C. Rajagopalachari

Chakravarti Rajagopalachari was born on December 10, 1878, in the village of Thorapalli, near Hosur in the Salem district of the Madras Presidency, then part of British India ^[1]. His father, Chakravarti Venkatarya Iyengar, served as the village munsiff, a minor judicial official, and the family belonged to a Tamil Brahmin community of modest means. The boy was frail in childhood, and his parents reportedly worried he would not survive to adulthood.

He studied at schools in Hosur before moving on to Central College in Bangalore and then Presidency College in Madras, where he took a degree in law ^[2]. In 1897, while still a student, he married Alarmelu Mangalamma. The couple had five children before her death in 1916. Rajagopalachari never remarried, raising his children alone while building a legal practice.

By the early 1900s he had settled in Salem, where his courtroom work earned him a comfortable income and a local reputation. He was drawn early to public affairs, joining the Salem municipality and eventually becoming its chairman in 1917, a platform he used to open civic institutions to members of the depressed classes ^[1]. Anyone tracing a C. Rajagopalachari biography finds in these Salem years the pattern of his whole career: a lawyer's precision joined to a reformer's stubbornness.

The turning point came with Mahatma Gandhi's arrival in Indian politics. Rajagopalachari met Gandhi in 1919, abandoned his lucrative legal practice, and threw himself into the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920 to 1922 ^[2]. He was jailed for his part in the agitation, the first of several imprisonments under British rule. Gandhi came to trust him deeply, once describing him as the keeper of his conscience, and the bond became familial in 1933 when Gandhi's son Devadas married Rajagopalachari's daughter Lakshmi ^[3].

Within the Indian National Congress he rose quickly, serving as General Secretary in 1921 and 1922 and sitting on the Congress Working Committee. During the Salt Satyagraha of 1930, while Gandhi marched to Dandi on the western coast, Rajagopalachari led a parallel march from Tiruchirappalli to Vedaranyam on the Tamil coast to break the salt laws, an act that brought him another prison term and national attention ^[1].

He was also a committed social reformer in the Gandhian mould. He campaigned against untouchability, promoted khadi and village industries, and ran an ashram at Tiruchengode in the 1920s devoted to constructive work. Prohibition of alcohol became one of his lifelong causes, rooted in his view of drink as a tax on the poor ^[2].

When the Government of India Act of 1935 introduced provincial autonomy, Congress swept the 1937 elections in Madras and Rajagopalachari became Premier of the presidency ^[1]. His ministry, which lasted until 1939, enacted prohibition, introduced agricultural debt relief, and passed the Temple Entry Authorization Act that opened Hindu temples to Dalits. His decision to make Hindi a compulsory subject in schools provoked fierce anti-Hindi protests in the Tamil districts, an episode that shaped Tamil politics for decades ^[4].

The Second World War split him from his party. Congress ministries resigned in 1939 over Britain's declaration of war on India's behalf without consultation, a move Rajagopalachari supported at the time. But he opposed the Quit India resolution of 1942, arguing that mass agitation during wartime would invite chaos, and he resigned from Congress rather than endorse it ^[3]. He also broke with orthodoxy by proposing, in what became known as the Rajaji formula of 1944, that Congress concede the principle of Pakistan in defined Muslim-majority areas subject to a plebiscite, hoping to secure a settlement with Muhammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League ^[2]. The formula failed, but it marked him as a politician willing to court unpopularity for what he judged realistic.

He rejoined Congress as independence approached and served in the interim government of 1946 and 1947 as Minister for Industry, Supply, Education and Finance ^[1].

After independence, Rajagopalachari served briefly as Governor of West Bengal in 1947 and 1948, where his conduct during a tense period won praise across communities. When Lord Mountbatten departed in June 1948, Rajagopalachari succeeded him as Governor-General of India, becoming the first Indian and, as it turned out, the last person to hold the post before the republican constitution took effect in January 1950 ^[1]. Among the C. Rajagopalachari facts that endure, this one is singular: no other Indian ever occupied the office.

He had been a serious candidate to become the first President of the republic, but Congress opinion favoured Rajendra Prasad, partly because Rajagopalachari's 1942 stance still rankled with many members ^[3]. Jawaharlal Nehru nonetheless brought him into the cabinet, first as a minister without portfolio and then, after the death of Vallabhbhai Patel in December 1950, as Home Minister, a post he held until late 1951 ^[2].

In 1952 he returned south. After an election that left Congress without a majority in Madras, he was appointed Chief Minister of Madras State and governed until 1954. His tenure saw the controversial Modified Scheme of Elementary Education, which critics attacked as reinforcing hereditary occupations, and the opposition it aroused contributed to his resignation ^[4]. In 1954 he became the first recipient of the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award ^[1].

Retirement did not suit him. Alarmed by the Congress commitment to state-led planning, cooperative farming, and the expanding licence system that he mocked as the permit-licence raj, Rajagopalachari founded the Swatantra Party in 1959 at the age of eighty ^[5]. The party stood for free enterprise, limited government, and property rights, positions then rare in Indian politics. Under his guidance it grew rapidly, and after the 1967 general election Swatantra became the largest opposition party in the Lok Sabha with 44 seats ^[2].

He remained a prolific writer throughout. His Tamil retelling of the Mahabharata, later issued in English by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, and his companion volume on the Ramayana sold in the millions and are still in print ^[6]. He edited the journal Swarajya, composed devotional songs including Kurai Onrum Illai, which the singer M. S. Subbulakshmi made famous, and translated the Tirukkural into English. His Tamil short stories had earlier won him a place in the Sahitya Akademi's honours: he received its Tamil award in 1958 for a work on Marcus Aurelius ^[4].

In his final decade he campaigned internationally for nuclear disarmament, travelling to the United States in 1962 as part of a Gandhian delegation that met President John F. Kennedy to urge an end to atmospheric testing ^[5]. He died in Madras (now Chennai) on December 25, 1972, at the age of 94 ^[1].

Rajagopalachari's private life was austere by the standards of his class and era. Widowed at 37, he brought up two daughters and three sons while active in law and politics. His son C. R. Narasimhan later sat in the Lok Sabha, and his grandson Gopalkrishna Gandhi, child of Devadas and Lakshmi, became a diplomat and Governor of West Bengal, the office Rajaji himself had once held ^[3].

Contemporaries remembered his wit as dry and occasionally cutting. He wore simple khadi, kept his household spare, and read widely in Tamil, Sanskrit, and English. Religion mattered to him: he was a practising Hindu who nonetheless spent much of his public life fighting caste exclusion, and his writings return often to the idea that dharma requires personal conduct rather than ritual display ^[6].

Who was C. Rajagopalachari to those who knew him? Nehru, his frequent adversary in later years, still called him a wise counsellor, and Gandhi's trust in him never wavered even through their disagreements over Quit India and Pakistan ^[2].

Any honest account of C. Rajagopalachari achievements must hold together several careers: freedom fighter, provincial premier, the only Indian Governor-General, Union Home Minister, Chief Minister, author, and founder of India's most significant free-market party of the twentieth century ^[1]. Few figures of the independence generation matched that range, and fewer still remained intellectually independent of every camp they joined.

His economic arguments, dismissed by many in his lifetime, gained a second hearing after India's liberalisation began in 1991. Commentators frequently trace the phrase licence-permit raj, now standard shorthand for pre-reform economic controls, to his polemics in Swarajya ^[5]. His language politics cut the other way: the anti-Hindi agitation his 1938 policy provoked helped launch the Dravidian movement's rise in Tamil Nadu, though he himself later reversed his position and defended English as a link language ^[4].

His books remain his most visible monument. The Bhavan's editions of his Ramayana and Mahabharata continue to introduce readers across India and the diaspora to the epics in plain prose ^[6]. Roads, universities, and institutions across Tamil Nadu carry his name, and the honorific Rajaji, by which the whole country knew him, still needs no explanation in India half a century after his death.