B.A. LL.B. (Five Years) Sem 1 General English 2026 Jan (100 marks) Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: the facts of his birth and family; the religious atmosphere of Tirutani and Tirupati; his inborn faith and his temperament; his own view of luck and responsibility; the influence of Indian home life and of women; twelve years of Christian missionary education; Vivekananda and the hurt to his Hindu pride; the Hindu habit of tolerance; the missionaries' challenge as the turning point; his early thesis and his teacher's praise; and an assessment.

Introduction

Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888 to 1975) became one of India's best-known philosophers, and later its second President. In his autobiographical essay, My Search for Truth (1937), he explains how he came to think and feel as he did. He does not credit himself alone. He points to his nature, his home, his schools and the challenges he met. These factors can be grouped under four heads: what he was born with, where he grew up, how he was educated, and what challenged him.

B. Where he grew up

Pilgrim towns. He spent the first twelve years of his life in Tirutani and Tirupati, two famous pilgrim centres. Religion surrounded him as a living practice of ordinary people, not as a theory.

Home life and the women of India. He writes warmly of Indian home life. He quotes Hegel: a man has settled his account with life when he has work that suits him and a wife whom he loves. He says Indian women, by their lives rather than their words, hold on to the deeper values behind daily routine. He was married young, as many of his class and generation were, and says such marriages were not unsuccessful. Yet he also says women need better legal protection than the goodwill of their husbands. This shows a mind that valued tradition but saw its faults.

C. How he was educated

Twelve years in Christian institutions. His whole school and college career was in Christian missionary institutions. He studied at the mission high school in Tirupati (1896 to 1900), Voorhees College, Vellore (1901 to 1904) and Madras Christian College (1905 to 1909). He came to know the New Testament closely. He also heard missionaries criticise Hindu beliefs and practices, at an age when the mind is easily impressed.

The challenge that decided his life. The criticism of Christian critics drove him to study Hinduism seriously. He wanted to find out what in it was living and what was dead. The spirit of the times, when India was stirring from a long sleep, strengthened this resolve. His university courses did not even require Indian philosophy. Still, for his M.A. he wrote a thesis on the Ethics of the Vedanta, to answer the charge that the Vedanta had no room for ethics. It was published in 1908, when he was twenty. He later called it juvenile. But he says it showed the direction his thought would always take: religion must be a rational way of living.

E. His own view of what shaped him

Radhakrishnan believed that luck, or a kind of guidance, protected him. He uses the image of a great pilot steering his ship past rocks where others were wrecked. He felt an invisible hand behind his major decisions. But he refused to blame circumstances for his mistakes. He says his achievements were not entirely his own, but his mistakes were largely due to his own folly or weakness. This humility is itself part of his character.

How these factors show in his later life

The same forces can be traced in his career. From April 1909 he taught philosophy at the Madras Presidency College. He made Indian philosophy and religion his serious study, just as the missionary challenge had pointed him. His articles in learned journals set out to show the ethical character of the Hindu religion, the very charge his early thesis had answered. His respect for other faiths also lasted. At Oxford he preached from Christian pulpits, and he was glad that Christian audiences liked his addresses. His shy, meditative nature showed in his belief that religion is what we do with ourselves when we are alone. It also showed in his advice to students to keep a silent hour each day. The boy who had books for companions became a teacher who wanted his pupils to believe in a spiritual and ethical universe.

Conclusion. Radhakrishnan's character was shaped by a humble birth, an inborn faith in the unseen, and a meditative and shy nature. The religious life of Tirutani and Tirupati and Indian home life shaped it too. So did twelve years of missionary education and the influence of Vivekananda. The decisive factor was the missionaries' criticism of Hinduism. It made him study and explain Indian thought, and it set the course of his whole life as a philosopher.