Triveni Journal
1927 | 11,233,916 words
Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....
“To the question, what should the man of letters be in our time?, we should have to find the answer in what we need him to do. He must do first what he has always done: he must recreate for his age the image of man, and he must propagate standards by which other men may test that image, and distinguish the false from the true.�
–Allen Tate, The Man of Letters in the Modern World.
By this sterling rule, Cattamanchi Ramalinga Reddy looms before us unquestionably as a man of letters who consciously sought to mould the “future Indian.� Dr. Reddy’s was an amazing career of brilliant achievements and missed opportunities. With intriguing question-marks at the most important turning-points in his life, Reddy the Man is a fabulous subject for a biographer, though no one has yet delved deep into his fascinating personal past. He did make a mark in South Indian politics during his brief sojourn into it. But obviously he was luckier in his exit than entry. He was not really cut out for the rough-and-tumble of party politics. The man of letters, the scholar, the sahridaya never is. As Allen Tate rightly says: “While the politician, in his cynical innocence, uses society, the man of letters disdainfully, or perhaps even absent-mindedly, withdraws from it.� At any rate, that sums up what Dr. Reddy seems to have done. Though he did not turn away from society, he did bid good-bye to politics, for he would not stoop to be a votocrat and head-nodder. His was the “politics of ideas�, not the “politics of opinion.� The politics of ideas takes us to the Man of Letters, and Dr. Reddy had drunk deep in the springs of Voltaire, Pascal, Rousseau and Diderot. And so, though he withdrew from politics, he kept up a lively interest in the future destiny of our nation.
Not surprisingly then, Dr. Reddy’s vocation became education. As Professor and Vice-Principal at Maharajah’s College, Baroda as the Inspector-General of Education at Mysore and as the Vice-Chancellor of the Andhra University, he was in his element. Conservation, reform and innovation walked hand-in-hand giving the Dr. Reddy-touch to the institutions which came under his Influence.
As educationist, again, Dr. Reddy was no jargoniser, nor a mechanical psittacist of hand-me-down reforms. His wide reading, penetrating thought and deep understanding analysed the problem on hand with a rare clarity of vision. The result was always a successful transformation of an idea into reality. An order for Harijan entry into schools here, a decision to start a Commerce department there: success was automatic for the educationist always did his homework carefully.
Dr. Reddy’s actual achievements were the bone-structure of his educational vision which was clothed in the healthy, glowing rhetoric of his verbal artistry. The Man of Letters dominated everywhere and did his duty with deceptive case by recreating the image of the modern Indian as a child of a glorious heritage, awakened by the freedom-breeze of the times and poised to master the sciences of the West while retaining his grip over the Spirit. To read Dr. Reddy is to watch repeat-paintings of the scientific man as a spiritually advanced being. Today we look at these portraits not without a pang. These days the “false� predominates the atmosphere in a great measure. Nevertheless, Dr. Reddy helps us gaze at the “true� and work for its realisation.
Dr. Reddy was heir to the twin traditions of the Occident and the Orient. Born in a cultured family of scholars and poets, he was introduced to the Telugu versions of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Bhagavata at an early age. While at school, he mastered the intricacies of Telugu grammar and prosody. As a student of the Madras Christian College, he came under the spell of the legendary Dr William Miller who has been immortalised in the novel Padmavathi Charithram by A. Madbaviah. Dr. Reddy made rapid strides in History and Philosophy. This strong base at Madras helped him later to attain coveted honours at St. John’s liege, Cambridge.
Cambridge of those days seethed with intellectuals like Lytton Strachy, John Cowper Powys, John Maynard Keynes and J. C. Squire. David McTaggart was a teacher. Dr Reddy’s fine oratory won him the Vice-Presidentship of the Cambridge Union. By the time he returned to India in 1906, he had established a close contact with the thought-processes of the day.
He began his long innings as an educationist at Baroda where the young scholar from abroad soon made his mark. It was not so easy as it sounds now, for he had succeeded Sri Aurobindo as the Vice-Principal of the college. And Sri Aurobindo had been hailed as a literary luminary even then. From now onwards, though much of his time was spent in administrative hack-work, Dr. Reddy never slackened from wide reading, deep cogitation and thought-provoking use of the pen. Poetic criticism, economic history, forewords, biographical essays, articles, addresses–there was a constant flow. And though burdened with office, he wrote his own books and addresses, never going in for “ghosts�. It is a pity that only a fraction of his writings is available in print. For, Dr Reddy’s output, in its entirety, would make a syllabus of Indian culture for our times.
Of course, as Dr Reddy himself said once, he never came “to preach, to exhort, or talk atmospheric stuff.� But if the essence of a preacher is to put across a moral or spiritual lesson, Dr Reddy’s message often did this with singular success. To begin reading an essay or an address of Dr Reddy is meeting a Guru, the hallmark of an ideal educationist. He could win audience interest with ease, and keep the faith of the audience strung to the subject on hand. He was incapable of destructive criticism. His positive approach to the problem on hand was most welcome, and his gentle guidance gave an accession of self-confidence to the young and the old alike.
Dr. Reddy’s major pre-occupation was with the Indian youth. With the insight of a mother tending her baby children, he realised their problems and gave them wholesome advice whenever the occasion arose. Wealth, degrees, honours, scientific and technological progress–all, all were welcome. But the youth should also look beyond mere material advancement and seek the good of the soul within. Thus, in his address to the Patna University in 1936:
“It is my sincere prayer that Europe may yet learn of the East the saving grace of moderation, and the urgent need to limit and regulate worldly passions and effect a proper balance and harmony between all the four Purusharthas, or objectives of life, namely, wealth and its production by just means and its proper distribution; love and social enjoyment; devotion to righteousness; and from bondage to worldliness unsatisfactory when weighed in the eternal scales of spiritual values.�
“The eternal scales of spiritual values� keeps the balance throughout Dr. Reddy’s writings, giving his image of man the glow of sreyas. Not caste, nor religion, but the spirit within that should be taken note of, was his constant advice. In a remarkable address to the Osmania graduates, he brought out the historical filiations between the Hindu and Muslim communities, and described the Nizam’s Dominion as “the confluence or Holy Sangam of Hindu-Muslim civilisation.� When history teaches us the possible enrichments of religious and cultural togetherness, why should we go out of the way and court disaster by emphasising upon the differences, which are again but superficial things? Dr. Reddy must have been a sad man on our Independence Day in 1947. His irrepressible jail de vivre deserted him at the very moment when it should have exploded in rainbow colours. His “Independence Day Message� reflects the sorrow and disquiet within even as he struggles to put on a brave face.
“The British are quitting. Integral India has quitted. The one sovereign India has broken up into a large number of sovereignties. Communal harmony–the basic requirement, even according to our own proposition, of real Swaraj–has suffered complete, hopeless shipwreck. It has gone to pieces, never to be put together again except by the same process as brought it forth–Force; and then it would be peace, not harmony.�
Dr. Reddy was no hapless Cassandra, but even he could not contain himself and gave stroke after stroke of “what could happen� in Independent India in the light of the Partition Holocaust. The “three-pronged menace� of internal commotions, mutual retaliations and para-national line-ups have today become facts of our existence. We have just learned to live with them and stare at the horrifying newspaper headlines with deadened sensibilities. The need of the hour was unity then, as Dr. Reddy averred. It is so now. But we continue to shy away from the issues confronting us by ceaseless platform speeches. As the neighbours quarrel self-lost in the vasts of communalism and regionalism, the government merrily runs its course of ineffective rule. Thirty years ago Dr. Reddy stated the malaise and the remedy. The words are those of a man speeding towards his tryst with the Maker.
“A corrupt government corrupts society. A corrupt society can only give us corrupt governments and each will intensify the rottenness of the other. The remedy for this is not education in the sense of literacy...It is example that counts more than idea. Knowledge may enable us to understand, but understanding is not entirely sufficient for conduct. Something else is required–goodwill, indomitable personal integrity. Ideas don’t breed character; it is character that breeds character.�
That was a great educationist speaking. Indeed, Dr. Reddy was never satisfied with the word. He aspired to transform words into deeds and hence his anxious building up of the Andhra University as a nursery of character. At the time when he founded the Andhra University, “our universities were no better than degree-giving high schools.� Dr. Reddy peered into the future and surmised “the needs and requirements of our tomorrow or the day after tomorrow and the battles to be fought in the future.� In his hands, the new university placed special emphasis on teaching and research and became almost a gurukula where the students and teachers lived in proximity. Along with History, Economics and Politics, the university ushered in the Department of Commerce, a rarity in academic circles in those days. While Telugu and other languages were taught, the medium of instruction was English. Untrammelled by casteist and linguistic chauvinism, Dr. Reddy went after talent. He wanted teachers who would teach and at the same time keep abreast with current developments in their subject through constant research. This was not surprising for as a man of letters, he always thought of himself as an Indian and not as an Andhra. There was no Tamilian, Bengali, Punjabi or Oriya for him. Such was his social faith.
“I write as a citizen of the Indian union. There is no other geography of which I could be national. Nor do I want tobe one.�
Among Dr. Reddy’s abiding anxieties was the suicidal un-neighbourliness witnessed among India’s religions and languages. For instance, there was mutual ignorance among South Indians regarding their respective literatures. He wished a closer collaboration among Andhras, Tamilians and Kannadigas. In this, he was, according to D Anjaneyulu, “the modern apostle of the Dravidian school of literature� as is brought out by Dr. Reddy’s foreword toa Telugu translation of the Tamil Ramayana.
“While so many works from Sanskrit had been translated into Telugu. Aryan religious classics as well as Kavyas and Natakas, there was no reason why nothing from Tamil literature had been rendered into Telugu. Translations and re-translations galore from Sanskrit! Look at the number of Telugu versions of the Ramayana and the Sakuntalam. How many more to come! Why could they not have attempted tocapture in Telugu the glory of that superb piece of art, Manimekhalai? Lack of taste? Or lack of contact?�
In the handling of the English language, Dr. Reddy had few peers. There was nothing sombre or stern about his convocation addresses while all that is inviting and glorious may be found in his essays. As in the passage just quoted, he was excited by pastures new, the hallmark of a true bridge-builder and sahridaya. Echoes of great poets and thinkers from the Orient as well as the Occident may be heard in his writings and not unoften an apt quotation bounces us with its perfectly hit target.
Never a friend of doom and gloom, Dr. Reddy could always disseminate cheer with masterly ease. There was no lack of pepper and vinegar either, a reason perhaps why he provides such palatable and often delectable reading.
“Joseph Stalin seems to be a great believer in chopping off heads than in counting them quietly.�
“We swallow Mahatmic camels and strain at Nizamian gnats.�
“Because it is too big an organisation, the Congress always finds it difficult to follow a simple straight path.�
Dr. Reddy’s epigrams have a delightful touch and a thought-provoking depth of their own.
“Discipline is power; power without reason may be effective, effective for confusion and evil.�
“The university is their alma mater the mother; the world is their mother-in-law.�
“Life is not idea. Itis will and conduct, illumined by idea.�
Of Course, the young men (of yesterday or today) have a right to be bitter about such advice. What is the use of will-power, and unflinching adherence to ideals? Such noble thoughts and noble action seldom wins the day, while crookedness and short-cuts help the evil men to prosper. Will-power yoked to inquity alone seems to succeed in this world! Dr. Reddy’s mastery of English leads to the triumph of his advocatus diaboli as well:
“The producers and those who fertilise the soil with their blood are hardly allowed to be present at the harvest. The parasites eat it up with cunning glee.�
But this should not tempt the youth to forsake idealism and adherence to duty. The nation’s progress must be the goal, and the means should be incorruptible. “Truth, sincerity of purpose and courageous devotion to principle and enterprise are the only basis of enduring and widespread, large-scale success.�
Dr Reddy’s many-faceted achievements were possible because he had dedicated his early years to a seed-time of intensive study and character-building. And to the end he retained the receptiveness and flexibility of youth with which he had dazzled his Cambridge coevals with his brilliant mind and marvellous dialectic, “Shining as burnished steel and also agile and sharp as steel.� And there was also his life-long attachment to Indian literature. He is said to have read the Telugu Mahabharata several times. Ekalavya, Vasishtha, Bheeshma and all the other precious life-blood of the Indian spirit were his companions. And if he followed their example in his search for the ideal, he has himself become a shining example for the Indian student, teacher and educationist.
“What’s alive has a spiritual glow�
the flash is from soul to soul.
Beneath the processes of mutation
reigns the eternal Spirit.
On the heights the godheads pour their sunrays,
and Truth’s white radiance smiles.�
–K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR