Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

Biography

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was born in 1888 in Tiruttani in the Madras Presidency into a Telugu Brahmin family of modest means. Scholarships carried him through school and Madras Christian College, where he took bachelor's and master's degrees in philosophy; his early thesis on the ethics of the Vedanta answered missionary critics who held that Hindu thought had no place for ethics.

He taught at Presidency College in Madras from 1909, became professor of philosophy at the University of Mysore in 1918 and in 1921 took the King George V chair of mental and moral science at the University of Calcutta. He lectured at Manchester College, Oxford, was knighted in 1931, served as vice-chancellor of Andhra University from 1931 to 1936, and in 1936 became Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at Oxford. From 1939 to 1948 he was vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University. Books such as An Idealist View of Life made him a leading interpreter of Advaita Vedanta and of Hinduism for Western readers.

After independence he represented India at UNESCO, sat in the Constituent Assembly and was ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952. He was elected India's first vice president in 1952 and served as its second president from 1962 to 1967; at his request his birthday has been kept as Teachers' Day ever since. He received the Bharat Ratna in 1954 and died in Madras in 1975.