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DR. S. RADHAKRISHNAN
A Conspicuous Example of Multifarious Accomplishments

It is given to very few persons to attain equal distinction in the fields of scholarship and research, of authorship and of adminis­tration. Dr. Radhakrishnan’s career furnishes a conspicuous example of such a multifarious accomplishment.

To him has been given the much prized honour of being a Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford and the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics in the same University. He has also occupied the coveted position of the Upton Lecturer in 1929. He has been the Vice-Chancellor of several universities. As Chairman of the Universities Commission, he was instrumental in furnishing a new perspective and envisaging new ideas in respect of higher educa­tion in India.

After having been the Leader of the Indian delegation to the UNESCO, he became the President of the General Conference of that august body in 1952. He was one of those who took part in the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly which was responsible for the present constitution of India and has been the Vice-President of India and held for five years the very position of President of India with great distinction.

If Dr. Radhakrishnan were asked to designate the happiest years of his life, he would, in all probability, regard the period of his Professorship in the Christian and Presidency Colleges in Madras and his work in the Mysore and Calcutta Universities and his Vice­Chancellorship of the Banaras Hindu University as the most signifi­cant in his personal career, because it was then that he perfected his intellectual perceptions and was able not only to render great service to the cause of education in the League of Nations and in the UNESCO but was able to make his mark as one of the most prominent autho­rities of Indian Philosophy, way of life and religion.

From the days when he contributed to the Library of Philo­sophy and produced his brochure on The Hindu View of Life (which is a reprint of his Upton Lectures delivered at the Manchester College Oxford), he has interpreted in his successive works, consecutive in thought, compact in expression and epigrammatically concise, the real meaning of religious experience as expounded in our scriptures, our systems or philosophy and our classical literature. He makes the proud boast in that book that half the world moves on foundation which Hinduism supplied, and he enunciates the proposition which he has consistently upheld that while fixed intellectual beliefs mark off one religion from another, Hinduism sets itself no such limit. Intellect is subordinated to intuition, dogma to experience, outer expression to inward realisation. Religion is not the acceptance of academic abstractions or the celebrations of ceremonies but is a kind of Life or experience. It is insight into the nature of reality (Darsana) or experience of reality (Anubhava).

He made it clear to audiences in Oxford and Chicago that the Hindu thinker readily admits the validity of several points of view other than his own and considers them worthy of acceptance. He insists that the Hindu solution seeks the unity of religions, not in a common creed but in a common quest. In that little volume also, he gives an account of Hindu Dharma and of the main systems of philo­sophy and of the Hindu interpretation of Samsara, of Karma and of the Vamasrama Dharma.

In his Eastern Religions and Western thought, he has put before us comparisons and contrasts between the speculations of Greece and Palestine and the Christian world on the one hand and Hinduism on the other. He has dealt with obstacles to mutual understanding and has pleaded for the meeting of religions. In his two volumes on Indian Philosophy, he has interpreted the doctrines of the various systems that have originated in our country. He has given us a history of Indian thought as an undivided whole and also as continuously developing.

Under his general editorship, the Ministry of Education of the Government of India has produced a comprehensive History of Philo­sophy, Eastern and Western. He has, in collaboration with Dr. Charles Moore, produced an invaluable Source Book on Indian Philosophy. His little manual, Kalki (or the Future of the civilisation) based on an idealistic view of life, is a notable literary venture. He has also produced popular editions of Bhagavatgita and the Brahma Sutras and has contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Hibbert Journal, philosophical articles of abiding value.

It is illustrative of Dr. Radhakrishnan’s world-wide reputation that he has not only acquired the Doctorate of the notable universities of the world but has been acclaimed as a “Master of Wisdom� by Mongolia and has been awarded the Goethe Plaquette–a particularly  appropriate award inasmuch as the intellectual outlooks of Dr. Radha­krishnan and of Goethe are not dissimilar.

Having known him from his youth and even before he became Professor of Philosophy in Calcutta, I am in a position to appraise his quality of a discerning and humorous acceptance of life which makes him a delightful conversationalist as well as a most reliable adviser.