Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

When he was 16, he entered into an arranged marriage with Sivakamu, a distant cousin. The couple had five daughters and a son. His wife died in 1956, after over 51 years of marriage.

His birthday, 5 September, has been celebrated as Teachers' Day in India since 1962, the year he became the president, in honor of his belief that "teachers should be the best minds in the country."

He died on 17 April 1975, at the age of 86.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was born on 5 September 1888, in Thiruttani, Madras Presidency, British India, into a Telugu Brahmin family. His father's name was Sarvepalli Veeraswami and his mother's name was Sitamma.

His father worked as a subordinate revenue official in the service of a local zamindar (landlord) and the family was a modest one. He did not want his son to receive an English education and wanted him to become a priest. But life had other plans for the young boy.

Radhakrishnan received his education from K.V High School at Thiruttani before moving to the Hermansburg Evangelical Lutheran Mission School in Tirupati in 1896. A good student, he earned many scholarships.

He attended Voorhees College in Vellore for some time before moving on to the Madras Christian College at the age of 17. He studied philosophy and earned his master’s degree in 1906. His thesis for the M.A. degree was on "The Ethics of the Vedanta and its Metaphysical Presuppositions".

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan embarked on an academic career and joined the Department of Philosophy at the Madras Presidency College in 1909. He moved to the University of Mysore in 1918 where he taught at its Maharaja's College.

He was offered the professorship at the University of Calcutta in 1921 where he assumed the King George V Chair of Mental and Moral Science. He represented the university at the Congress of the Universities of the British Empire in June 1926 and the International Congress of Philosophyat Harvard University in September 1926.

A prominent academician by now, he was invited to deliver the Hibbert Lecture on the ideals of life which he delivered at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, in 1929.

He served as the Vice-Chancellor of Andhra University from 1931 to 1936 before being named Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at the University of Oxford and elected a Fellow of All Souls College.

He succeeded Pt. Madan Mohan Malaviya as the Vice-Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in 1939, a position he held till 1948.

Radhakrishnan is counted amongst India's best and most influential scholars of comparative religion and philosophy. His defense of Hinduism against "uninformed Western criticism" has been highly influential, both in India and the Western world. He is credited to have made Hinduism more readily accessible for the Western audience.