Assignment on Paper 202

Assignment on Indian English Literature – Post-Independence

Paper Name: Paper 202: Indian English Literature – Post-Independence

Paper Code:20407

Topic Name: Radhakrishnan and His Works

Name: Divya Sheta 

Roll No.:06

Enrollment No.:4069206420210033

Email ID: divyasheta@gmail.com

Batch:2020-23 MA SEM-III

Submitted to: Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English, MK Bhavanagar University.  

 

 

• Introduction:

Indian writing in English or Indo-English is a term that is reflected in literature written in English by Indian authors. It remarkably differs from Anglo-Indian literature which was created by Englishmen in India who were fascinated by her romantic and exotic charm. They made India the main theme of their writings. It is “for the most part, merely English literature marked by Indian local color.” Indian writing in English began much before the establishment of British colonial rule in India and has survived the collapse of the Empire. The resilience of Indian writing in English is largely due to the English education provided by the Christian missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth century and the high adaptability of the Indian mind to Western education. Indian writing in English was able to mutate by combining typically Indian “feeling,” “emotion” and “experience” with the “discipline” imposed by English.”

English, which has been domesticated and nativized in India, has been one of our own languages like Kannada, Punjabi, Marathi, Bengali, etc. Hence, literature written in Indianized or nativized English is Indian English literature. It bears an indelible stamp of Indianness which implies’ life attitudes’, ‘modes of perception’, ‘life patters’, ‘behavior of the people, and ‘traditions that have emerged over the years in India’. Gowri Deshpande asserts: “…We are right in asserting that we are Indian poets writing in English. Our landscape is Indian, our thought is molded by our political, social, economic, and philosophical scene.” Indianness or the Indian experience of life cannot be restricted to rigid definitions, as its expression varies from, person to person, writer to writer, poet to poet, and novelist to novelist. It is this richness and variety of experience which imparts color and beauty to Indian English literature. It embodies the Indian sensibility which has come down to us through the Vedic period. In the context of Indians writing in English, as with many others in their regional languages as well, the process of coming to terms with tradition and the contemporary towards developing an indigenous sensibility has indeed been a large and complex historical process, which has evolved through a variety

Professor Radhakrishnan, the best-known of the three, is a philosopher-states- man with an international reputation, a scholar with a phenomenal memory, a resourceful and eloquent and effective speaker, and a voluminous writer with an uncanny flair for lucidity and epigrammatic strength.

Raghunathan, better known by his nom-de-plume Vighneswara, is a deep student of English and Sanskrit literature, and was for many years the leader-writer of the Hindu; but it was as the writer of the ‘Sotto Voce’ weekly causeries that he made a significant impact on the readers of Swatantra and Swarajya.

Nirad Chaudhuri, an “unknown Indian” till 1951 when his Autobiography made him famous, is a master of prose style, an intellectual who has the courage to stand aside and be different from the crowd, a critic of Indian society with an almost Swiftian capacity for making surgical probes. Each in his own way has tried to interpret Indian history and thought, and although their approaches are different, there can be no question about their integrity.

 

English was always seen as a language of the Indian elites, a language used not only to construct the Indian nationalist movement but also to deconstruct the hegemony of the Raj. In fact, much of the muscular growth and modernization of the Indian vernacular languages, especially Bengali, in the nineteenth century was largely due to the dissemination of the English language amongst the elite. It may be said that in the last two hundred years Indian writing in English has come of age. Indian writers have gained both the confidence and competence to express themselves in English thereby creating a typical and distinct idiom that is at once Indian and cosmopolitan. However, the construction of national literature in India has been a predominantly upper-class project with clear ideological biases and intellectual predilections, which looked at kinds of literature of society rather selectively, at times ignoring Muslim, Anglo-Indian, Indian Christian, or Parsee writers.

 

• Life of Radhakrishnan:

Radhakrishnan was born on 5th September 1888 in a middle-class Brahmin family in the small town of Tamil Nadu. His father’s name was Sarvepalli Veeraswami and was a revenue official with a local zamindar. His mother’s name was Sitamma. His father didn’t want him to study English and wished that he became a priest instead. On seeing his intelligence, Radhakrishnan was allowed to pursue school and higher education. Being from a financially weak family, he sustained his studies by borrowing second-hand books from a cousin. He got married at the age of 16 years with his distant cousin, named Sivakamu, the couple had five daughters and a son by the name of Sarvepalli Gopal. He graduated with a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Madras Christian college. During this time he was introduced to western thought. In 1918, he was selected as the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mysore. Radhakrishnan had his education at Tirupati, Vellore and the Madras Christian College. He completed his masterate thesis on ‘The Ethics of the Vedanta and its Metaphysical Presuppositions’ in his twentieth year, and since then his pen in the service of his mind has not been idle.

• Education:

Dr. Radhakrishnan belongs to a poor family and thus had to complete his education with the help and support of scholarships and he completed his education from various missionary schools that were spreading across the country.  

He got his primary education from a local school in his birth village named K. V. High School at Thiruttani. Later in 1896, he moved to a nearby temple town, named Tirupati, where he went to Hermannsburg Evangelical Lutheran Mission School and also visited the Government High Secondary School, Walajapet.

From the year 1900 to 1904, he attended the college, named Elizabeth Rodman Voorhees College in Vellore, which was run by an American Arcot Mission of the Reformed Church (of America). It was here, where dr. S. Radhakrishnan was introduced to the Dutch Reform Theology, which criticized the Hindu religion in more than one way by saying that Hinduism is intellectually incoherent and does not have any ethics. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan was proud of his Hindu religion and this criticism appeared to him as a crippling assault on his Hindu sensibilities (feelings). While living in Vellore, he married his distant cousin, named Sivakamu. They remained married for 50 years, till his wife died.

After completing his four years of study in Vellore, he completed his F.A. (First of Arts) course and shifted to the Madras Christian College at the age of 16 and graduated from there in 1907. He also completed his master’s degree from that same college. He studied philosophy in his college but he did so by chance, due to financial constraints, he borrowed philosophy books from his cousin who studied there before, and that decided his academic subjects in the college.

• The function of his Philosophy:

As a teacher of philosophy and as a writer, Professor Radhakrishnan held on with tenacity and as ease of dedication to a course chosen ~ sixty years ago. He has taught at the Madras, Mysore, Calcutta and Oxford Universities; he has been Vice-Chancellor of the Andhra and the Banaras Hindu Universities; he has presided over, the UNESCO General Conference and the All India Writers’. Conference; he has been President of the Sahitya Akademi and of the P, £. N. All-India Centre. He has delivered the Kamala, Bampton, Haskell, Miller, Upton and Hibbert Lectures; he has addressed the World Congress of Faiths and most of the uni- versity convocations in India. After Independence, he became Chairman of the Universities Commission, India’s ambassador to Soviet Russia, Vice-President and finally President of India. As ambassador, he divided his time between Moscow and All Souls, Oxford, and completed his English translation of the principal Upanishads. These diplomatic and political diversions have been a great gain to the nation without being a serious loss to philosophy. During the ten years of his Vice-Presidency and the five years as President, Radhakrishnan had to be con- tinually on the move, making numberless speeches, opening con- ferences, welcoming foreign dignitaries, and participating in offi- cial functions of all kinds, That in. spite of all that ceaseless hurry and glare of publicity Radhakrishnan always managed to speak very much to the point, that his speeches—even the most casual ones—were broadly related to his own central philosophy of life, was the true measure of his distinction as a thinker and speaker. The range of his interests, the sweep of his mind, the commendable catholicity of his tastes, and the temper and quality of his eloquence have marked this man of “words and wisdom” (as Sarojini Naidu once described him) a Guru for his contemporaries.

• Perspective on Hinduism:

The double merit of the work was that it was an interpretation of Indian philosophy from within, and it was also an exposition of Indian philosophical thought in an idiom at once intelligible and attractive to the West. That he was no mere historian of Indian philosophy but also a thinker in his own right, that he was a Hindu for whom philosaphy was not just a cloak but rather a way of life, a means of. understanding life and a force for changing life, was presently revealed in his Upton Lectures (The Hindu View of Life, 1927) and the wide-ranging Hibbert Lectures (An Idealist View of Life, 1932). These lectures were addressed in the first instance to Christian audiences in the West. The apologist of the Hindu view od life – and of the ‘idealist’ view of life in terms mainly od Advaita Vedanta – had to speak in an idiom that could define the uniqueness of the Hindu and Vedantic view of life, yet insinuate its filiations with the Western Christian way of life.| He explained things with a lucid clarity that seemed to be almost deceptively simple:

The Hinduism of the Hindu View of Life is not Hinduism as it is, or ever has been; but as Professor Radhakrishnan would have it to be after he has remolded it nearer to his heart’s desire.

Radhakrishnan was bold enough to rethink the ends and means of human life from the wider perspective of traditional Hinduism and modem thought. There are no new questions in philosophy; the old questions are—What do I know? What ought I do? What may I hope for?—are as valid today as ever, but one’s answers need to be formulated in relation to contemporaneous urgency.

• Writing Style:

ting was not a little responsible for the success of the book. As a reviewer wrote in Theology: “Such clear vigorous English can only come from clear and vigorous thinking. Now and then it rises to heights of poetic diction, and we feel that the author adds the sensibility of the artist to the intellect of a scholar”.

An Idealist View of Life is unquestionably Professor Radha- Krishnan's most valuable contribution to constructive philosophy, for in it East and West meet creatively and achieve a voice of articulation intelligible to all. What is the function of philosophy? It is, says Radhakrishnan, “to provide us with a spiritual rallying center, a synoptic vision, as Plato loved to call it, a Samanvaya, as the Hindu thinkers put it, .... a spiritual concordat which will free the spirit of religion from the disintegration of doubt and make the warfare of creeds and sects a thing of the past”. The philosopher’s plain duty, then, is to “find out whether the convictions of the religious seers fit in with the tested laws and principles of the universe”. And this is what Radhakrishnan sets out to accomplish in his Hibbert Lectures. A good teacher, he knows the art of taking his listener from the familiar to the recondite. Thus, for example, about the Hindu theory of Karma:

The cards in the game are given to us. We do not select them. They are traced to past Karma, but we are free to make any call as we think fit and Quad only suits us. Only we are limited by the rules of the game We are freer when we start the game than later on when the game has developed and our choices become restricted. But till the very end, there is always a choice... Even though we may not like the way in which the cards are shuffled, we like the game and want to play.

The whole work is verily a compelling spiral of argument in defense of the idealist view of life, for “it is this mysterious, unclear and inarticulate knowledge (of the universe as Spirit) that brings us closest to reality”.

• Conclusion:

Memory and industry, curiosity and sense of adventure, adaptability, and the readiness to meet any new challenges whatsoever, all make up an impressive budget of qualities. Yet these alone cannot explain the phenomenon that is Professor Radhakrishnan. Without the reserves of the spirit, the inner poise, the hidden fire, all other endowments cannot count for much. And the spirit that moved and sustained our ancient Indian Rishis and Acharyas is not foreign to Professor Radhakrishnan, and it is this alone that can explain the splendid our of his ministry over a period of half a century. Whatever the outer envelope of his thought, it is always illumined in some measure by the spirit of the rishis of old; and this is the reason why his writings and speeches command respectful attention everywhere.

• Works Cited

 

“Course Maerials.” SIST, https://sist.sathyabama.ac.in/sist_coursematerial/.

“Indian Writing in English : Kodaganallur Ramaswamy Srinivasa Iyengar : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, 1 Jan. 1985, https://archive.org/details/indian-writing-in-english/mode/2up.

Vedantu. “Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan Essay.” VEDANTU, Vedantu, 27 Apr. 2022, https://www.vedantu.com/english/sarvepalli-radhakrishnan-essay. 

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