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D. ANJANEYULU

The very first impression that one had of the phenomenon known as Pattabhi is one of breathtaking velocity, “He walks fast, he talks fast, he thinks fast, he writes fast�, remarked that eminent journalist, the late Mr. Iswara Dutt, one of the Doctor’s most ardent admirers.

As a medical practitioner, Dr. Pattabhi was known in his time, for the quickness of his diagnosis, not to speak of its correctness. As a practitioner in the field of public life, he was even better known for the quickness of his political diagnosis. As for the efficacy of his cures at the national or regional level, there could be two or more opinions.

There could, however, be no two opinions about the quickness of Dr. Pattabhi’s grasp of the fundamentals of any problem–political, economic or social. He was a first-rate intellectual, who pooh-poohed the role of the academic intellectuals in India’s struggle for independence. A resourceful theoretician, he preferred to brush all theories aside in the insistent effort to get down to the brass tacks. Not given to simplistic responses, he bowed low before the simplicity and soundness of the Mahatma’s solutions and exposed them with a subtlety and skill, unexcelled among the latter’s disciples. It was not for nothing that Gandhiji said: “I am the Bania Sutrakara, and Pattabhi is my Brahmin °ä´Ç³¾³¾±ð²Ô³Ù²¹³Ù´Ç°ù.â€�

Apocryphal stories are told of how he would hold an English newspaper (The Hindu) in his hands and read from it the news in Telugu for the benefit of his semi-literate companions at his doorstep as if he were reading from the Andhra Pallika, This was a fair measure of the speed of his uptake and mastery of the languages. In addition to Telugu and English, he had an admirable fluency in Sanskrit, Hindi and Urdu. As Chancellor of Nagpur University, while serving as Governor of Madhya Pradesh, he is known to have delivered his address in Sanskrit.

As a staunch protagonist of Swadeshi, and as a devout follower of Gandhi, Dr. Pattabhi went through all the motions of discarding English on the platform and in the Press. But obviously, he would not have been able to do without English as a vehicle of communication in the second decade of this century, when it was the dominant language in public life. Despite his ambidexterity in the matter oflanguage, an unprejudiced observer cannot help the feeling that he was a better writer in English than in Telugu or any other language. For the simple reason that he belonged to a generation, whose education was entirely in the English medium.

His earliest publications were in English. They include the booklet Indian National Education (1910), produced jointly with his close friend, Kopalle Hanumantha Rao, the founder of the Andhra Jateeya Kalasala, and the one on Indian Nationalism, brought out three years later. A majority of his other books were also in English. Notable among them are: On Khaddar (1931), Socialism and Gandhism (1938), Gandhi and Gandhism, in two volumes (1942), The History of the Indian National Congress Vol. I (1935) and Vol. II (1947) and Feathers and Stones (1946).

It is true that Dr. Pattabhi was not by profession, a man of letters, whose writings should be judged by their stylistic elegance or aesthetic appeal. He was, no doubt, in a hurry to present certain facts and convey his ideas relating to them. His output was essentially in the category of the literature of information. But no reader should go away with the impression that Dr Pattabhi was unaware of or insensitive to the graces of style, the beauty of idiom, the turn of phrase or the appeal of the figures of speech.

There is no doubt that the “History of the Congress� was Dr. Pattabhi’s magnum opus. The first volume in particular touches the high watermark of his own achievement. There is no point in rejecting it out of hand with the superior remark that Pattabhi is no Gibbon. For the simple reason that Gibbons do not go abegging in this country or any other. For that matter, even Nehru may not be a Gibbon. It would do us no harm to acknowledge Dr. Pattabhi’s remarkable capacity for assimilating a mass of miscellaneous historical and political material and presenting it in lucid and cogent a manner as was possible for a single writer, unaided bya secretariat and a reference library. In the event, the account was readable as well as reliable.

An interested reader will have no problem in going through a volume of nearly a thousand pages. While the division into parts is done with a sense of historical perspective, the chapter headings are chosen with an eye to vividness of phrasing. To take not only a few examples, “Our British Friends�, “Our Indian Patriarchs�, “Gandhi Bound�, “A Fight to the Finish�. “to the Wilderness�, “Marking Time� and “From the Fast to the Loose Pulley� are picturesque enough to provoke anyone’s imagination. They could have been thought of only by a historian, with a flair for journalism, and an instinct for subediting.

The introductory and the concluding chapters have an evenness of flow, a compactness of expression, a richness of diction and a vividness of metaphor that cannot escape the trained eye of a student of history as literature. Reviewing the movements of social and religious renascence like the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, Theosophical Society and Ramakrishna Mission, he says:

“All these movements were really so many threads in the strand of Indian Nationalism and the Nation’s duty was to evolve a synthesis so as to be able to dispel prejudice and superstition, to renovate and purify the old faith, the Vedantic idealism and reconcile it with the nationalism of the new age. The Indian National Congress was destined to fulfil this great mission.�

Paying a tribute to the great patriot and orator of Bengal, whose political moderation and loyalist stance he did not share, he himself grows eloquent:

“In the Valhalla of Indian politicians there lies in a prominent niche the spirit of Surendranath Banerjee, who had been for over four decades connected with the Congress and whose trumpet voice, resounding from the Congress platform in India, reached the farthest recesses of the civilized world, For command of language, for elegance of diction, for a rich imagery, for emotional heights, for a spirit of manly challenge, his orations are hard to beat; they remain unapproachable. The spice of his speeches was his avowal of loyalty. He developed this into a fine art.�

Coming closer to his own time, towards the Rt. Hon, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri, he could afford to be more familiar, even patronising:

“Mr. Srinivasa Sastri no doubt stepped into the shoes of Gokhale as the President of that great and noble order–the Servants of India Society, but by his inherent temperament as well as by the eternal conflict raging in his breast between his extremist inclinations and moderate ‘conviction,� between principle and expediency, between the ultimate and the immediate, he was always content to remain a -bencher, though he loved to praise the cross-bench mind.�

It is in the conclusion, however, that the author reaches the climax of his grand style, worthy of a Banerjee or a Besant, and a lot more graceful than either. The panoramic view, presented here, is brilliantly picturesque:

“Thus has the stream of the Congress, that had its humble origin in Bombay in 1885, flowed on for half-a-century, now as a narrow channel and now as a wide river, here cutting across wood and forest and there eroding hill and dale, at one place pooling its freshes into a bed of serene and even stagnant waters, and at another, presenting a mighty and roaring torrent–all the while, swelling its volume and enriching its content, by an unceasing flood of annual downpour of new ideas and new ideals and waiting, with pious faith, to realise its destiny by the final absorption of its national culture, integrated and purified, into the wider and vaster culture of inter-nationalism or cosmo-nationality.�

The second volume, possibly better documented, does not have the same conciseness or integrity of form or brilliance of style.

In Feathers and Stones, which is more or lessa scrap-book maintained by him during his confinement for 32 months in Ahmednagar Fort in the “QuitIndia� movement, Dr. Pattabhi seems to be diverting himself with the odds and ends that come his way. One finds the light and the heavy, occasions for laughter and for tears, in other words, feathers and stones. Unkind critics, having a jibe, say that there are more stones than feathers here.

It is worth recalling too that Dr. Pattabhi was editing the English weekly Janmabhumifor over a decade from 1919 to 1930. It was a one-man show, rather like Mohammed Ali’s Comrade and Malabari’s East and West. The writing was of a high standard, with a fund of political knowledge. Students of Indian politics, of the Gandhian era, willfind it a source-book of useful material. Having declined the offer of editorship of the Bombay Chronicle, Dr. Pattabhi never really ceased to be a freelance journalist–a regular contributor to the Press–Telugu as well as English. His article on Jinnah, dictated on his death in 1949, was masterly.
That Dr. Pattabhi did not live to see his autobiography in print was a great pity. His grandsons and others, in charge of personal papers and unpublished works, will do well to move in the matter so that it might soon see the light of day.