Delivering the Hibbert lecture at Manchester College, Oxford in 1929, Dr S Radhakrishnan said “religion today is a branch of statecraft, a plaything of politics.” Validating his knowledge of power-play in a rapidly changing world, he said “Our sense of worship is shifted to our country, which to most of us is a sacred symbol that has its own creeds and ritual, demanding sacrificial living.

The last war gave a pointed demonstration of the feeble claims of religion as compared with the imperious demands of patriotism,” acknowledging that religion was sanctifying inhuman deeds. “Where religion has not been herself the oppressor upholding darkness by violence, she lends her authority to the oppressors and sanctifies their pretenses. That religion is worth little, if the conscience of its followers is not disturbed when war clouds are hanging over us all and industrial conflicts are threatening social peace. Religion has weakened man’s social conscience and moral sensitivity by separating the things of God from those of Caesar. The socially oppressed are seduced by hopes of final adjustment in a celestial fatherland, a sort of post-mortem brotherhood.

No wonder religion is condemned as a piece of capitalistic propaganda. The workers and wage-earners have come to discover themselves and are demanding an opportunity for a fuller and deeper life. Anxious as they are for a new social order based on justice and creative love, they stand out of religious organisations which preach contentment and status quo.” He thus expressed his thoughts on the social revolutionaries who contended that religion blocks the way to all progress and is “a bourgeois prejudice and superstition which must be rooted out at any cost. Spiritually an external or ceremonial religion is good for nothing; materially it has failed to stop the strong man from exploiting his weaker brother; psychologically it has developed traits which are anti-social and anti-scientific.

As for its aesthetic and metaphysical satisfactions, they can easily be fostered by the spread of science and art, morality and social service and a living faith in human brotherhood.” Communism is the new religion; Lenin is its prophet and science its holy symbol, he declared, stating, “Karl Marx’s theory of communism transplanted into the mystic soil of Russia has become a religion practising sanctified methods for its propagation. The active agencies of the communistic parties, the Red Army, the schools, the press and the platform, are struggling to rid the country of all religion. The driving force of Bolshevism is faith, mysticism and willingness to sacrifice even unto death. It is moved by dreams of a new heaven and a new earth even as were the believers in Jewish apocalypse. If the socialist declares, ‘We are not oppos ed to religion.

Neither are we supporting it. We are simply cutting out religion. Our socialist idea of a universal brotherhood is more important than God or Jesus Christ or any religion’, we must confess that he is more truly religious than most worshippers of God or Christ.” Religion, especially organised religion with all its resources, has failed, said Dr Radhakrishnan. “The age has lost the living sense of the truth which it once held. The spirit which revolted against divine rights and sanctified tyrannies in politics, which protested against the iniquity of social abuses and established conventions, which, in the Reformation, expressed itself in the claim to determine the sense of the scripture and ritual, which gave to modern Europe in the Renaissance the free curiosity and the intellectual scrutiny of the Greek mind and the practical sense of equity of the Roman, is to-day expressing itself in the demand for the sway of science and social idealism,” he declared unequivocally, referring to the general unrest that he was witnessing in the world around himself.

“The present confusion and disorganisation are not confined to Europe and America. Though there are fundamental distinctions between the East and the West, the striking feature at the moment is the extent to which the cultural life of the peoples is getting unified. Turkey is turning its back on Islam for the sake of national efficiency and progress. What is true of Turkey is more or less true of other Moslem states, Persia, Egypt and Afghanistan. In China and India venerable structures built by the patience and effort of unnumbered generations are attacked from all sides. Religion is set down as the cause of our intellectual and national bondage, of our failure and lack of vitality. Many of the Indian leaders are convinced that orthodox fundamentalism, which is still the creed of the majority of the people, has cost us a lot in struggle and suffering, in stunted manhood and de – for med spiritual growth,” he said.

The scholarhistorian in Dr Radhakrishnan found that “when men of undoubted piety range themselves against common sense and scientific knowledge, against the dictates of hu manity and the demands of justice, all in blind obedience to laws whose infallibility is a myth, our leaders are getting tired of religion and think it is time we part with it. The country wants today not so much salvation from sin as social betterment which will transform the mass of people who are ill-fed, illclothed and ill-housed into a free community of well-regulated families, living not in luxury, but in moderate comfort with no fierce or unheal thy competition. Freedom is the rallying cry. It is inevitable that the challenge of freedom means often a rude handling of old loyalties and a hasty dismissal of venerable beauty in symbol and ceremony. But freedom asks for its price.”

He addressed the issue of the unrest of the day, saying, “it is caused as much by the moral ineffectiveness of religion, its failure to promote the best life as by the insistent pressure of new knowledge on traditional beliefs. There are a few intellectual snobs with whom it is a sign of accomplishment to ridicule religion. To care for religion is to be old-fashioned; to be critical of it is to be in the movement. A reading democracy which is necessarily imperfectly educated feels it its duty to reject traditional control when it does not understand the reasons for its claims.” Scepticism does not cost us much; it is faith that requires courage nowadays were the golden words that are reaching out to the 21st century.

“We have the much larger number who have outgrown the faith but are unwilling to break away…Our concern, however, is with those who find themselves while willing, yet incapable of belief. Their souls have grown more sensitive and so their difficulties are deeper and their questions more insistent. Their doubt is an expression of piety, their protest a kind of loyalty. In the depths of the human soul lies something which we rationalise as the search for truth, a demand for justice, a passion for righteousness.

This striving for truth and justice is an essential part of our life. We do not need an Aristotle to tell us that the pursuit of knowledge is our highest duty and the only permissible excesses are the excesses of the intellect. The disorders due to the disturbance of our minds are preferable to the bondage of the human spirit. This is not the first time in the history of the world that the age was felt to be transitional and religion held to be untenable. It is said ~ though I cannot vouch for its authenticity ~ that the first words uttered by Adam to Eve as they stepped out of the gate in the garden of Eden were, ‘We live in times of transition’,” said Dr Radhakrishnan, the scholar who was yet to become a global statesman.

“Every period is one of transition. Through discord and confusion lies progress. It happens in the sub-human level; it is willed in the human. The spirit of man can change the direction of the march… At a time when humanity is struggling to rise from a state of subjection to authority to one in which perfect self-determination is possible, we need the assistance of creative minds. The prophet souls and not the priest minds, the original men of understanding and not the mechanical imitators of the inherited habits, are needed to help our wandering generation to fashion a goal for itself.

Prophecy is insight. It is vision. It is anticipating experience. It is seeing the present so fully as to foresee the future.” In paying tribute to Dr Radhakrishnan on his birth anniversary, his undying brilliance makes for a memorable Teacher’s Day.

(The writer is an author on history and heritage issues, and a former deputy curator of Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya)