Three prose writers_ Radhakrishnan, Raghunathan and Nirad Chaudhuri.pptx

Three Prose
Writers
Radhakrishnan,
Raghunathan and
Nirad Chaudhuri

● Prepared by: Nilay Rathod
● MA Sem: 3
● 22407: Paper 202: Indian English Literature Post-Independence
● Roll No: 17
● Enrolment No: 4069206420210030
● Submitted to: Department of English,
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

RadhaKrishnan
● Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (5 September 1888 – 17 April
1975), natively Radhakrishnayya. Born in 1888 at Tiruttani,
Radhakrishnan had his education at Tirupati, Vellore
and the Madras Christian College.
● 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.
● As a teacher of philosophy and as a writer, Professor
Radhakrishnan held on with tenacity and a sense 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.
● He has delivered the Kamala, Bampton, Haskell, Miller, Upton and
Hibbert Lectures; he has addressed the World Congress of Faiths and
most of the university 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.

● He completed his masters 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.
● Two of his professors, Rev. William Meston and Dr. Alfred George
Hogg, commended Radhakrishnan's dissertation.
● According to Radhakrishnan himself, the criticism of Hogg and other
Christian teachers of Indian culture "disturbed my faith and shook
the traditional props on which I leaned."

● Radhakrishnan himself describes how, as a student,
● The challenge of Christian critics impelled me to make a study of
Hinduism and find out what is living and what is dead in it. My
pride as a Hindu, roused by the enterprise and eloquence of
Swami Vivekananda, was deeply hurt by the treatment accorded
to Hinduism in missionary institutions.
● This criticism led him to study of Indian philosophy and religion.
● At the same time Radhakrishnan commended Professor Hogg as
'My distinguished teacher,’ and as "one of the greatest Christian
thinkers we had in India.'

● According to K. R. S. Iyengar Professor Radhakrishnan subjected the
thought of Western thinkers—for example, Bergson, William James
and Bertrand Russell—to a searching examination in the light of the
absolutist thought of the Upanishads in his The Reign of Religion in
Contemporary Philosophy (1920).
● He elaborates that this book demonstrated Radhakrishnan complete
intimacy with Western thought on the one hand and his complete
mastery of the English language on the other.
● Iyengar argues that An Idealist View of Life is unquestionably
Professor Radhakrishnan’s most valuable contribution to constructive
philosophy, for in it East and West meet creatively and achieve a
voice of articulation intelligible to all.

Philosophy: Advaita Vedanta
Radhakrishnan was one of the most prominent spokesmen of Neo-
Vedanta.His metaphysics was grounded in Advaita Vedanta, but he
reinterpreted Advaita Vedanta for a contemporary understanding. He
acknowledged the reality and diversity of the world of experience,
which he saw as grounded in and supported by the absolute or
Brahman. Radhakrishnan also reinterpreted Shankara's notion of
maya. According to Radhakrishnan, maya is not a strict absolute
idealism, but "a subjective misperception of the world as ultimately
real."

Accusations of Plagiarism
In the January 1929 issue of The Modern Review, the Bengali
philosopher Jadunath Sinha made the claim that parts of his 1922
doctoral thesis, Indian Psychology of Perception, published in 1925,
were copied by his teacher Radhakrishnan into the chapter on "The
Yoga system of Patanjali" in his book Indian Philosophy II, published in
1927. Sinha and Radhakrishnan exchanged several letters in the
Modern Review, in which Sinha compared parts of his thesis with
Radhakrishnan's publication, presenting altogether 110 instances of
"borrowings." (Minor)
Radhakrishnan felt compelled to respond, stating that Sinha and he
had both used the same classical texts, his translation were standard
translations, and that similarities in translations were therefore
unavoidable. He further argued that he was lecturing on the subject
before publishing his book, and that his book was ready for

Nirad C. Chaudhuri
● Nirad C. Chaudhuri, in full Nirad Chandra
Chaudhuri, (November 23, 1897- August 1,
1999)
● Chaudhuri was born in Kishoregunj,
Mymensingh, East Bengal, British India
(now Bangladesh), the second of eight
children of Upendra Narayan Chaudhuri, a
lawyer, and of Sushila Sundarani
Chaudhurani. His parents were liberal
middle-class Hindus who belonged to the
Brahmo Samaj movement.

● Chaudhuri was a prolific writer even in the last years of his life,
publishing his last work at the age of 99. He died in Oxford,in 1999.
● K. R. S. Iyengar introduces Nirad Chaudhuri as an “unknown
Indian” till 1951 when his Autobiography made him famous.
● He continues, Nirad Chaudhuri 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
approach.

His Major Works
● His masterpiece, The Autobiography of an
Unknown Indian, published in 1951, put him on
the long list of great Indian writers.
● Chaudhari had said that The Autobiography of
an Unknown Indian is 'more of an exercise in
descriptive ethnology than autobiography'.
● It is stated that 'Chaudhuri was hounded out of
government service, deprived of his pension,
blacklisted as a writer in India and forced to live
a life of penury'.

● However, as Sociologist Edward Shils, who helped Chaudhuri
immigrate to the UK, stated in his article 'Citizen of the world:
Nirad C. Chaudhuri.' (American Scholar, 1988), Chaudhuri retired
at the compulsory age of 55 but was not eligible for a pension
because he had not completed sufficient years of service.
● It is also stated that- 'Furthermore, he had to give up his job as a
political commentator in All India Radio as the Government of
India promulgated a law that prohibited employees from
publishing memoirs.'

● However, he did publish in non-Government magazines.
Chaudhuri argued that his critics were not careful-enough
readers; "the dedication was really a condemnation of the British
rulers for not treating us as equals", he wrote in a 1997 special
edition of “Granta”
● At the age of 57, in 1955 for the first time Chaudhuri went abroad.
After coming back he wrote A Passage to England (1959). In this
book he talked about his visit of five weeks to England.
● His later works include personal essays, biographies and
historical studies.

Works
● The Autobiography of an
Unknown Indian (1951)
● A Passage to England (1959)
● The Continent of Circe (1965)
● The Intellectual in India (1967)
● To Live or Not to Live (1971)
● Scholar Extraordinary, The Life
of Professor the Right
Honourable Friedrich Max
Muller, P.C. (1974)
● Culture in the Vanity Bag (1976)
● Clive of India (1975)
● Hinduism: A Religion to Live by
(1979)
● Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1987)
● Three Horsemen of the New
Apocalypse (1997)
● The East is East and West is
West (collection of pre-
published essays)
● From the Archives of a
Centenarian (collection of
pre-published essays)
● Why I Mourn for England
(collection of pre-published
essays)

Raghunathan
● 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.
● One of our great journalists, N. Raghunathan of the Hindu
became, late in life, the columnist who wrote under ‘Sotto Voce’
and signed himself as ‘Vighneswara’. (Iyengar)

● After a life-time of training in the exacting discipline of expression in
a difficult foreign language, Raghunathan now revealed himself as
the perfect humanist and the flawless literary craftsman.
● Raghunathan’s was.usually the conservative, unpopular, ‘diehard’
view; his assent with tradition was apt to assume the tone of dissent
from current notions of progress; and yet his views couldn't be
dismissed as of no consequence, for the undertones of assent and
dissent came with an accent of authority that compelled attention if
not acquiescence
● There was a certain challenge in Raghunathan's assumption of
‘Vighneswara’ as his nom-de-plume, but we can now see that the
name wasn’t taken in vain.

● Raghunathan discontinued the ‘Sotto Voce’ feature a decade ago,
but the series of essays has been collected since in the volumes
Sotto Voce: The Coming of Freedom (1959), Our New Rulers (1961),
The Avadi Socialists (1964) and Planners’ Paradise (1970). He has
also published Reason and Intuition in Indian Culture (1969), being
his Madras University extension lectures, but the ‘essay’ seems to
be his real forte.
● Some of the best essays in the ‘Sotto Voce’ collections could be
said that they might be the Elephant God’s own sallies of the
mind.
● Whatever the subject—economics, politics, education, social life,
literature, music, philosophy—it is touched with the seal of
universality. (Iyengar)

Spirituality
● The culture of the people—the complex of swabhava, swadharma,
swatantra, swarajya that is the true index of this culture.
● Indian ‘spirituality’ isn’t something opposed to life and world affirmation.
Spirituality is an awakening to the inner or true Reality of our being. But
how does one achieve contact with the Ground?
● This alliance between intuition and reason —this clue to enlightened and
wise living—Raghunathan calls viveka. Without the continual exercise of
viveka, man would be but a forked animal, a siege of contradictions and
frustrations.
● The Integrated’ man is one who has achieved a harmony between himself
and the world, his inner and his outer life, his thought and his word.

● The man afflicted with pramada—the man without viveka—has a
clouded consciousness that knows neither right measure, matra,
nor self restraint, dama, but is a prey to egoistic separativity and
the misery arising out of it.
● Literature makes such a feat of transcendence possible because
of the alliance of creative imagination and deep sensibility, which
correspond to the two terms of intuition and reason.
● Iyengar justifies him by stating, “Raghunathan’s feeling for
tradition doesn’t of course make him a stick-in-the-mud
obscurantist. He is fully aware of the tempo of change in this age
of nuclear power and space travel. Change is easy, and as
dangerous as it is easy; but stagnation is no less dangerous.”

Works Cited
● Chaudhuri, Nirad. India: The Golden Jubilee. Granta, 1997.
● Hawley, Michael. “Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888—1975).” Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/radhakri/#H2.
● Iyengar, K. R. S Indian Writing in English. Sterling Publishers, 1987.
● Minor, Robert Neil. Radhakrishnan: A Religious Biography. State University
of New York Press, 1987.
● Radhakrishna, Sarvepalli. Search for Truth. Hind Pocket Books Private,
Limited, 2003. Radhakrishnan, S. “The Ethics of the Vedanta.” International
Journal of Ethics, vol. 24, no. 2, 1914, pp. 168–83. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2376505.
● Shils, Edward. "Citizen of the world: Nirad C. Chaudhuri." The American
Scholar 57.4 (1988): 549-573.
● Vohra, Ashok, and K. Satchidananda Murty. Radhakrishnan: His Life and
Ideas. State University of New York Press, 1990

Three prose writers_ Radhakrishnan, Raghunathan and Nirad Chaudhuri.pptx

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