Photo of Vemuri Venkat Ramanadham. Photo credit: The Hindu.
By Sarika Bansal
Cramped in a sweltering college dormitory in South India, Dr. Vemuri Venkat Ramanadham—then known as “Lecturer Ramanadham”—and fervently debated the Indian independence movement with more than 50 students.
Was non-violence the best way to get the British to leave India? How should India govern itself if the British leave? How long would it take for Gandhi’s “Quit India” movement to be effective?
Students posed and answered questions in rapid-fire Telugu, and Ramanadham sat on the side, looking back and forth between his students as though watching a tennis match. This is the closest he would come to the independence movement, and he was satisfied with his contribution.
Today, the nonagenarian is best known for his work as an economist for the United Nations and as a poet in his native language, Telugu. Seventy years ago, during the climax of India’s independence from the British, he was just starting his illustrious academic career. After completing his master’s degree in 1941, Ramanadham became an economics lecturer at Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, a mid-sized town on the coconut-scented southeastern coast of India.
Like most Indians of his generation, Ramanadham spent the 1940s partly engaged with everyday work and partly yearning for India’s independence. “Few people quit their jobs to start fighting for freedom,” he said in a phone interview, “but the freedom struggle permeated everyday life. Almost [everything] in the university during those years related in some way to the independence movement.”
During these years of intense struggle across the country, Ramanadham decided his biggest potential contribution lay in helping students organize debates and demonstrations across the city. “My colleagues and I were trying to bring the students together in the fight for independence,” he said. “We would give them advice.”
In addition to offering tips on how to fight for freedom—“always, it must be non-violent”—Ramanadham also offered an intellectual understanding of independence. It was crucial, he told his students over and over again, to distinguish anti-British sentiment from India’s need for self-governance. “As teachers at a high level, we encouraged students to understand the meaning of independence. It wasn’t against the British, but against the fact that the British were keeping India in bondage,” he said. “The main function students had during those years was to explain [this distinction] to ordinary people.”
“It was our role,” he continued, “to prevent students from doing stupid things in the name of independence. Students had to show the public what was going to be good about freedom, and not simply that we got rid of the British because it was fashionable.”
Considering how he had been witnessing freedom efforts since he was born in 1920, Ramanadham’s sentiment was hardly surprising. The seeds of India’s independence movement date as far back as 1885, when British and Indian members of India’s Theosophical Society established the Indian National Congress. This move both symbolically and pragmatically represented a step towards India’s self-governance. The next few decades saw several independence movements, such as the militant one led by Subhas Chandra Bose (“Netaji”), as well as famously nonviolent ones, like the one led by Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi.
By the 1940s, Ramanadham said, “everyone knew the British would be leaving soon. It was just a matter of time.” Gandhi’s Quit India movement, which called for immediate Indian independence, had quickly gained ground from its inception in 1942.
Across India, including in Visakhapatnam, common people were demanding that the British renegotiate their presence in India. Ramanadham remembers bonfires in the middle of town, where people would burn their Western clothes and pledge to wear only Indian-made threads.
“This was done in the Gandhian spirit of self-reliance. The khadi movement”—the movement that encouraged Indians to wear domestically-produced handspun cloth—“had started years before. It meant that you would give employment to local people and that you don’t buy clothes [made] from a machine. After all, India is a country that had always grown cotton, and there was no reason to buy cotton from another country.”
Ramanadham recalled the khadi clothes as sometimes being itchy and ill fitting, but he and his colleagues still wore them, day in and day out. “They didn’t look as nice as non-khadi suits, even after ironing,” he admitted, “but it was the [idea of] a national dress that mattered to us.”
All the while, he was helping his students debate the core independence-related issues more succinctly, more carefully, more powerfully. He was sometimes gruff in his approach—“after debates, I would tell students where they had defects and what not to do again”—but a core group of debaters returned to him time and again. They seemed to admire Ramanadham’s strict Gandhian approach to the revolution: violence was the easy solution, but Indians needed to rise above it.
“A few people were damaging buildings and assaulting British police officers during these years,” he recollected. “This was wrong.” Luckily, he added, such acts of violence were not very common in Vishakapatnam. They were certainly not common within the university campus, where Ramanadham spent most of his time.
By the time independence came in 1947, few were surprised. “It was time for the British to leave,” Ramanadham said, “and it was good of them to leave when they did.”
He was pleased not only by the timeliness of Britain’s departure but also by the manner in which independence was achieved. “Gandhi’s biggest contribution,” he recounted, “was that we should be peaceful. Be peaceful to the extent that you give yourself to the beatings of the British. Many were hurt in the process. But the British gradually knew that it was a mistake.”
Despite the beatings he witnessed, and despite the intensity of the independence movement, Ramanadham maintained a positive opinion of the British. “We used to emphasize that the British as persons were friendly, but that the government was not friendly,” he said. “They held India under them politically, which was a mistake. But they were fairly nice people.”
Two years after independence was achieved, Ramanadham matriculated to the London School of Economics, where he received his first PhD. To some, Ramanadham’s choice of university may have seemed incongruous with his desire for India’s self-rule, but he did not believe so. “I found everyone friendly there. India was free by then, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it wasn’t free.” After all, he repeated, “we didn’t like the British as rulers, but we were never against them as individuals.”
More than half a century later, his experience in the independence movement has stayed close to him. Both during and after his 30-year career with the United Nations, he published dozens of poetry books in Telugu. Some of his books featured the independence movement quite strongly.
“One of my poetry books is called Swadham Siddhi, which means the achievement of independence. It is 350 pages long, and tells the story of independence from the time Gandhi came from Africa to when he started to lead the independence movement. It finishes when we gained independence.”
When asked why he chose to recount the story of India’s independence in such a manner, Ramanadham simply replied, “I have the good fortune of a gift of poetry. I just wanted to use my gift.”