It would not be inaccurate to say that between roughly 1933 and his death in 1946, Rt. Hon’ble V. S. Srinivasa Sastri was in relative political wilderness compared to his earlier prominence. By the mid-1930s, Sastri had distanced himself from the more militant and mass-based nationalist politics led by the Indian National Congress under Gandhi and Nehru, following his resignation from the Party over disagreements about the non-cooperation movement.
Sastri had serious qualms about Civil Disobedience and Non-Cooperation being used as weapons of political struggle albeit in wholly Gandhian-style and in much-touted Non-Violent ways.
While not disagreeing that Sathyagraha was indeed a very effective way of exerting tremendous moral pressure on the British Colonial powers, Sastri had the foresight, nevertheless, to realise that it was a potent and treacherous double-edged sword. After Independence was attained, Sastri feared, the new fledgling Nation might not be able to rein in the anarchic impulses that he discerned lurking deep and latent at the very core of the whole philosophy of Civil Disobedience. Those impulses he felt would not be conducive to nation-building and, in fact, would turn out to be inimical to social reconstruction.
Civil Disobedience was politically expedient in the short-term for Gandhi and Nehru to wrest freedom from the British. Sastri however was convinced that it would only instill in the Indian people, once they had gained such freedom, a very unhealthy political culture and a deep-seated habit of wilful recalcitrance and non-cooperation that would never wear off. Rather it would only gather more strength and would engender and normalise chronic instablity and acrimony in the relationship between the State and People.
In other words, Sastri had the statesman’s farsightedness to anticipate how in the Independent Democratic Republic of India, Gandhi’s legacy of Civil Disobedience would take deep root in the national character and begin to constantly plague civil society with all sorts of mass-movements and social unrest staged more for narrow parochial, group self-interests rather than large national causes. Civil Disobedience thus could easily become less and civil; and in time, become ever more and more disobedient.
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During this later period in which he found himself in relative political wilderness, Sastri turned the focus of his energies to his other passions.
Sastri focused more on constitutional liberalism and worked mainly through moderate political channels such as the Indian Liberal Federation. His leadership of the Indian Liberal Federation and expertise as an orator and diplomat remained respected but his political influence and popular visibility diminished significantly in these years.
He engaged further in diplomatic and educational roles, notably serving as Vice-Chancellor of Annamalai University from 1935 to 1940. Since the British Government of India greatly valued his expertise in foreign affairs, Sastri was even briefly offered an assignment to go to Malaya to study and submit a report on the status of Indian labourer-population working there as migrant workers in tea and rubber plantations.
Although Sastri participated in some important political events such as the Round Table Conferences (1930-31) and was part of delegations appealing for dominion status during WWII, he was still largely sidelined by the mass nationalist movements that dominated the freedom struggle in the 1930s and 1940s.
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WORLD WAR-2 and QUIT INDIA MOVEMENT:
Sastri’s moderate, cooperative stance during World War II, including refusal to resign from the British War Committee and opposition to the Quit India movement, placed him at odds with the dominant Congress leadership and radical nationalists.
The “War Committee” during World War II was constituted by the British Government in India. It was mandated to coordinate and oversee the Indian contribution to the Allied war effort. This committee was part of the administrative and consultative mechanisms set up by the colonial government to manage military, strategic, and resource mobilization issues during the war.
Sastri’s role in the War Committee was as a member representing Indian interests from a moderate, constitutionalist perspective. He did not hold a formal military rank but served as a senior political advisor and elder statesman. His participation reflected his pragmatic support for India siding with Britain during the war while advocating orderly constitutional progress and opposing radical civil disobedience such as the Quit India Movement. Sastri’s presence on the committee was part of his broader role as an experienced diplomat and political moderate engaged in advising the British government and advocating Indian concerns within legal and constitutional frameworks.
Sastri made no secret at all that he considered the Quit India movement of 1942 as an impossible demand that could lead to anarchy and appreciated the difficulties faced by Britain in the war. Sastri blamed India’s problems more on Indian disunity than British policy and maintained that British rule was “providential” as part of India’s political evolution. Thus, he chose to remain on the War Committee as a moderate voice supporting dominion status and constitutional progress, rather than withdrawing in protest or radical opposition.
There is no specific record of who exactly demanded that Sastri resign from the War Committee, but it can be inferred that the more radical elements of the Indian National Congress and Quit India Movement supporters would have expected loyal Indian leaders to resign in protest of British rule during the war. Sastri’s refusal to resign set him apart from the Congress leadership and mass nationalist activism of the period.
V. S. Srinivasa Sastri did experience thus a form of political marginalization during the later years of the Indian freedom struggle, especially as the mass nationalist movements led by Gandhi and Nehru became increasingly dominant. However, the relationship between Sastri and Gandhi was marked by mutual respect and personal friendship despite their sharp political differences. Gandhi even addressed Sastri as his “elder brother” in their correspondences and praised his qualities. Their personal rapport remained warm.
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Sastri himself expressed a sense of melancholy and political isolation in the late 1930s and early 1940s, lamenting that Indian liberals were “not wanted” in the political landscape dominated by radical nationalism. This nuanced picture is reflected in biographies and archival letters showing Sastri’s dignified but somewhat melancholic withdrawal from frontline nationalist politics in the 1930s and 1940s.
Below is a mere sampling of such letters of Srinivasa Sastry. They all truly reflect the mood of subdue and melancholy that was gradually creeping upon him in his advancing years but which he yet bore with stoicism and, in fact at times, with remarkably good humour! To his good friend, the outstanding legal and constitutional luminary, Alladi Krishnaswamy Aiyar, Sastri wrote about his sense of isolation but then at the same time also pulled Alladi’s legs, playfully shaming him for his preoccupation with the mundane and quotidian preoccupations in his humdrum life and even for not showing gratitude to his “long-suffering” spouse!
TO RAO BAHADUR A. KRISHNASWAMI AIYAR
POONA: 31st March 1935
Dearest Friend
This note is several days behind, but there is no more to write for that reason. Life is reduced to routine for me and one day is so like another, I ask myself why prolong.
You come frequently into my thoughts-stooping and looking at your own sandals, which you drag with an effort, the ancient blanket resting on the shoulder with accustomed repose, the fingers of the right hand tracing queer lines on the heedless air, the head no longer poised firmly, but thrown forward and a wee bit sideward, as if too heavy with borrowed cares and adopted tasks, and the mind—ah, that mind! who shall sort its contents? May be the most suitable transport of a patient from Guindy to the hospital, maybe a word of unfelt anger to the school contractor, maybe the supply of a missing link in the chain of evidence for a trumpery small-cause suit to which a cousin or a nephew of an old friend is a party, maybe some subtle flattery by which a simple official could be wheedled into forgetting restrictive bye-laws. …. Good honest items everyone: but does it strike you ever that others may do them just as well as you, and that if they were not done so well, the world would not be the worse the least bit?
Why not listen two hours daily to the melting thevaaram of a half-starved andi, helping the puzzled intelligence of a neighbour with pregnant comments on the vocables and allusions? Why not get an old sastri to chant the Upanishads or expound the Gita. now and then startling him by questions suggestive of the limitation of rishis or the unbridled exegetical ingenuity of Sankara?
And why not, I ask twice, why not spend a quiet hour at home, submitting to the just reproaches of a long-suffering partner, from whom so much has been exacted but to whom so little has been given? Believe me always your saucy, but reverent and worshipful,
V.S.SRINIVASAN
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The spectre of World War-2 breaking out in Europe greatly disturbed Sastri and perhaps even aggravated his personal mood of depression. Sastri was greatly admired by the noted Kannada poet and prolific Sahitya Akademi Award winning writer, “DVG”, D.V.Gundappa (1887-1975). In a letter addressed to DVG, Sastri’s mental state of anxiety can be fathomed:
To: Mr. D.V. GUNDAPPA
MYLAPORE: 4th October 1938
My dear Gundappa
Born in 1869, I am only 69 now. That is, I have completed 69 years. When Sept. 22 comes round in 1939, I should be a septuagenarian, if…..
The world is going mad. I never was so perplexed in my life as now. Do I want peace or war? Peace.
Then why am I not pleased? Because of the extinction (it will be that soon) of Czechoslovakia. Did I expect peace in a Hitler-ridden world without some iniquity? If I did, I was a fool. Much as I disliked Halifax when he said: ‘Peace is at this juncture greater to the world than justice’, I don’t dislike him nearly so much now. Peace is something more tangible, at least in its negative aspects, than justice, and far more clearly discernible. Who would sacrifice a clear tangible end for a mere abstraction which means different things to different nations and different individuals? This peace, however, cannot last long. Some people would ask: “Since we must fight someday, why, not now? it may be better now than tomorrow”.
The answer is that of the doctor in the case of the dying man. He can’t say: “Since the patient is sure to die in three days, why not finish him now? So much bother is saved.”
The idea is, God’s ways are inscrutable. Nothing is certain. If we gain time, who knows? Mankind may change its ways, the nations may learn the wisdom of peace, and all quarrels will yield to reason.
Let Chamberlain (then British Prime Minister) have the peace prize, and give a share of it to Daladier (French Radical-Socialist centre-left politician, then Prime Minister of France in 1933, 1934) and Mussolini (then Italian Prime Minister) and (Adolf) Hitler himself. Benes (then Czech politician and statesman who served as the president of Czechoslovakia in 1935-1938) is to have nothing but the world’s pity and scorn.
My brain is now feeble and fitful in its work, and I daren’t trust its verdict. But there will be a few more wars before the reign of peace begins. Then the earth and its peoples will be very different from what they are to-day.
Affectionately yours
V. S SRINIVASAN
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The most poignant of his letters expressing the utter sense of isolation and loneliness he felt at being marginalized by the mainstream of politics in India in that period was the one Srinivasa Sastri wrote to a dear and personal friend to whom he truly opened out his heart and vented feelings:
To Mr T. N. JAGADISAN:
COIMBATORE: 7th June 1941
My dear Jagadisan,
A few years ago I used to plague myself with examination of my past and contemplation of the great chasm between what might have been and what was….
Now I have a solace, but you will he surprised, perhaps shocked, to know of it. What would it have signified to the world, I ask, if I had realized my possibilities to the full？
True pessimism, you say. Stern reality, I rejoin.
Pray do not imagine I have a grievance against the world. I have none. On the contrary, the world has been kind; not only tolerant, but generous. A diffident, ungrasping man is generally at a disadvantage; but luck has been friendly to me. Good things have sought me, occasionally found me timid and hesitant. I have not actually run away from such opportunities; conscience-stricken and scared, I have sat up and done my duty. But I was never eager, not at all ambitious and sadly deficient in the quality of adventure. If I sat at the table of the mighty, I was content to eat what I needed. I did not shout for the viands and costly wines and gorge myself.
To speak the truth, I was every moment weighed down by the feeling that I had strayed out of bounds. I never settled down where I was stationed, but sat on the edge of the chair, ready to vacate if stared at questioningly by any steward.
Conquerors must be made of sterner stuff.
Affectionately yours
V. S. SRINIVASAN
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In spite of his relations with Gandhi remaining warm and affectionate as ever, still there was no doubt that his deep and wide political differences with the Mahatma’s politics and leadership did at times chafe and even rankle Srinivasa Sastri. In one of his letters to another friend, and in a moment of rare candour, Sastri gave voice to all his suppressed bitterness:
To Mr A. V. THAKKAR
R. S. PURAM, COIMBATORE: 12th September 1941
My dear Thakkar
You will have seen my statement on Churchill’s declaration. He is a powerful man, now all powerful and puffed up. India can tackle him, if she is united, practical-minded, long-sighted. Jinnah has tied himself up into a tangled knot. He is paralysed. Gandhiji can shake himself and strike a new line but he too for the moment is in perverse company and wedded, like the I.C.S. of old time, to prestige and consistency. These are the shibboleths of party but the ruin of the nation. He can’t give up his morals and Ahimsa, but he can stand aside and give a chance to an alternative policy. Stark abdication, publicly announced, may cause a panic and do terrible harm. But acquiescence in another line of approach is feasible. He is aware of it. However, I am impotent and have no business to advise. So I shut up. Love.
Yours affectionately
V. S. SRINIVASAN
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(to be continued)
Sudarshan Madabushi