HOMAGE TO C. R. REDDY
Prof.
K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR
He
was born on 10 December 1880 and died, in his 71st year on 24 February 1951.
For a man like Cattamanchi Ramalinga
Reddy who had such robust vitality and infectious intellectual energy, it was a
young age to die. No doubt he had problems with his health during 1950. In
October, he had temperature for a fortnight, and a deep and big absess developed which had to be opened. “At my age it
won’t heal quickly”, he wrote to me ruefully on 25 October, and added: “Keep
this to yourself. I don’t want my physiology to be broadcast.” By 11 November,
the bandaging had been removed, and he hoped to be soon “entirely out of the
hands of the doctors.” In the course of same letter, he referred to my views on
the composition of the University Syndicate, and remarked:
“After
all...it is not constitutions that count, but the character and capacity of the
people. An illogical British Constitution works, because it is worked by the
British; and so do the Anglo-Saxon Constitutions generally. In other places
there is logic but hardly any life. It is impossible to devise any Constitution
which would be knave-proof and fool-proof; and we are
well-supplied with both species.”
Then he referred to the
situation in the country:
“Partition,
to which our leaders agreed for the sake of peace–incidentally I may remark I
never did and was for fighting it out–has resulted in the most terrible
problems on our frontiers, problems which take the most inhuman and bestial
forms. To the communal danger, external and internal, is now being added the
communistic, external and internal...Our Foreign Policy also has been too much
in the clouds to serve the real needs and purpose of the country. So, just now,
I am in a rather depressed mood.”
The accomplished fact
of
“Came
here for Pongal…found it a frost...no life, no joy.
Do
you really think there is real value in this earthly accident? Astronomers say
that the experiment has not been repeated in any other orb dark or bright, on
the principle, I suppose, of sufficient unto the day...
The
glories of our birth and state
Are
shadows, not substantial things...
Ah!
it is a mad existence and not even merry.”
But these were passing
moods, for he continued to take a lively interest in the work of both the
Today,
on the eve of his birth centenary, as in 1951 at the time of his passing, the
same questions formulate themselves. Wasn’t C. R. Reddy’s achievement rather
less than his capacity? Didn’t he fail to fulfill in adequate measure the
promises held out, so early in his life by his brilliant intellectual gifts?
Was he primarily an educationist who had absent-mindedly strayed into the
desert sands of politics? Or was he really a politician of the stamp of a
Burke, a Morley, a Gokhale, who had to be content to
be a mere educationist, the political climate in the country what it was? As a
writer again, how was it that, although he made sensational starts, be failed
to persevere, to arrive? In other words, why didn’t he quite redeem the
promissory notes of his great and unique gifts of intellect and character?
Forty
years ago, on 10 December 1940, C. R. Reddy’s sixtieth birthday (Shashtiabdapoorthi) was celebrated in Waltair-Visakhapatnam.
Sir C. V. Raman was chairman of the main meeting and there were other functions
too. Even at that time, the usual questions were discreetly posed by some of
the speakers. Was Reddy primarily and purposefully a politician–or an
educationist? Ah, he was a politician without power, and a scholar-academic
saddled with administration! Wasn’t he thus actually a curious amalgam, a
singular phenomenon? A politician (yes, a politician with a difference) doubled
with an educationist (again with a difference)! C. R.
Reddy was himself–he was not C. R., he was not C. P., he was not Satyamurthi, he was not either of the Mudaliars,
Ramaswami or Lakshmanaswami,
although he had something or other of all of them–C. R. Reddy was C. R. Reddy,
just as G. B. Shaw was Bernard Shaw. There was no need to be anybody else. And,
for us too, Reddy’s descendants and friends and admirers, there is no room for
regrets.
While
replying to the felicitations on his completing sixty years on 10 December
1940, Reddy himself made a distinction–a seminal one–between two
types of politicians, leaders of ideas and leaders of opinion. There was, for
example, S. Srinivasa Iyengar.
He was a subtle lawyer and an intrepid politician, and wore the Congress crown
at Gauhati. But he was basically a thinker, a factory
for political ideas. There was M. N. Roy, again, whose mind was a political
forge, and he held no position or office, although he wielded enormous
influence. Reddy was like them, political scientist and a dynamo of political
ideas. After a time of vigorous throwing about of brains, ideas stratify into
opinions, which are pinioned to organisations; and it
is the organisation man that usually seizes power and retains it as long as
possible. How, then, are we to judge the ‘success’ of politicians? Reddy
answered:
“It
is essential to understand the points of view from which a man as a publicist
should be estimated–whether as a man of ideas, as a critic who gives a turn,
whether right or wrong, and contributes something fresh and something vigorous;
or as the opportunist who gets on because he has no ideas. Men of ideas find it
rather difficult to get on, and it is but right.”
There,
there C. R. Reddy has explained the reason why he preferred on the whole to be
a freelance in politics, rather than a careerist politician of settled
(received) opinions yoked to an organisation carrying all before it by force of
its brute momentum. There are political careerists, opportunists, technocrats,
and there are the politocrats who are complementary
to the bureaucrats. They are needed perhaps, but C. R. Reddy preferred to be a
political thinker and a statesman. Why blame him, or regret his decision? They
also serve who think, and dissent, and applaud when possible, and utter grave
warnings when necessary.
And, besides, C. R.
Reddy didn’t acquiesce in the facile and foolish distinction between politics
(in terms of ideas and ideal action) and education (as an adventure and a
conquest). The university was centered in the community, and drew sustenance
from it, and was meant to serve its members. When he reigned
the Vice-Chancellorship of Andhra University, he
wrote on 15 December 1930:
“But
the country is greater than the university and indeed conditions, the scope and
quality of its work and the standing and prestige it enjoys. After what has
happened at Calcutta and Lahore, not to mention Benares
where graver issues seem to be under precipitation, one wonders what exactly is
the value placed by the powers that be on universities in their scheme of
things…”
He
couldn’t continue as Vice-Chancellor after witnessing the Government’s attitude
towards Gandhiji’s Satyagraha campaigns, but he still
wished well of the university:
“But
I shall have the pleasure of watching with interest and sympathy its (Andhra
University’s) future career, trusting that when weighed in the scales of
eternal values it will not be found wanting, and that it will act with no other
motive or interest except God above and conscience within–a pattern of what a
spiritual corporation raised above all worldly consideration ought to be.”
It
was not therefore difficult for him to return to the university after his
second brief stint (the first was in the early ’Twenties) in active politics.
This time (1936-1951), his deep involvement with education was for life.
Reddy
had had his scholastic training at Chittoor, the Madras
Christian Collge, and St. John’s, Cambridge. Among
his contemporaries at Cambridge were J. M. Keynes and Philip Price, J. C. Powys and J. C. Squire. His interests ranged from
literature and philosophy to history and politics. Returning to India from Cambridge,
he succeeded Sri Aurobindo at the Baroda College as Professor and
Vice-Principal, and presently moved to Mysore. He
taught at Maharaja’s College, helped the Mysore
University to come into being, and became Inspector-General of Education. Then,
in 1920, he left it all to plunge into dyarchic
politics in the old undivided Madras presidency. In all–if we include his
Baroda, Mysore and Andhra years–he was in education
for about 30 years, as against the 12 in combative politics. If in public life
his distinctive mark was that he was quintessentially a practitioner of the
politics of ideas, what were his marks as an educationist and as a university
administrator? Firstly, he believed in scholarship as hard-headed as it could
be, and in teaching, as much charged with responsibility and animation and
dedication as possible; but from the university teacher he demanded something
more too–an aptitude, a vocation, a thirst for research and a commitment to the
exploration of knowledge. And knowledge is a running stream, not a pond of
stagnant waters. Talking of research, C. R. Reddy wrote in his Mysore Education Report:
“Birth
is always a sacred exhilarating moment, whether it be in a humble household or
the king’s palace, in a human habitation or in a bird’s nest, in the material
world or the world of ideas. And an institution where the faculty and
the students are not consciously acting their part in the creation of new
things and the revelation of new ideas and have so to speak run dry have still
to reach the foot of university.
Secondly,
while he was all for English, the mother-tongue, and modern European languages
like French and German, he had also an adamantine faith in Sanskrit. As he said
once:
“Unless
we are going to cut ourselves off from all our past and from the greatest men
whom our country has given birth to from the earliest dawn of Indian
consciousness, we should be prepared to make liberal provision for a study of
Sanskrit by our boys and equally with them by our girls. Otherwise, they shall fare
as the trees uprooted by the strong winds of the present, unable to find a
foothold anywhere.”
Thirdly,
even when he felt strongly about the perennial life-giving value of our ancient
culture (he had a particular feeling of adhesion to the Mahabharata),
he also wanted our generations to be abreast of modern science and
technology, and to cultivate the disciplines of the social sciences including
commerce and management. Fourthly, while teaching and research were basic to a
university, if anything worthwhile was to be achieved, conditions should be
created, Reddy thought, as in Oxford and Cambridge, for community life by
teachers and students. Higher education was not merely the acquisition of
certain chunks of quantifiable knowledge, but a way of thinking, talking,
arguing–a whole way of life. Hence the importance Reddy gave to the several
hostels in Andhra University, with their characteristic Buddhist names–Asoka Vardhana, Vinaya Vihara, Viveka Vinyasa, Saddharma Sadana!
When
it came to university education, Reddy was a perfectionist. Almost seventy
years ago, he scathingly attacked the functioning of the old affiliating
universities modelled on London, and
pleaded for the establishment of true universities, in other words,
universities that directly accepted the responsibility for teaching,
research and community life. When he had positions and power to translate his
ideas into practice, he strove hard to get the best appointed to the faculty
without being swayed by narrower considerations. Appointing a teacher was not benefitting a particular caste, religion, or region; it was
choosing a person who would give his best to generations of students. Every
faculty appointment was in this sense a national appointment, and had to be
governed by the highest criteria. As he saw it, much depended on the head of
the university, the Vice-Chancellor:
“Character
and capacity are equally important as only these will gain him the confidence
of Government, the university authorities, the teaching faculty, the students
and lastly, through all these, the public. He should be one to whom the
professors and other readers of thought would be able naturally to look up as
leader and comrade.”
And
he should be the custodian of the university’s conscience, unafraid of the frowns
of the Government or the menacing postures of collective action by one or
another group within the university. It is not easy to fill the bill, but Reddy
was unquestionably a great Vice-Chancellor because he was in very large measure
the kind of Vice-Chancellor whose features he had limned above. And indeed he
must be counted among our greatest, alongside of Sir Ashutosh
Mukherji, Dr. Radhakrishnan,
Sir Maurice Gwyer and a few others perhaps.
In
the day-to-day details of university administration, he strove hard to live up
to the principles he enunciated (taking his cue from an American writer):
“1.
The sole purpose of the organisation is to attain the objectives of the
organisation. The administrative organisation of a university is not an end but
a means. It is a means for performing services for the teachers and the
research men so that they can fulfil their
obligations to teaching and research.
2.
The responsibility for a function should be matched by the authority necessary
to accomplish the objectives of the function.
3.
Responsibility and authority for action should be decentralised
to the greatest extent possible consistent with the maintenance of appropriate
control over policies and method.
4.
The responsibility of every member of the organisation should be respected at
all times by every other member of the organisation.”
But
C. R. Reddy wouldn’t have been the exemplary Vice-Chancellor that he was, had
he not been open so readily to the humanising and spiritualising influence of the humanities. His Telugu
writing–his juvenile poem, Musalamma Maranamu, his treatises on political Economy and
Poetics–was of a pioneering kind. He blazed the trail, and was content that
others should follow his lead (as they have indeed). In English, he excelled
more in the spoken than in the written word, although he could always develop
arguments with great skill, weight of authority and dialectical brilliance. His
Convocation Addresses were a class by themselves, and the scintillating quality
of his performance shouldn’t blind us to the massive homework behind. He could
suddenly lift a conventional address to a high level, as for example when he
said, towards the close of the Osmania University Convocation Address (1938),
that the felt presence of the Eternal was the most sustaining power for
righteousness. He excelled especially as a conversationalist, and perhaps even
more as a letter-writer. In his table-talk and in his
letter-writing, the whole man lay revealed: the scholar, the intellectual, the
idealist, the humanist, the wit, the prince of sarcasm, the iridescent
epigrammatist, the devastating punster, the seasoned logician. Never a dull
moment, never a moment thrown away! It is vain to regret that Reddy’s
superlative gifts of mind and heart have not given us some mighty or voluminous
work like, say, a critical commentary on the Mahabharata.
C. R. Reddy was an immitigable force, and he was a catalytic who made
others come out with the best in them; he was a statesman thinking of all our
tomorrows applying the lessons of all our yesterdays, he was a warm-hearted
human being and magnanimous friend and mentor and leader, and he was a
master-builder in abstract and concrete.