V. S. SRINIVASA SASTRI
(1869-1946)
B. Natarajan and S. Jagadisan
When India celebrates the golden jubilee of her Independence, Gandhiji will be reverentially remembered particularly on his birthday. But few may remember that only eleven days earlier (September 22, 1869) another distinguished son and servant of India - V.S. Srinivasa Sastri - was born. A strange Providence brought them together - Gokhale being the common inspiration - culminating in a steady, enduring, lifelong friendship which did not suffer or snap, despite their widely divergent connections. Replying to Sastri’s arguments on the methods of the Congress in the struggle for Independence, Gandhiji wrote in 1940 “There are certain political differences between us, which our mutual love and regard
cannot get over. I fancy I am in God’s good hands”. When Mahadev Desai wished to get the English translation of Gandhiji’s Autobiography revised in 1940, he turned to Sastri who undertook the task on the specific condition that his name should on no account be disclosed. It is on record that Desai accepted this condition. This instance, not widely known, is a testimony to the sanctity of the legendary Gandhiji-Sastri friendship, the former looking on the latter as his elder brother. As Champions of the cause of India’s freedom in their respective ways, their friendship made history not only in India, but in South Africa and the rest of the commonwealth.
Gone are the days of eloquence in English. Those who have crossed their seventies will remember a string of names in the field of public speaking - Ranade, Telang, Surendranath Banerjee, Rash Behari Ghose, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Sri Aurobindo, S. Sathyamurthy, the Nehrus, father and son, Shyamprasad Mukerjee, Mrs. Sarojini Naidu and the Mudaliar twins. Till only two generations ago, young minds in schools and colleges looked up to these models of public speaking that at once stimulated the mind and pleased the ear. Instances of parliamentary and forensic eloquence and public speaking in English are now rare and hard to come by. V.S. Srinivasa Sastri belonged to this celebrated galaxy of speakers whose “tongue dropped manna”. “An, artist in words” was Lady Lytton’s compliment to V.S.S. A.H. Smith, Master of Ballioi, Oxford, observed that he did not realise the beauty of the English language till he heard Sastri. Mahadev Desai, Gandhiji’s secretary applied Dr. Johnson’s remark about Edmund Burke to. V.S.S. “He is an extraordinary man; His stream of mind is perpetual”.
In his early years ,V.S.S. lived in the shadow of poverty. He grew up on the diet of traditional, mythological lore provided by his mother. As a student at Kumbakonam, he learnt the finer aspects of Sanskrit literature and the commentaries on our epics at the feet of Mahamahopadhyaya Rangacharya. The Ramayana made a profound impact on him and he described it as “one immortal product of the human mind without a rival in world’s literature, one that would rank among the noblest monuments of poetic genius”. The English classics, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, and the novels of Scott and George Eliot cast a spell on him. “From boyhood, books have been to me more than a learned interest of purveyors of useful knowledge. When they are of some real merit, I have consciously let them govern my conduct and clarify my notions of right and wrong. In a sense it is true that every book makes you wiser and imperceptibly affects your sense of life’s values”. (Books that have influenced me: V.S.S.). It was in this spirit that he studied books. From T.H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and J.S. Mill he learnt the virtues of precision of thought and lucidity in presentation. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius stirred him deeply by its sincerity and high-souled philanthropy. Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is within you came as a revelation to him. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles: The Story of a Pure Woman which is concerned with a victim of tyranny of social convention, touched his depths. Les Miserables was another book to make a deep impact on him.
Srinivasa Sastri’s oratorical skill was matched by the facility and force with which he wielded the pen. The literary influence to which he was exposed, expressed itself in his character sketches of eminent personalities of his day. His portraits of his master Gokhale, Ranade, Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi, P.S. Sivaswami Iyer, V. Krishnaswami Iyer and S. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar are marked by individuality, balance, insight and warmth. V.S.S. had an eye for their distinguishing traits – Gokhale’s idealism, Ranade’s versatility, loftiness and sacrifice and Mehta’s strength of will and courage of conviction. Gandhiji’s greatness, Sastri says, sprang from his self-examination, utter selflessness, forgiveness, moral courage and piety.
V.S.S. excels in character comparison and contrast. In his tribute to P.S. Sivaswarni Iyer on the occasion of his eighty first birthday in 1944, Sastri makes a masterly, balanced comparison of Sivaswami Iyer and Krishnaswami Iyer. The two “grappled each other’s soul with hoops of steel”. Chance drew Sastri first to the “virile and magnetic personality” of V. Krishnaswami Iyer. “When envious death quenched his fire”, Sastri moved “instinctively to the neighbouring orbit of which P.S.S. was the central sun”. Sastri knew both of them intimately and received warmth from the two legal luminaries. Speaking of the marked differences between their temperaments and attitudes, Sastri says: “Krishnaswami Iyer was eager, quick, bubbling, brilliant; Sivaswami Iyer, phlegmatic, slow, difficult to move, without sparkle; Krishnaswami made friends and enemies with equal ease; Sivaswami seems frigid, but seldom hurt your pride or overbore you. The one was ever in the public eye; The other, reserved, cautious, had to be dragged out. The one was eloquent and occasionally impetuous; the other was hesitant, unemphatic, unable to grip his audience. Both gave and were discriminate in giving; but while Krishnaswarni had greater readiness and more lively sympathy with the causes he helped, Sivaswami enquired more minutely, showed less alacrity, and earned tepid praise. Krishnaswami cared little for forms and conventions; Sivaswami was fastidious to a degree in dress and speech and cultivated refinement of manners and conversation far above the common. But all this could not obliterate their mutual solicitude and love, which burst forth in refreshing and beautiful form. Each obeyed the law of his own being. But what a substratum of similarities there always was! It was not the antithesis of good and evil, but of good and good, of one order of excellence and another”. Gokhale too had noticed this contrast. After setting up this contrast, V.S.S. sums up Sivaswami Iyer’s personality in glowing terms. “A man of wide culture, amiable disposition, and innate courtesy, with an inflexible love of justice and keen sense of honour, having large and enlightened benefactions to his credit, able to look back on many years devoted to the pursuit of high aims and doing of things that are clean and of good repute, Sir P.S. Sivaswami Iyer is a man to admire, cherish and present to the young as a shining example”.
The tribute V.S.S. paid to S. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, the Editor of The Hindu, on his death in December 1923, is a piece of literature by itself and ranks among the best that he wrote: “A potable publicist, powerful editor and dutiful son of India passed away the other day in the person of Mr. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar. Proud and sensitive, shy and retiring, he did not court public notice, but his conspicuous office forced him, as it were, on the public eye. Feeble health and slowness of speech prevented him from attaining in public life the fullness of power and influence, which, by ability, equipment and character, he deserved. It was a rare insight, enterprise, and confidence which he displayed, when after some years of not very lucrative practice at the Madras Bar, he purchased The Hindu newspaper and installed himself as Chief Editor, undeterred by the timid counsel of his friends or his lack of journalistic experience. A habit of careful and selective reading, a natural reticence that afforded occasion for firm and consecutive thought, a mental elevation that kept him safe above the mean and the sordid, combined to give him a position second to none among the leading and authoritative exponents of public opinion. His paper attained fame and influence which exceeded those his great predecessor Mr. G. Subramania Iyer knew and which as a Madrassi I was proud to see admitted throughout India.
It was not necessary to agree with him to recognise his judgement; it was not necessary to be friendly with him to admire his patriotism. The traits which, above all, were worthy of imitation in Mr. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar’s character were the courage with which he braved official displeasure, the promptness with which he resented personal discourtesy and the dignity which marked his bearing in the encounters with the powers that be”.
In his thirty Lectures on the Ramayana delivered in Madras over a period of eight months (5-4-44 to 8-11-44) V.S.S. brought a scholarly, critical and perceptive mind to bear on his analysis of the Immortal epic. His exposition of the Ramayana as a human document is subtle and penetrating. There is an erroneous impression among some scholars that Sastri was enthralled by Rama and the Ramayana only in the final phase of his life. Nothing can be more uncharitable and farther from the truth. The Ramayana nourished and sustained him right from his early years. “Of the countless benefits - one may even call them blessings - that the Ramayana can confer, the highest is the training of the emotions and of the spirit. Of the lessons it teaches, the highest seems to me to be the exaltation of dharma. On its altar, everything must be sacrificed, reverently and cheerfully”. (V.S.S.) While bidding farewell to the staff and students of the Hindu High School in 1907 on the eve of joining the Servants of India Society at Poona, V.S.S. reiterated his faith in the potency of dharma, quoting Kausalya’s parting benediction on Sri Rama “Let dharma keep thee from harm, the same dharma that thou follow with such steadfastness and self-denial”.
True to the tradition of his mentor Gokhale, Sastri believed in order and denounced disorder as a means of building up a new order. He laid repeated emphasis on truth, orderly progress, liberty, integrity and purity in public life, on the means being as important as the ends. In a brief preface to a reprint of his 1939 lecture on Birthright, Sastri wrote: “Seldom is truth inopportune”. Speaking of the rights and the duties of citizens in a democratic set up, he said “I advise you to be faithful to the party, but to always put the nation above it”. The charge levelled against Sastri is that he was a skeptic. One of the writers of this tribute who enjoyed the benefit of long and intimate association with him can vouch for the fact that Sastri was a highly evolved personality who had built up a rich inner life. Slogans and panaceas left him cold. The highways of philosophy beckoned to him. Continued practice of self-control was the secret of his personality. His adherence to the basic tenets of Indian culture and his recognition of their strength and validity were beyond question.
V.S.S. was a many-sided personality - statesman, educationist, savant, literateur and a champion of women’s rights and social progress. More than anything else, he was a humanist and an advocate of freedom. Though he underlined the pitfalls of democracy, he held fast to and swore by the principle of freedom. Accepting the Freedom of the City conferred on him by the Corporation of London on July 29, 1921, he said “The joys of freedom are indeed difficult to describe; they can only be fully appreciated by those who have had the misfortune to lose them for a time. Like culture, like knowledge, like virtue, like spiritual, merit, freedom is such that the more it is given, the more it grows; and the more it taxes the vigilance and the energy of people,” the more beauty, grace and richness it adds to their life. He who would circumscribe freedom to particular areas and to certain peoples, knows not what he is doing, for he is taking away from humanity a possible contribution to its richness and glory”. Sastri’s words of wisdom and sanity are still relevant. His letters, lectures and writings bear out his mental poise, elevation of thought and gift for chaste, choice expression. With his tongue and pen, V.S.S. adorned every subject he touched.