V. S. Srinivasa was born of very poor parents in Valangiaman, a village near Kumbakonam in the Madras Province, on 22 September 1869. His father was V. Sankaranarayana Sastri, a Sanskrit scholar and a Brahmin priest. His mother was Valambal Ammal. He was the third of their six children and the eldest of four sons. Under the pressure of the orthodoxy of his parents, he had to marry at the early age of fourteen, despite his being opposed to early marriages. His wife was Parvati Ammal, who bore him a son, V.S. Sankaran. She died in 1896 and Srinivasa married his second wife, Lakshmi Ammal, in 1898, who bore
him two daughters. She passed away in 1934.

Sastri was a brilliant student in school and college, stood either first or obtained a first class in all examinations and won prizes which paid for his higher education in Arts and in teacher-training. He was a student of the Native High School, Kumbakonam, whose good and efficient Headmaster, Rao Bahadur Appu Sastri, moudled his character his early life. He was a student of the Government College, Kumbakonam, and came under the efficient guidance of its British Principal, Mr. Bilderbeck.

Among the eminent public figures, whose friendship and opinions he valued, were Dr. Annie Besant, Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar, Sir P.S. Sivaswami Aiyar, T. R. Venkatarama Sastri and V. Krishnaswami Aiyar, and, above all, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the Founder of the Servants of India Society, whom he revered as his Master and whom he succeeded as the President of the Society.

He joined the Society in 1907 after resigning his very successful Headmastership of the reputed Hindu High School, Triplicane, Madras, and assisted Gokhale in his public work, and in particular, in his campaign in the Imperial Legislative Council and outside for free and compulsory primary education for Indian children.

He was the Secretary of the Madras session of the Indian National Congress in 1908 and took a very active part in formulating the Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League which demanded “responsive” government for India under which the executive would be “irremovable” by a vote of the legislature but would be responsive to it. He published “The Congress-League Scheme” to explain and popularize it. He wrote also ‘Self-Government for India under the British Flag.’ in which he argued that India could attain her highest political goal within the British Empire.

The Rt. Hon. E. S. Montagu, as Secretary of State for India in the British Cabinet, announced on 20 August 1917, that “responsible” government of the British Parliamentary type was the goal of the British policy for India. Though Sastri personally preferred the “responsive” system, he supported, for practical reasons, the Montagu offer. When the Indian National Congress opposed it, he helped to found the National Liberal Federation in 1918 to support it and went to England and gave evidence before the Joint Select Committee of the British Parliament.

His evidence was unanimously hailed as the most cogent and effective. He was member of the Southborough Committee on franchise under the Montagu scheme, and co-operated unofficially with Montagu in finalizing the Government of India Act of 1919. when the Congress, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, adopted the policy of Non-Violent Non-Cooperation and boycott of the Montagu Constitution, Sastri opposed the policy as harmful to India.

He was member of the Round Table Conference between India and England in 1930 and 1931 to evolve a new Constitution for India. He was, however, not invited to its third session in 1932 by the Conservative Government of England which had succeeded the Labour Government.

Sastri was nominated to the Madras Legislative Council in 1913 and was elected by it to the Imperial Legislative Council in 1915. His speech in 1918 denouncing the repressive policy of the Government, which led to the Jallianwala Massacres, was considered the water-risk mark of the Council’s proceedings. He was elected to the Council of State of 1921 and promptly and successfully agitated for the repeal of the repressive laws.

In 1921 he was chosen as a delegate of the Government of India to the Imperial Conference, London. With the zealous support of Montagu and against the determined opposition of Gen. J. C. Smuts, Prime Minister of South Africa, he succeeded in securing the passage of his resolution that British subjects of Indian origin, lawfully settled in the British Dominions, should not be denied the political franchise. The Prime Ministers of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, who had the unique experience of pleading with the peoples of he Dominions to honour the commitment of their own Prime Ministers.

In 1922 Sastri attended the Limitation of Naval Armaments Conference in Washington, D.C, U.S.A, as the head of the Indian Delegation. He welcomed India’s advance in international prestige before national status was established.

South Africa was excluded from Sastri’s tour in 1922. He was, however, a member of the Indian Delegation to the Round Table Conference between India and South Africa in 1926, which resulted in the Cape Town Agreement which committed the South African Government which committed the South African Government to shelve its Class Areas Bill intended to segregate Indians in that country and to uplift them so that they did not lag behind any other South African community. The success of the Conference was due largely to the personality and diplomacy of Sastri.

Sastri was pressed by the Governments of India and South Africa and Mahatma Gandhi to accept the office of the Agent of the Government of India in South Africa for one year to supervise the implementation of the Cape Town Agreement. Under unanimous pressure, he extended his stay by six months.

His task in South Africa was his greatest challenge and his greatest triumph. The British daily, the Natal Advertiser, described his stay in that country as the “brilliant reign of Sastri in South Africa”. He was a member of the Second Round Table Conference between India and South Africa in 1932, when the Cape Town Agreement was renewed with some changes. His last public reference to South Africa was his unusually strong criticism of the defense of apartheid by Gen. Smuts in the United Nations in 1946.

In 1923 Sastri campaigned in England for equal status for Indians in Kenya, then a British Crown Colony, and worked so strenuously that he fell ill with angina pectoris which handicapped him for rest of his life. In 1929 he was deputed to British East Africa to help local Indians present their case before the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, but his mission was sabotaged by the Colonial Secretary in London. In 1931 he gave evidence before the Joint Select Committee of British Parliament on Closer Union of the East African Colonies. In 1936 he was deputed by the Government of India to Malaya to enquire into the condition of Indian labour.

He delivered the Kamala Lectures on Indian Citizenship at the Calcutta University in 1926, spoke on Gokhale in 1935 and on the Status of Women in India in 1940 at the Mysore University and on Sir Pherozeshah Mehta in 1943 in Madras and on the Ramayana in 1944 in Madras, all of which he delivered ex tempore, except for a quotation here and there. In his lectures on the Ramayana, which was his Magnum Opus, he presented Rama, not as an avatar of God, but as a human person, of very noble character, but not without some human foibles.

He founded the Servant of India in 1918, as the weekly organ of the Servants of India Society to voice the views of the Indian Liberals, and was for some time its Editor and later contributed in it fairly regularly. In 1941 he wrote a series of articles in Tamil on some aspects of his life in the Swadesamitran of Madras.

He was made a member of the British Privy Council and received the Freedom of the City of London in 1921 and of the City of Edinburgh in 1931. He declined the offer of K.C.S.I but accepted membership of the British Order of Companion of Honour in 1928.

Sastri was not sure that independent India would remember, with gratitude, the British friends who, at the risk of alienating their British compatriots, strove for India’s political advance. He, therefore, collected the photographs of British friends, such as Charles Bradlaugh, Henry Fawcett, Montagu, Mr. and Mrs. H. S. L. Polak, Sir William Wedderburn and Allan Octavian Hume to adorn the Servants of India Societ’s Headquarters in Poona.

Sastri was influenced by the writings of Shakespeare, Edmund Burke, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, T.H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Marcus Aurelius, Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy and Victor Hugo and, above all, by the Ramayana.

Sastri had a cross-bench mind; he took a judicial rather than an advocate’s view of problems; in fact, his friends often accused him of presenting his opponent’s case better than his own. He was soft-spoken and shy, and generous to a degree. He was an agnostic.

In 1921 Sastri attended the League of Nations, Geneva, as a member of the Indian Delegation, and in 1922 he attended the Limitation of Naval Armaments Conference in Washington D.C., U.S.A., as the head of the Indian Delegation. Though India was then only a British Dependency and was not entitled to a seat in imperial and international bodies, he seized the opportunity to advance India’s international standing, which would act as a lever to raise her national status.

In 1943 Sastri advocated that Mahatma Gandhi should attend the Peace Conference at the end of the Second World War and make the most effective contribution to world peace. In 1945 he strongly opposed M. A. Jinnah’s Two-nation Theory and his demand for the partition of India.

Sastri passed away on 17 April 1946. He was thus spared the sorrow which the partition of India, which he hated, would have caused nor did he share in the joy that the attainment of independence, which he always cherished, would have brought.