As the nation observed another Teachers Day on September 5, it is imperative that we remember with gratitude and respect the great teacher, Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.
Being a teacher myself, I sincerely believe that not only ‘September 5’ but the whole month can rightly be dedicated to this great teacher par excellence.
Distinguished philosopher and thinker, prolific writer and gifted public speaker, Dr Radhakrishnan was in the line of the great teachers of the world. Although he adorned many offices in his lifetime, including the highest political offices of the land - Vice-President and President, he remained till the last a teacher. And, the world was his classroom. The final tribute to him as a world teacher was the Templeton award which he won just before his passing away.
Who is a teacher? Referring to a truly religious man, Radhakrishnan says: “The function of a religious man is to disturb, his duty is to wake up the sleepers, to shake the pillars of orthodoxy” (address at the centenary convocation, University of Madras, 1957) These words can equally well apply to the great teacher and to Radhakrishnan.
For over half a century this erudite scholar has disturbed us, awakened the sleepers and shaken the pillars of orthodoxy. A few random samples will suffice.
In 1929, Radhakrishnan was invited to deliver the famous lectures under the auspicious of the Hibbert Trust in England. These were published under the title, “An idealist view of life”. In this work, warning the world against a religion that divorces spiritual realization from earthly life, he says “Religious men seem to have developed unduly the instinct for being unhappy. They seem to have a perverted ingenuity for finding out new contents for sin” (P. 32).
In 1956, as the Vice-President of India, he visited Poland and addressed the University of Cracow speaking about the United Nations, he said, “We need today a sense of humility. We must give up the attitude of righteousness that we are right and our opponents wrong, or the attitude that we may not be perfect but that we are certainly better than our opponents. We must abandon the sense of moral superiority. We must realize that we are slaves of fear, of unlimited egotism. He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone”. Again, at a Kremlin reception given by President VEROSHILOV of U.S.S.R, Radhakrishnan gently reminded those in authority there, “The state exits for man and not man for the state. Karl Marx complained about the capitalistic order that for the enormous majority, it gave mere training to act as machines, that it destroyed the humanity of the Proletarian, that the individual was deprived of privacy and the right to personal development. Any system that suppresses the individual is un-Marxist…..If we give people education and economic opportunity, they will demand freedom of enquiry and criticism. As collective leadership increases, there will be more democratic control of state policies, open discussions of them first within the party and then in public”. What a remarkable foresight!
Radhakrishnan has not spared anyone - not even professors and universities and those who run the universities listen to this. “A college does not become a university simply because we change the name; make the principle the vice chancellor and the Superintendent the registrar. The change of name must imply a change of character. To deserve the name of the university there are certain minimum requirements. When power outstrips quality and education, the result will be disaster”. We can see that Dr Radhakrishnan has used to advice and rebuke with telling effect from the national platforms and the international forums.
Addressing his countrymen, he tells them, ”In present day India we find a few living in luxury, while the millions are terribly emaciated, with nothing to cover their nakedness but a rag for the middle of their bodies.”
Again turning to the societies that put money and success above everything, he says: “society which is acquisitive in its nature, unhealthy in his pleasures, dissolution in its ideals, is a murderous machine, without a conscience”. It is a sad thought that we no longer be able to sit at the feet of the great teacher and get his vice-counsel no longer hear from the platforms or on the air his resonant voice, his measured diction and sit charmed by his dazzling eloquence. It is sad thought indeed.
–– Padma Surendran (The author teaches English to visually impaired college students who stay in the University hostel for Women, Thiruvananthapuram)