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[Rajarshi Radhakrishnan was born on September 5, 1888. His birthday is being celebrated throughout the country as “Teachers� Day.� Here are extracts from his first ever Con­vocation Address delivered in 1927 at the Andhra University.
­�Editor]

While the term University is a modern one in India, its meaning has been familiar to us for ages past. If the earliest records of India are to be trusted, we find that students gathered round famous teachers with strange enthusiasm and in surprising numbers. Takhasila, the capital of Gandhara in North West India, the native land of Panini the grammarian, attracted fine young men from all quarters of India, even as early as the fourth century B. C. The famous seats of learning belonging to Nalanda, Vikramasila, our own Dharanikota, Benares and Navadvipa were cultural centres to which flocked not only crowds of Indians but many eager students from distant parts of Eastern Asia.

The Universitas, the whole body of teachers add pupils had something like a corporate existence. These seats of learning were responsible for developing the higher mind of the country, its conscience and its ideals. They helped to produce what we might call a university world, a community of cultural ideas, a profound like-mindedness in basic aims and ideas. In the altered circumstances of today, it is the universities that have to assume the leadership in the world of ideas and ideals. India distracted by the deadly feuds of creeds and communities, requires more than ever the spread of the university spirit of self-criticism and broad-minded reasonableness towards other peoples� beliefs and practices.

I am afraid that the sastriesand the Pundits, the Moulvies and the Moulanas, the Missionaries and the Clergymen of the conventional type are not likely to be of much help to us in our present condition. They seem to think that religion has come into the world in order to afford careers for pedants and priests and not that the mass of men may have life and may have it more abundantly. We are all familiar in this part of the country with the type of mind which is concerned with the protection of privilege. It upholds privilege by plausible arguments and employs in its defence the powerful motive of self-interest. It deludes itself into the belief that what the critics call privilege is but the law of nature and the barest justice requires the satisfaction of its prejudices.

In North India, the troubles are due to the opposite type of mind, the type which strives strenuously to obtain universal conformity to its own standards. The mind which works for conformity shrinks at nothing to gain its ends. When inflamed by passion, it resorts to violence and persecution. To cast the whole of a great people in one mould and subdue them into the blind acceptance of a central power or creed is what we are taught to characterise as the Prussian method, though it is not peculiar to Prussia. Conformity has been the dream of despots, political as well as religious. The ideal of the university is the promotion of liberty of mind or freedom of thought. It has little to do with the protection of privilege or a call to conformity. It contests privilege which is something other than that excellence which follows on intellectual eminence or spiritual greatness. It contests conformity, for each individual has the right to develop his own convictions. As a society of thinkers, the university is the home of liberty. The power and presence of the types of mind which deny liberty and uphold privilege or conformity are responsible for communal bigotry and religious fanaticism. It is the task of the universities to break down these types of mind and reshape the thought and temper of the age.

The history of humanity is a ceaseless conflict between two fundamental instincts, the instinct of defence, of conservatism which jealously clings to what it holds, turns into itself and locks itself fast in and that of expansion, the bubbling of life, of the vital urge that ceaselessly strives to break down the barriers. Every age of expansion is succeeded by one of contrac­tion and vice versa. The age of the Vedic seers was a period of vigour and vitality when India gave voice to immortal thoughts. The great epic of the Mahabharata gives us a wonderful picture of seething life, full of the freedom of enquiry and experiment. New and strange tribes poured into the country and the Mahabharata relates how the culture was vigorous enough to vivify the new forces that threatened to stifle it and assimilate to the old social forms the new that came to expel them.

In the age of Buddha, the country was stirred to its uttermost depths. The freedom of mind which it produced, expressed itself in a wealth of creation in all phases of life, overflowing in its richness the continent of Asia. Chandragupta, the great military leader, almost unified a continent Asoka of immortal fame sent Buddhist missions to Syria and Egypt, Cyrene and Epirus. India soon became the spiritual home of China and Japan, Burma and Ceylon. Under the Guptas and the Vardhanas, we had an immense cultural flowering. Those who carved deep out of the solid rock, “cells for themselves and cathedrals for their gods� which are even today the admiration of the world, must have had sufficient strength of spirit. But soon the spirit of creation died away. The vivid life, the passionate enthusiasm and the strong conviction gave place to teachers less original to ambitions, less exalted and to tame compliance with the old forms. There was a dread of venturing outside the safe limits of guaranteed ideas. The country seemed to suffer from exhaustion. The ebb of the tide has reached its utmost.

At the present moment, we are in one of those periods, when humanity pushed by the powers of reaction is about to make a great leap into the future. Everywhere the suffocation is felt, the same vital need to pull down the walls, to breathe freely, to look around on a vaster horizon.

To plead for an awakened interest in Indian culture is not to advocate a return to the conditions of antiquity. The past never returns. In the European Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centu­ries, there was a renewal of interest in the thought off Greece and Rome and the early Christian church and it marked the beginning of modern European civilisation. So I believe, a study of our past will lead to a quickening of our cultural life and a triumph over scholasticism.

In the handling of the past of one’s country, there is one serious danger which we have to guard against. We are tempted to look for great things in the past which is generally regarded as a golden age of peace and plenty, when men lived for centuries, married with angels and entertained gods. The farther we go into the past of a country, the greater is the temptation to the un­controlled imagination. The danger is a very subtle one to every real interpreter of history if he is to present his work in an intelligible way, he must note the general principles unifying the multitude of facts with which he deals. It is but a short step from perceiving this unity to imposing the design of one’s own making. We must beware that we do not give more than their due weight or value to the facts observed.

To pervert the past in order to gain new sanctions for our dreams of the future is to sin against our intellectual conscience.

If we are to be restored to health and vigour, we must learn to conquer our national failings. We must find out what those institutions are which have outlived their utility and still survive, thanks to our mental laziness and the extreme unwillingness which men have to overhaul habits and beliefs which have become automatic in their workings. To the conservative mind and the artist soul it may appear a melancholy task to strike at the foundations of beliefs in which as in a strong temple, the hopes and aspirations of a large section of humanity through long ages have sought a refuge from the strain and stress of life. It is difficult to break even a physical habit; it is much more difficult to break long-established habits of thought and mind. But I hope that love of ease, regard for antiquity or considerations of safety will not induce us to spare the ancient moulds, however beautiful, when they are outworn. It is not true conservatism, but a false sentimental one, which tries to preserve mischievous abuses simply because they are picturesque. Whatever comes of it, wherever it leads us, we must follow truth. It is our only guiding star. To say that the dead forms which have no vital truth to support them are too ancient and venerable to be tampered with only prolongs the suffering of the patient who is ailing from the poison generated by the putrid waste of the past. We need not shy at change. Our philosophy tells us that permanence belongs to eternity alone and unceasing change is the rule of life.

It is impossible for any nation to stand still and stiff within its closed gates, while humanity is marching on. The world is no more a miscellaneous collection of odd and dislocated spots where we could live alone. It has become a small neighbourhood where we could neither live alone nor be let alone. We cannot return to the walled cities of the middle ages. The flood of modern ideas is pouring on us from every side and will take no denial. On the question of response to the new forces there is much confusion of thought.

We come across a curious blending of self-assertion and timidity. There is a passionate loyalty to everything Indian haunted by deep but secret misgivings. The conservatives adopt an attitude of forlorn resistance and cling tenaciously to old ideas. They little realise that the forces will steal unknown, bring down the defences where they are weak and cause inward explosion. The radicals are anxious to forget the past, for to them it is to be remembered, if at all, not with pride but with shame. But they forget that where other cultures may give us the light, our own furnishes the conditions for action. The constructive conservatism of the past is the middle way between the reactionary and the radical extremes.

If we study the history of Indian culture from the beginning of its career somewhere in the valley of the Indus, four or five milleniums ago down till to-day, the one characteristic that pervades it throughout its long growth is its elasticity and ability to respond to new needs. With a daring catholicity that approaches foolhardiness on occasions, it has recognised elements of truth in other systems of thought and belief. It has never been too proud to learn from others and adopt such of their methods as seemed adaptable to its needs. If we retain this spirit we can face the future with growing confidence and strength.

The recovery of the old knowledge in its depth and fullness, its restatement in new forms adapted to present needs and an original handling of the novel situations which have arisen in the light of the Indian spirit are urgent necessities and if our universities do not accomplish them, nothing else will.

We live in an age of intense striving and creative activity. If we are to be credited with intellectual power, we cannot afford to say, “Let others� make the experiments, we will benefit by their experience�. The assumption that we are metaphysically-minded and are not interested in the pursuit of science is not quite true. In our vigorous days, we developed sciences like astronomy and architecture, mathematics and medicine, chemistry and metallurgy. Latterly, however, there has been a decline in scientific activity owing to the cramping effects of scholasticism. All signs indicate that we are waking up from our scientific slumber. I hope there are not many who sneer at the conquests of science as materialistic avenues to the betterment of human conditions.

A spiritual civilisation is not necessarily one of poverty and disease, man-drawn rickshaw and the hand-cart. It is one thing to say that wisdom is more precious than rubies and the wise man is happy whatever befall him and quite another to hold that poverty and ill-health are necessary for spiritual advance. While poverty is spiritual when it is voluntary, the crass poverty of our people is a sign of sloth and failure. Our philosophy of life recognises the production and increase of wealth among the legi­timate aims of human endeavour. Pursuit of wealth does not in itself spell spiritual ruin. It is a means, in itself ethically colourless, neither good nor a necessary means nor the attainment of the higher life for the individual and the mass of mankind. What counts is the purpose for which wealth is striven after and so long as we realise that it is a means to a higher end, we can boldly venture out on the path of the conquest of nature’s secrets and their utilisation for man’s service. There are so many ills that flesh is heir to, need not be met by fatalism and folded hands. Instead of facing suffering and disease by apologetic justifications of the ways of God to man a nobler piety demands their reduction and ultimate removal.

May it be your endeavour to realise the poet’s dream that in this land all may be in a position to overcome the difficulties of life, to attain an insight into the good, to gain that wisdom and find enjoyment everywhere:

�Sarvas taratu durgani, sarvo bhadrani pasyatu.
            Sarvas tad buddhim apnotu, sarvas sarvatra nandatu.�