Shortly after returning to India, Annadurai fell ill again and another operation for cancer was performed. On 3 February 1969 he died. The Tamil country mourned on a scale not seen before — and C.R., roused at 1 a.m. with the news, realized his loss. No one else in the DMK had the stature to remould it. ‘Everyone knows how grieved I am and why,’ he said. Later he added that the people of Tamilnad had ‘lost their good right arm’ (Swarajya, 15.2.69).
Anna was buried — not cremated — near the beach. As the exhibition of grief continued around the tomb, C.R. recalled a Socrates story:
When he said to the jailor that he was ready to drink the potion of death, the weeping friends of Socrates asked Socrates whether he would like to be cremated or buried. Socrates laughed and told them they might do whatever they liked if they could catch the bird after it had flown away from the cage (Swarajya, 8.2.69).
In April 1967, at 88, C.R. underwent surgery for the first time in his life (it was for hernia) and stood it well. A violent attack of hiccups that followed the surgery ‘made breathing, eating and sleeping a torture,’ (Swarajya, 22.4.67) but after ten days the attack passed.
At 89, he surprised newsmen in New Delhi. The Indian Express (28.11.67) reported a press conference:
He was all there: the aphorisms, the arrogance which showed through as he slighted certain questions which were flung at hin, the quickwittedness, the cracks at himself — ‘kindly improve my answers when you report this conference’ . . . He poured acid on the Communists (‘Sir, I do not differentiate between the two groups’), gave the DMK government a good chit, attacked the language bill, jibed at state governors [and] bared his gums at the Congress party.
A year later, he was still in remarkable shape, as the writer Padmalaya Das, interviewing him in Bhubaneshwar, found:
The curtains parted and a small frail figure stepped in, stumbling a little on the doormat . . . Unaided, Rajaji walked into the room. He . . . sat in a chair and I introduced myself and handed him two pamphlets written by me . . .
And then began the questions. Later I realized that he had asked me more questions than I could ask him . . . He looked very fresh and cheerful. His voice was deep and slow and surprisingly firm and precise . . .
I had typed out a question on a suggestion he was stated to have made for ‘a gadget for monitoring the human mind.’ . . . As he pored over the piece of paper, I could observe the famous face . . . He has large gentle eyes with heavy lids . . . His skin had a strange glow.
At last he looked up and smiled. ‘You can develop the idea yourself,’ he said. And I had to laugh.
‘Could you please tell me what you would do if you were compelled to take charge of India?’ ‘I would first go to a doctor to get younger.’ And he really grinned and I burst into laughter.12
‘Please don’t write to me,’ he begged of his readers, telling them that his sight prevented him from going through his mail. But he read Tennyson’s poems, ‘Sixty Years of Power’ by Lord Swinton, ‘The Divine Flame’ by Alister Hardy, and other works, and he re-read Valmiki. ‘Tara is the most intelligent and brightest of the womenfolk in Valmiki,’ he said, explaining why he named one of his granddaughters Tara.13
There had been no diminution in his love of the Epics, for some of his other descendants would be called, in’ accordance with his wishes, Sita, Govind, Sriram and Kesavan. With the marriages of more of his grandchildren, his clan was getting bigger.
The year 1969 saw the Gandhi centenary — and strife in several parts of India. ‘Not a night passes but Gandhiji comes alive in my dreams,’ C.R. had written (Swarajya, 5.10.68). Writing to grandson Gopu about a classic he had just re-read, C.R. said:
The sad tenor of the idylls of the King, the corruptions and the tragedy of the Round Table read like an echo of our Congress story in India. Arthur’s sword Excalibur was thrown into the lake and so has Bapu’s Excalibur been thrown away (18.2.69).
When they live long, dissenters can hear a phrase hard to utter and pleasant to receive — ‘You were right.’ His age was now conferring this pleasure on C.R. The phrase was used by some who had opposed his stand against Quit India or his Pakistan formula of 1944.
K.R. Karanth, in 1942 an ardent Quit India supporter, now wrote that Rajaji had been prescient in arguing that Britain would give freedom at the end of the war and should not be asked to quit ‘when it was fighting for its very existence.’14 Akshaya Kumar Jain, editor of Navbharat Times, wrote:
Had we acted upon Rajaji’s advice (over the Pakistan demand ) at that time, the country would not have experienced the bloodbath [of 1947] . . . The present-day bitterness would also not have engulfed India and Pakistan.15
Hukam Singh, the Lok Sabha speaker from 1962 to 1967, thought that ‘Rajaji could see what was coming and could not be avoided,’16 and in Pakistan Khaliquzzaman reflected that the 1944 Rajaji formula would have been ‘far better’ than the 1947 arrangement.17
There was rethinking, too, on C.R.’s position on the economy. Thus S.C. Sarkar wrote:
For a number of years Rajaji was campaigning against the failures of . . . ‘permit-licence raj.’ Few of us who were wedded to the ideals of socialism and economic equality could appreciate the justice of his criticism although in retrospect today few would dare to controvert that criticism. [C.R.’s] long experience had endowed him with an insight of which well-meaning intellectuals had not even the faintest idea.18
As he reached and passed the ninetieth milestone, C.R. heard such acknowledgements and was glad. Provided supporters stood firm, he was, he said, prepared to say, ‘Life begins at ninety’ (Swarajya, 23.11.68).
His Swarajya and Kalki pieces were as interesting as ever. His signed column was, if anything, longer, sharper, richer than before. It asked whether readers realized that Lyndon Johnson had stopped smoking, that the Danes were Europe’s leaders in civil aviation, that St. Joseph’s College in Trichy was turning out splendid exam results . . . It spoke of the sad final days of Francis Bacon, the current dilemmas of the Beatles, and the foolishness of disbanding traditional regiments of the Indian Army.
The Tamils are told, as they await the change from ‘Madras’ to ‘Tamil Nadu,’ that the ‘u’ at the end of the new name would be infelicitously lengthened when uttered by North Indians, that Tamil Nad would be a better spelling. (But they have long learned to admire him without heeding him, and Tamil Nadu it will be.) They are also told that Chavan rhymes with jawan, not with Ravan; the lesson is called for, for some Tamil papers have made him Chaa-one.
And there are the suggestions, old and new. All India Radio should be run by an autonomous body. The state should bear election expenses. The French should not test their Bomb. Sometimes he was purely, and charmingly, reflective:
Unquestionably the most beautiful things on earth are the flowers and the sweet notes of the birds, sunrise and sunset not being of the earth but of the sky. The grandest things are the great trees. Man’s claim to beauty is only his mind . . . (Swarajya, 17.5.69).
More frequently he supervised the nation’s manners:
The External Affairs Minister, Mr M.C. Chagla, we are told, replied, ‘Evidently Mr Mody was saying this on the basis of his own weight.’ I must very regretfully say that this was cheap and in very bad taste . . . The report says the House burst into ‘applause,’ meaning, I suppose, laughter. The MPs should have expressed disapproval rather than cheering him for his poor joke (Swarajya, 17.6.67).
His sarcasm — and sense of moral injury — had full play when, in 1968, preparations commenced for depriving ex-rulers of the privy purses guaranteed to them by the Constitution:
What a fool Rama was, say Congressmen, to give up the crown and go to the forest to enable his father to keep his word of honour and not break his pledge. ‘We break our pledges without compunction,’ the Congress party says. ‘Our ideas of morality and honour have marched with the times’ (Swarajya, 27.7.68).
Sri Jawaharlal Nehru, Sri Vallabhbhai Patel and myself all stand t
o be dishonoured . . . The negotiations regarding the privy purses and privileges of the Princes were concluded when I was Governor-General and not a mere figurehead. Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel are gone. But I share in the responsibility of maintaining honour in this affair and it is my particular and personal duty to protest most strongly (Swarajya, 16.11.68).
As likely as not, his column referred to the death of someone famous or significant or near. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the assassinated ones; Attlee, who signed away India; Master Tara Singh (‘dear and restless soul’); Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, president of the Jan Sangh; Sir Homi Mody, Murarji Vaidya and Charanjit Rai, Swatantra stalwarts; Manu Gandhi, the Mahatma’s dedicated grandniece — these and others were farewelled.
He felt no qualms about taking sides in American disputes. He was for Johnson and against the growing ranks of his foes who were demanding withdrawal from Vietnam; and in the end-1968 presidential contest he ‘cast his vote,’ as he put it in Swarajya, for Nixon and against Humphrey. The preference for Nixon was not enthusiastic:
The whole of America [has] turned isolationist . . . Nixon will be busy with internal problems. North Vietnam will eat Saigon as we dispose of milk chocolates.19
While apprehending a day when ‘Southeast Asia falls a prey to the Communist powers by American withdrawal,’ he was careful not to regard the Chinese people as enemies, and made prescient appraisals:
The industriousness of the Chinese people, their piety and their adherence to the rules of conduct laid down by Confucius have not ceased to be on account of the black shadow of Communism now upon them. These will shine again when one day . . . the Chinese people are free again. (Swarajya, 24.5.69).
He was sure, in fact, that ‘years of Communist indoctrination have not brainwashed irredeemably’ the Chinese, whom he saw as ‘a philosophic as well as a practical race who find their moorings and their bearings in hard work. This great gift of the Chinese people for working hard at the thousand and one things that needed doing in man’s daily existence was their surest insurance against their being irretrievably lost to the power games of the politicians’ (Swarajya, 12.7.69).
When the Czech hopes of 1968 were crushed, he again revealed foresight. ‘If the days of Dubcek are numbered,’ he wrote, ‘the days of Communism are also numbered.’ Earlier, during the short-lived Prague spring, he had spoken of ‘Czechoslovakia’s victorious breach in the walls of Communism’ and rejoiced that ‘they have not fallen into the fatal trap of violence.’20 India’s official attitude offended him:
Why should Indira Gandhi be afraid of the word ‘condemn’ when the Soviet Government was not afraid of committing its monstrous crime? India is not yet a member of the Warsaw Pact (Swarajya, 31.8.68).
His religious views and practices may be looked at.
Whenever I have keenly felt the distress of others, and I pray for their relief, I have found God has answered (Swarajya, 18.3.72).
In any three or four consecutive issues of Swarajya there was bound to be a piece by Rajaji relating to the Almighty, or on the Gita, or, perhaps, the Bible. No public speech of his omitted a reference to some eternal truth. As Chief Minister he had prayed for rain and the waters did come down. His prayers for opposition unity and Mrs Gandhi’s defeat were less successful but he did not blame Providence.
He did not set aside any particular time of day for praying; all his urgings were silent ones; he did not recite any standard verses; and he was opposed to astrology. After joining the Mahatma, he had given up the shikha and the naamam — the hairknot and the forehead mark. What he retained on his person was the annually-replaced sacred thread, first received by him as a boy at a ceremony in the great temple above Tirupati.
Rarely did he visit temples but there were occasions when he sent offerings of money to Tirupati. He adhered strictly to the vegetarianism his tradition prescribed, and occasionally preached it to others, but there were also times when he thought fish and eggs essential to combat malnutrition in India.
His religion was, among other things, a product of thought. In typical passages, he wrote:
The foundation for science as well as for religion is wonder . . . It is science to find out the answers to wonder through investigation and experiment. When we reach the limit of such investigation and the wonder still remains unanswered, we pass on from wonder to the awe that is worship (Swarajya, 22.2.64).
As long as there is suffering in the world, as long as there is the great curiosity to unravel truth, as long as men and women have some intense desire to be fulfilled, as long as there is wisdom in this world, the future of religion is assured (July 1966).
Like many other Brahmins, C.R. believed that genealogy had linked him to the wisdom of ancient India. Thoughts reminding him of his ancestors and of ties with Nallan (‘the good’) Chakravarti and Ramanuja were pleasant to him. He was proud of the faith and insights of the Hindus of old. No doubt the caste system had been perverted, no doubt untouchability was a shame too deep for words, yet Hindu doctrines seemed to him priceless and made for modern man everywhere:
We have inherited the broadest culture and the most tolerant of all religious creeds (Swarajya, 13.11.71).
The children of the rishis of the Upanishads have a mission for the world (Swarajya, 12.2.72).
Yet he disavowed any desire ‘to plead that the Gita is better or fuller than any other scriptures,’21 and his respect for other religions and their adherents was noteworthy. He felt Hindus could emulate the average Muslim’s trust in God; his Swarajya pieces were sprinkled with Biblical quotations and he spoke once of being affected by ‘the icon of the crucifix’22; and he desired ‘all pious Hindus to read the Ganth Saheb either in the original or in good translations.’23
‘God will not let India down, though He is putting us to hard tests now,’ he wrote in 1972 (Swarajya, 12.2.72). If his faith sounded sincere, it did not always bubble across from him. His wit effervesced; his faith did not. Often it was faith as duty.
I have written books, stories and fables. But on the whole I am not a man of letters. I have written mostly for causes— propaganda for the abolition of untouchability for instance.24
C.R.’s writings may be looked at under four heads: the Swarajya, Kalki, Young India and Harijan pieces, in other words his journalistic output; the Ramayana and the Mahabharata; the short stories and fables; and his verses. (These categories exclude, among other items, his commentaries on the Gita and the Kural, as well as the short books he wrote on Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Ramakrishna and Brother Lawrence.)
His journalistic writing mixed exhortation with observation. The former impinged more on the public consciousness — often it was strong, compelling and controversial stuff. But the latter possesses a sharpness and a sweep that would strike any student of writing. Had he wished to be no more than a mirror of his times he would still have attracted attention.
Offering one man’s opinion, W.R. Crocker, the Australian diplomat-writer, placed C.R.’s Swarajya outpourings above G.K. Chesterton’s contributions in the Illustrated London News ‘for variety, pungency and interest.’25
Rajaji’s obituaries — their number growing with him — lighted up the qualities of their subjects in a minimum of graceful and heartfelt lines; and there was at least one person who regretted outliving C.R. because he was denied an obit by Rajaji.26 The Swarajya and Kalki pieces written after Pope John, Prakasam and Khasa died and a comment on Tagore suggest in fact that had he had the time C.R. might have made a rare biographer.
In any case he belonged to the highest class as an onlooker, and many would agree with C.S. Venkatachar, civil servant and diplomat, who found Rajaji’s ‘tête-à -tetê with the Dear Reader’ a ‘model of urbanity, good taste, friendly comment, sane advice, thoughtful reflection.’27
The Ramayana won the Sahitya Akademi award for Tamil; in both Tamil and English the Ramayana and the Mahabharata sold in large numbers and continue to be reprinted. In the early 1950s, Ramnath Go
enka produced a hundred thousand Tamil copies of Rajaji’s Mahabharata on newsprint and sold them within days.
What lay behind the success? Apart from a lucid style and skill in selecting characters and episodes, C.R. reacted as a typical citizen to the paradoxes in which the two Epics abound and which explain, in part, their magnetic appeal. Thus he was as vexed as the man in the street with the Rama who uttered cruel words to Sita. ‘Subhadra and Sita walk in our midst and speak a language we understand,’ said the Sunday Statesman (31.12.72), reviewing one of C.R.’s versions. Contributing to the impact was C.R.’s approach to the Epics. He went to them neither as a scholar nor as an awe-struck worshipper but as a lover of great literature.
None of his short stories (thirty-six were put together in Stories for the Innocent) is without a moral. Often they tell of the ruin that liquor or untouchability or caste arrogance brings. All breathe irony and most are sad but a few amuse as well. Virtually all belong to the pre-Independence era and were first written in Tamil.
The characters are from rural South India, the stories almost real-life ones. The strength lies in their plots and characters, not in description. The tragedies unfold naturally. A Madras critic sees in Rajaji ‘a mastery of the short-story form’ and notes a powerful ‘reticence’ and ‘artistic control.’28
‘Some of [Rajaji’s] characters like Parvati have become part of the popular culture of the Tamils.’ Professor K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, making this observation, categorically places C.R. ‘among the masters and makers of modern Tamil prose.’29 Even if they do not all go so far, most other critics would include Rajaji in any study of this century’s Tamil literature.
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