Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan is the most influential scholar, philosopher and leader of Modern India. Discuss. (250 words)
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was a philosopher, a great teacher, a scholar par-excellence, a creative genius, a great humanist, a spiritualist, a man of vision, a man of mission, a man of principles, an idealist, an orator with gift of the gab, an original thinker, an eminent author and then the role of the Executive Head of India are few outlines of this personality. He was one of the greatest educationists in India.
Radhakrishnan influential works
- Radhakrishnan is counted amongst India’s best and most influential scholars of comparative religion and philosophy. His defense of Hinduism against “uninformed Western criticism” has been highly influential, both in India and the Western world. He is credited to have made Hinduism more readily accessible for the Western audience.
- He won the Templeton Prize in 1975, for promoting the notion of “a universal reality of God that embraced love and wisdom for all people”. He donated all the award money to Oxford University
- Through his innumerable visits to various parts of the world, through his good-will missions, lectures, and interpretations of the spirit of Hinduism, Radhakrishnan has inspired enormous friendship for his country.
- It gained popularity throughout the western world. In his age of mental unrest and desires and cravings, his writings give inspiration to people to find the new gamut of life and get peace.
- He was the torch-bearer of the Indian education. His contribution to the field of education, philosophy, religion, culture, science etc. was immemorial.
- Radhakrishnan defines education as the instrument for social, economic and cultural change. For social and national integration, for increasing productively, education should be properly utilized.
- The importance of education is not only in knowledge and skill, but it is to help us to live with others.
- According to him education should not merely give us some techniques so that we lead successful lives, but should also help us discover “lasting values”.
- To Radhakrishnan any form of life, where we have significance and social value, is moral.
- Radhakrishnan defines art as form knowledge, a disclosure of the deeper reality of things, and an imitation of inner reality.
- According to Dr. Radhakrishnan, Philosophy is avoiding terms that includes logic, ethics, aesthetics, social philosophy and metaphysics. Metaphysics which is concerned with the ultimate nature of things is comprised of two main fields, oncology and epistemology.
Changes have been unprecedented and so large-scale and so fast. All his university education reforms have been overtaken by new demands, new responses. Even we can’t have much help from Radhakrishnan’s vast corpus of writings, much education content as such.