Pride of India, envy of West

Dr Radhakrishnan was one of the consummate orators in English whose orations had the surge of the serene Ganges and the beauty of gentle waterfalls. He mesmerised the so-called eminent orators of the West with his chaste pronunciation and mellifluous eloquence. Each one of his orations was marked by classic purity of language and stately dignity. They, in fact, scintillated with the mellow wisdom of Indian Philosophy.

Brilliant in exposition and cogent in argument, they regaled the audiences of all nations and transported them into realms of ancient Rome and Greece where great orators were said to have delivered spell-binding orations and swayed millions of people.

According to the eminent columnist P Rajeswara Rao, ‘’In point of range, depth of learning and originality of mind, he was unequalled by any other man of his time in the East and the West and he held his own against the best brains of Oxford and Cambridge, Yale And Harvard. His stentorian voice reverberated from the professorial chair across the civilised world.

There were none to compete with him in terms of command of language, extraordinary elegance of diction, appealing imagery, emotional empathy and intellectual acknowledgement.’’ An eminent intellectual like Lord Morley wondered how he could master the genius of the English tongue. In the words of Dean Inge, Radhakrishnan ‘’rose to the towering heights of pure eloquence and even grazed the heights of poetry.’’

At times, he appeared to be a Shelley or a Schopenhauer and reminded them of astounding orations in the Roman senate. Even Sir Stafford Cripps hesitated to speak after him. Anthony Eden in his ‘ Memoirs’ said that he felt like a boy stumbling across a plough field after a leveret has shown its swift light paces as Radhakrishnan spoke for three hours and created an indelible sensation in Moscow.

Despite countless honorary doctorates showered on him, he was always humble to the core. Pope Paul felt it a privilege to decorate him with the highest distinction of Golden Spur. He had the rare honour of being the only Indian and the second non-Britisher to receive the Order of Merit---the highest and strictly limited distinction conferred by Britain.

The Sri Lankan government honoured him with the title ‘’Sarvaguna Sarvabhouma’’ while Visva Kavi Tagore’s Viswabharathi hailed him as ‘‘Desikottama.’ Varanasi Samskrutha Vidya Peeth addressed him as the very ‘’Vachaspati.”

The Bharateeya Vidyabhavan felicitated him with the most prestigious tile ‘ Brahma Vidya Bhaskara’ and admired his depth of knowledge of both Eastern philosophy and western science as exceptional. No wonder, the philosopher-statesman Dr S Radhakrishnan remains to be the pride of India and the envy of the west.

By SM Kompella