Acharya Narendra Deva,
savant, socialist leader and educationist, was
born on 31 October, 1889, at Sitapur in Uttar
Pradesh. He was the second of the four sons of
Baldeva Prasad and Jawahar Devi. His parents belonged
to a middleclass Hindu Khatri family which originally
came from sailboat in the Punjab but had long
been settled at Faizabad. At the time of his birth
his grandfather, Kunja Mull, was managing a prosperous
utensils shop at Faizabad and his father was practicing
law at Sitapur.
On the death of Kunja Mull in 1893, Baldeva Prasad,
who had already gained experience and acquired
some reputation as a lawyer, shifted to Faizaad
where his presence was required to look after
the family and manage ancestral property. Besides
law, his main interests lay in religion and education.
He was always happy to welcome and entertain saints
and scholars at his house and among the persons
who visited him and deeply impressed young Narendra
Deva were Swami Rama Tirtha and Pandit Madan Mohan
Malaviya.
He compiled and published several texts on religious
topics and also books for children and founded
a public library for the use of students and the
general public. He took a personal interest in
the education and upbringing of his children.
Narendra Deva, being his favourate child, often
accompanied him on his tours and attended with
him, for the first time, a session of the Indian
National Congress at Lucknow in 1899.
Narendra Deva’s elder brother, Mahendra Deva,
known as Lalji, became a lawyer and died soon
after Narendra himself in 1956. The brother next
to him, Surendra Deva, died before reaching manhood.
His youngest brother, Yogendra Deva, lived to
be a ocular doctor at Faizabad but also died young.
Narendera Deva was married for the first time
in his fifteenth year and had a son and a daughter
by his first wife. The children, however, soon
died and the wife also died after seven or eight
years. He married his second wife, Prema Devi,
in 1919 and had two sons and three daughters by
her.
Narendra Deva had his early education in Sanskrit
and realities scriptures from the private pundits
his father engaged for all his children. He very
early learnt to recite the Gayatri Mantra and
the Gita with faultless enunciation. For his general
education he joined the local High School where
he distinguished himself as a bright and studious
boy, passing his Entrance examination in the first
division in 1906. For further education, his father
sent him to the Muir Central College at Allahabad
where he stayed in the Hindu Hostel.
He passed his Intermediate in the first division
in 1909, losing a year because of an attack of
smallpox. He passed his B.A., again in the first
division, in 1911 with English, History and Sanskrit
as his subjects. For his M.A. in Sanskrit, with
Epigraphy and Paleography, he studied at the Queen’s
College, Benares, under Dr. Venis and Professor
Norman, both of whom left a deep impression on
his mind. He also studied Pali, Prakrit, German
and French. He took his M.A. degree in 1913 and,
declining an offer of a Lectureship in Sanskrit,
returned to Allahabad to study for his LL.B. which
he passed in 1915.
It was during his stay at Allahabad that Narendra
Deva came under the spell of Bal Gangadhar Tilak,
Lajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal, Aurobindo Ghosh
and other leaders of the Extremist Party in the
Congress. He was a regular and assiduous reader
of papers like the Bande Mataram and the Arya,
of which he maintained regular files. He was also
a voracious reader of all sorts of book of Indian
history and current politics.
It was about this time, too, that he came to know
Sachindra Nath Sanyal and through him several
other revolutionaries for whom he felt great sympathy
and admiration. He was also keenly interested
in the growth and development of Hindi. He contributed
articles in Hindi to local papers and joined a
society known as Nagari Pravarshini Sabha, which
was started about this time by Babu Purushottam
Das Tandon and some others and later developed
into the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan.
After taking his law degree Narendra Deva started
legal practice at Faizabad and soon built up a
reputation for himself as a successful lawyer.
But his heart was not in this work. The First
World War had started on 1914 and he had been
closely following the happenings in and outside
the country. After Tilak had been released from
prison and rejoined the Congress, Narendra Deva
had met him and was eager to play an active role
in the struggle for freedom.
He started a branch of the Home Rule League at
Faizabad in 1916, with himself as Secretary, and
this marked the beginning of his active participation
in politics. It was about this time, too, that
he met Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, at whose persuasion
he agreed to join the Kashi Vidyapith at Benares
in 1921.
Kashi Vidyapith had been founded by Shiva Prasad
Gupta as a National institution after Mahatma
Gandhi had called for a boycott of Government
educational institutions and law courts. Narendra
Deva found that his new assignment could satisfy
the two great passions of his life- study and
teaching and active political work. He also had
congenial company. Dr. Bhagvan Das was the Acharya
or Principal and Sri Prakash and Sampurnanand
were among his colleagues.
He drew no salary at first but after his father
died in 1922, he agreed to accept a small allowance
of Rs. 150/- per month. On the retirement of Dr.
Bhagvan Das in 1926 Narendra Deva was appointed
Principal, and it was from this time that “Acharya’
became a permanent prefix to his name. Both as
a teacher and as a Principal he was a remarkable
success and won the esteem and affection of both
his colleagues and students.
Narendra Deva had followed the Russian Revolution
and subsequent events with great interest, but
it was only after he came to the Kashi Vidyapith
that he took up the study of Scientific Socialism
or Marxism, as it was called, in all seriousness.
Another subject in which he was deeply interested
was Buddhist Philosophy and he continued to study
and teach it whenever he got an opportunity. But
his academic work was no bar to his active participation
in politics.
From 1921 onwards until he left the Congress,
he was a member of the U.P. Provincial Congress
Committee and also of the All India Congress Committee.
In 1928 he joined the Independence of India League,
which had been started by Jawaharlal Nehru and
Subhash Chandra Bose, and worked as its Secretary.
In 1929 he led the boycott of the Simon Commission
at Benares. In 1930 he was arrested in the Civil
Disobedience Movement and spent three months in
jail.
In 1932 he led a batch of some of his students
and colleagues to participate in the no-rent campaign
in Rae Bareli and was again arrested and sent
to prison. After his release a meeting of the
A.I.C.C. was held at Poona, and it was on this
occasion that discussions were held about the
need for organizing a separate Socialist Party
within the Congress. A conference for the purpose
was convened at Patna in 1934 and Narendra Deva
presided over it. The new Party was named the
Congress Socialist Party and Jaya Prakash Narayan
became its first General Secretary. Narendra Deva,
as long as he lived, remained the chief theoretician
and among the top leaders of the party.
In 1936 Jawaharlal Nehru invited Narendra Deva
and Achyut
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Patwardhan , another
socialist, to be members of the Congress Working
Committee, and they both continued there up to
1938. In 1936 Narendra Deva was also elected to
the U.P. Legislative Assembly but, in spite of
great pressure, refused to join the Cabinet as
the Party was not in favour of such participation.
But he gave wholehearted support to the Congress
Ministry, particularly in its policy of land reforms,
and acted as Chairman of several important committees
dealing with educational reforms both at the University
and lower levels.
In 1939, on the outbreak of the Second World War
and the resignation of the Congress Ministries,
Narendra Deva, as leader of the Congress Socialist
Party, was in favour of starting an immediate
and nation-wide struggle if the British Government
failed to concede the substance of independence;
but unlike the Communists, the Royists or the
Subhashites, he was for strengthening the Congress
and accepting Gandhiji’s leadership.
He courted imprisonment during Individual Satyagraha
in 1940 and when the ‘Quit India’ movement
was started in 1942, he was arrested along with
the members of the Working Committee and remained
in detention at Ahmadnagar till 1945. In 1946
he was elected a member of the U.P. Legislative
Assembly and again refused to join the Cabinet.
In 1948 the Party having decided to secede from
the Congress, Narendra Deva and twelve other members
of the Party resigned their seats in the ‘Assembly’
to which they had been elected on the Congress
ticket.
They were all defeated in the bye-elections which
followed. A little earlier, in 1947, Narendra
Deva had accepted the Vice- Chancellorship of
the Lucknow University where he continued up to
1951 when he was offered and took over the Vice-
Chancellorship of the Benares Hindu University
which, because of ill-health, he resigned in 1953.
In 1950 Narendra Deva had attended as a delegate
the Regional Conference of the World Federation
of the United Nations in Thailand and also spent
some time in Rangoon studying the social and political
conditions in Burma. In 1952 he went to China
as a member of a goodwill delegation under the
leadership if Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.
On his return Narendra Deva, though personally
opposed to the proposed merger of his Party with
the Kisan Mazdur Praja Party led by Acharya, J.
B. Kripalani, agreed to represent his Party at
the negotiations, as a result of which a new Party
emerged under the name of the Praja Socialist
Party. In 1952 and again in 1954, the second time
for six years, the U. P. Vidhan Sabha elected
Narendra Deva as a member of the Rajya Sabha.
In 1954 Narendra Deva’s asthmatic attacks,
from which he had suffered off and on since 1926,
suddenly took a turn for the worse and his friends
persuaded him to undertake a trip to Europe for
treatment. The treatment gave relief, and on his
way back he was able to visit Germany, Switzerland,
England, Belgium, France, Egypt, Israel and Yugoslavia
and met many inportant political leaders in these
countries.
When he returned of India he found the Party torn
with internal dissensions and, anxious to avoid
a split at any cost, he agreed to take up the
Chairmanship at the Nagpur session in 1954. But
even this did not help. Dr. Lohia and some others
continued to flout the National Executive and
Narendra Deva had to take disciplinary action
against them.
As a result, Dr. Lohia and his friends left the
Party and formed a separate Socialist Party of
their own. The mental and physical strain caused
by these unhappy events proved too much for Narendra
Deva and he was too ill even to attend the important
session of the Party at Gaya in 1955 though the
policy Statement adopted there was prepared under
his guidance. He died at Erode on 19 February
1956.
His magnum opus, on which he had been working
even during the last hours of his life and which
was published after his death, is his monumental
work on Buddhist Religion and Philosphy in Hindi
entitled ‘Bauddha Dharma-Darshan’, running
into 616 pages. There is no other book in Hindi
or any other language in which the most abstruse
problems of Buddhist religion, philosophy, psychology
and logic have been discussed so thoroughly and
in such a lucid manner.
What was Narendra Deva’s specific contribution
to the Socialist Movement in India? In the first
place, he helped to make it an integral part of
the national struggle for freedom. Secondly, he
realised from the very beginning that no socialist
movement could succed in India without the active
participation of the peasantry, and in all the
policy statements and programmes formulated by
him land reforms were given their due importance.
Lastly, he was never tired of emphasising that
Socialism was not merely an economic issue but
a great cultural movement.
His whole background and deep understanding of
our cultural heritage gave him unusual authority
to expound this aspect of the movement. He was
a staunch Marxist, but his Marxism was not a set
of rigid formulations. It was to him a method
of analysing and studying social phenomena which,according
to the social and economic environment in which
they occur, can yield widely differing conclusions,
both as to a theoretical basis and the consequent
mode of action. To him Marx was a great democrat
and a great humanist, and the way his teachings
were being distorted and misapplied by his communist
followers was a matter of great sorrow and disappointment
to him.
Throughout his life Narendra Deva was deeply interested
in education and regarded it as the principal
means for a political, social and economic revolution
in the country. He believed that in the earlier
stages education should be integrated with useful
activity and therefore welcomed the concept of
Basic Education propounded by Mahatma Gandhi.
The function of the Universities, according to
him.
Was not merely to transmit traditional knowledge
and learning but also and mainly to serve as centres
of research and enlightenment and to prepare the
youth of the country for participation and leadership
in all spheres of life. He was for having regional
languages as media of education upto the secondary
stage and thereafter the national language which,
he thought, could only be Hindi. He was for a
common script for all Indian languages and recommended
the study of South Indian languages in the North
as well as Hindi in the South.
In his own person Narendra Deva represented a
rare synthesis of certain qualilties which would
ordinarily appear to be incompatible. He was an
ardent believer in national identity and integration
in spite of being a Marxist. He was an agnostic
in the sense that he believed the ultimate reality
to be unknown and unknowable, yet he had all the
qualities-humility, sincerity, compassion and
love for his fellowmen-which distinguish a man
of God.
He liked good food and the ordinary comforts of
living, but hated all waste and ostentation. He
was never a rich man but liked to share whatever
little he had with others. Both at the Kashi Vidyapith
and at the Lucknow and Benares Universities he
gave away almost half his salary for the benefit
of needy students. During the last years of his
life, he was constantly ill and often bedridden,
but his cheerfulness and sense of humour did not
desert him to the last. |