| Valangaiman Sankaranarayana Srinivasa Sastri (1869 - 1946) |
Sastri was born of poor priest parents, in Valangaiman in Thanjavur in South India. He began his career as a schoolmaster, but his interest in public causes and his powers of oratory soon combined to bring him national fame. In 1907 he joined the political and reform movement of the Servants of India Society, of which he became president in 1915. He was a member of the Madras Legislative Council and was elected to the central legislature in 1916. Elected to the new council of state established under the reforms, he found himself increasingly out of sympathy with the dominant group in the nationalist Congress Party, which declined to cooperate in the reforms and preferred methods of civil disobedience. He therefore left the Congress Party and founded the Indian Liberal Federation, of which he was president, in 1922.
In the same year, the government sent him abroad in an effort to improve the position of Indians living in those countries. In 1926 he was sent to South Africa for a similar purpose, and in 1927 he was appointed India's agent-general there. Two years later he was appointed a member of the Royal Commission on Labour in India. From 1935 to 1940 he served as the vice-chancellor of the Annamalai University in Madras State. Like Nehru, Sastri was visionary.
Sastri was an embodiment of the Indian Tradition with a capacity for expressing in universal language. He was one of the greatest ambassador and interpreter of Indian Culture abroad and is rated next to Rabindranath Tagore.
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| Category filed under: Political |
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