sunny area outside the vice-president’s wall as drying space for his laundry, was gathering up his garments. As we thanked Dr. Radhakrishnan for the time he had so generously given us, and felt our hands clasped again in that warm, vigorous grip, I had a momentary sense of his aloneness — the aloneness of the man of superior intellect who has chosen deliberately not to live apart from human struggles in the aloof world of abstract “ideas,” but in the very thick of the current conflict.

3

THE next time I saw Dr. Radhakrishnan was in New York City, on the thirty-fourth floor of a great hotel. He was wearing now not the white khaddar in which I had first seen him but the dress in which Nehru usually appears, the long, plain, tunic-like coat with high collar and buttons down the front. Behind his white head I could see, in the far distance, like one of those miniature landscapes in a Renaissance portrait, a view of the lake in Central Park and a few green trees. I remembered the green trees of his garden in Delhi and the birds at their evening songs. The trees here were far off and there were no birds. We were in the very center of a city of stone and steel.

We spoke for a moment or two about his travels in America. He told me laughingly that he had just addressed a graduating class of girls at the University of Virginia, and had told them they must be prepared to find their future husbands a combination of “savage and baby” and must learn to deal successfully with these two different kinds of creature. He then spoke of an address he had given at McGill University in which he had used Thomas Jefferson’s epitaph as his theme. I had to confess that I did not remember this epitaph and he recited to me the three things that this great American felt he could, at the end of his life, take enough pride in to inscribe on his tombstone: that he had been the author of the Declaration of Independence, that he had helped to hold down religious prejudice in his state of Virginia, that he had founded the University of Virginia.

“These represent the three great fundamental freedoms,” said Dr. Radhakrishnan, “social, religious, intellectual. If these three freedoms, these great values of all civilizations should be lost, what would be ‘won’ by any conflict in which one country or another might seem to win?”

We were right back at the same place where we had parted in Delhi.

But I said that I had for him today a specific question on which I wished him to speak his thoughts. This question had been suggested to me by some recent prophecies of Arnold Toynbee to the effect that when — within the next fifty years — the “whole face of the planet will have been unified politically through the concentration of irresistible military powers in some single set of hands” then this would be the signal for a great spiritual rebirth. The nineteenth-century emphasis on technology, with which man had been living for many years, would be supplanted in the twenty-first century by a strong countermovement from technology to religion. In this reflowering, India might lead, for, said Professor Toynbee, the center of power would “ebb back from the shores of the Atlantic to the Middle East where the earliest civilizations arose 3,000 to 6,000 years ago” and from which also, all religions have come.

Specifically, in relation to this prophecy, I asked did Dr. Radhakrishnan feel that India had some secret of vitality and endurance which might be of value to the world today, a world standing at the crossroads, in one of those cyclic “times of troubles” about which Professor Toynbee theorizes, facing a possibly immeasurable human catastrophe? Would India’s undying interest in the values of the soul survive? Would India offer the sick world some healing message, some spiritual help?

As Dr. Radhakrishnan answered I was again struck by his characteristic manner of approaching a subject. He formed his reply by enlarging the idea embodied in the question; lifting it up and out, away from the specific into the general; making the answer fit a larger frame of reference.

“If there is any one distinctive quality of our age,” he began, “it is the getting together of different parts of the world. In the future man will not talk of our age as the age of wars, rumors of wars, and economic dislocations, but as an age in which different parts of the world have come to ‘jostle’ each other, and thus the fundamentals and the different, attitudes of life have been drawn into closer intimacy.” Here he paused and repeated, “This is the most prominent characteristic of our age.”

After a moment he went on. “If this ‘closing up’ is to result in an effective human community, how is it to be brought about? There are some people who say that as science and technology have been responsible for the shrinking of our horizon may they not be the cementing forces of the new world?”

Again he paused briefly before continuing with special emphasis. “Civilizations are built not on mechanical devices but on basic values. They cannot be built by bread and techniques alone. A human being is not to be regarded as a mere lump of flesh and bone, controlled by conditioned reflexes and social pressures, not merely an economic being — though there are fundamental economic needs to be satisfied. We eat in order to live and we wish to live on planes other than economic also. In other words, we have to admit the reality of a spiritual dimension. Man is not merely body and mind but also a soul.

“Mere intellectual knowledge is not sufficient for welding the people of the world into a single human community. The fundamentals of a civilization are spiritual. The unfortunate part of it is that religions have so departed from their original purity, have lost their dynamic vigor, have degenerated into arid and exclusive sects. They love those who follow their doctrines and disciplines and are indifferent to those who follow other doctrines and disciplines. Sometimes in the name of dogma and rites, which did duty for true spirituality, they persecuted, burned, and tortured those who did not accept their point of view. Religion in this sense of the term cannot serve as the basis for a future world. It is here that perhaps India’s outlook may be of some little use.”He paused and looked directly at me over his glasses. “Note the words ‘some little use,’" he repeated, with emphasis.

“India does not bother much about the historical formulations and denominational expressions of religion which are merely guides to adventure and experience on the spiritual plane. India holds that to pass from word to vision is each individual’s personal adventure. The higher we rise in the spirit of religion, the more do the differences diminish. . . . Just as when we reach a hilltop, the landscape we all see is the same, so the angles of approach, the paths of ascent, do not matter when we reach the ideal of religious life.

“In this respect,” he said — and he moved one hand and raised his brows above his glasses, apparently indicating that he referred to India’s emphasis on the spiritual search as a personal adventure, an individual journey to its universal view — “in this respect, India has stood for a spiritual as distinct from a dogmatic approach to religion. When our country is said to be secular it does not mean that we lay stress on material comforts, worldly interest, knowledge, and power. We make out rather that we stand for a religion which is deeply spiritual and not narrowly dogmatic. A practical demonstration of this view of life is to be found in our country where so many types of religious expression flourish side by side.”

(And I found myself thinking of all the many different kinds of mystics, saints, swamis, sadhus, sanyasins, masters, yogis, priests, all the variety of mosques, minarets, ashrams, towers of silence, sacred caves, temples, shrines, churches that I had myself been aware of in a limited sojourn in India. I saw India’s new national flag with the ancient emblem of the great Buddhist emperor, Asoka, the sacred chakra, or “wheel,” which was also a symbol of a spiritual “center.” I saw Prime Minister Nehru’s beautiful, sincere face under the canopy at a recent Buddhist gathering in Sanchi when he was not ashamed to speak over a microphone before thousands about his troubled heart, his “confusion,” to admit that he had come to Sanchi as a “seeker”: “I try to see light and try to search for it. Often I stumble down, but I get up and go forward.” And I could see Dr. Radhakrishnan’s serene face under his white turban on that same occasion — which was the return of the relics of two of Buddha’s leading disciples from their long sojourn in England at the Victoria and Albert. Museum. I could hear him saying what he had said then about Buddha’s enduring message to “be compassionate, be merciful, be self-controlled”; about Buddha’s reiteration to his disciples of the theme which was also that of Christ, “Seek and ye shall find.”)

4

BUT now Dr. Radhakrishnan was not outside the ancient stupa at Sanchi addressing a mass audience. He was a solitary, sixty-four-year-old man giving an interview on the thirty-fourth floor of a famous New York hotel. Looking down, clasping his expressive, muscular hands together, he continued as though pulling the words from the depths of his being.

“If today wo are trying to build up political unity through the United Nations, economic understanding through international banks and monetary funds, it is time for us to think of a more enduring basis for world unity through a concentration and mobilizing of the forces of its spirituality. In this perhaps the fundamental insights of India’s spiritunlity may be of some advantage to the world.”

He had made his formal reply. Did I have anything further to ask? I said yes, that someone had requested me to speak about a recent television broadcast made by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the distinguished ecclesiastic who is the head of the organization for the propagation of the Catholic faith in the United States. Bishop Sheen, on one of his regular telecasts, had spoken of Buddha, had referred to him as a great teacher, but had added that Buddha himself had said that “there was one to come after him greater than he and his name would be Love.” This was presumed to refer to Jesus Christ. As a great Buddhist scholar, what would Dr. Radhakrishnan think of this?

And again Dr. Radhakrishnan’s reply was characteristic of his fundamental attitude, that of a tolerant seeker for the wider view. “The important thing is not which teacher came first, which second. The important thing is not who preached, or who preaches love, but who can practice it. Who among us can endure deep suffering without malice?” (I thought of Gandhi blessing his assassin as he died.) “Our need is for greater souls among us, for as St. James said, ‘Faith without works is dead.’”

I opened the notebook I had brought and asked, “Could I quote something from one of your essays that I have copied out; something that seems to be particularly pertinent ?”

I read: “If we should wish to build a society in which evildoers are transformed into higher beings, into brothers forgiving one another, and thus free themselves from falsehood, guilt, and crime, we must practice love. The believer today is called upon to stand up against the old and the outworn.

. . . The mystery of life is creative sacrifice. It is the central idea of the Cross, which was such a scandal to the Jews and the Greeks, that he who truly loves us will have to suffer for us, even to the point of death. It is the truth central to all living religions. The victory over evil through suffering and death we have not only in the garden of Gethsemane, in the palace of Gautama, the Buddha, in the cell where Socrates drank the hemlock, but in many other unknown places.”

When I had finished reading he nodded. “You may quote,” he said. And then he gave me his characteristic smile, a smile that has something both warm and wry about it, as though he sees that life — and in particular history — is indeed something of a jokester. “You may quote whatever you like from my written words.” He emphasized the word “written” perhaps because he had — though leaving the decision up to me — indicated that he would prefer me not to quote him on Stalin, President Eisenhower, and other world figures with whom he has talked in confidence, and about whom I had questioned him. He gave as his reason for this caution the explanation that perhaps public men, with grave responsibilities, need to feel that they can upon some occasions, to certain people, unburden their minds freely without thought of subsequent. publicity and possible misinterpretation. Dr. Radhakrishnan has had his own share of misquotation and misinterpretation. One feels that he personally has learned to accept this as a part of the price one must pay for voluntarily leaving the study and entering public life.

In a small book he once wrote on Gandhi, Dr. Radhakrishnan quoted India’s great political saint in phrases that seem to me to be equally applicable to him.

“My motive has been purely religious. I could not be leading a religious life unless I identified myself with the whole of mankind, and this I could not do unless I took part in politics. The whole gamut of man’s activities today constitutes an indivisible whole; you cannot divide social, political, and purely religious work into watertight compartments. I do not know any religion apart from human activity.”

Dr. Radhakrishnan, like Gandhi, draws into the orbit of his appreciation, understanding, and gratitude, all great world teachers, honoring by quotation, and precept, all those founders of world religions who have left humanity its most priceless heritage.

Once again I made my good-bys and left Dr. Radhakrishnan to the next appointment on his crowded American schedule. As I looked back from the doorway of his hotel suite to see his hand raised in farewell, his distinguished white head silhouetted against that distant view of the one small green spot in a city of gray stone, I felt that I had been in the presence of a great transition figure. I seemed to see in this generous but essentially lonely man a prototype of the possible leaders of the future; those men who, with highly developed spiritual sense, and equally developed social sense, may come to serve humanity in the new age eventually to be born from our current “Time of Troubles.”