Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Term of office: May 13, 1962 to May 13, 1967
Dr Radhakrishnan was a formidable intellect. He was the only President before A P J Abdul Kalam who did not hold political office before being elected to the Presidency. The country's vice-president for two terms, he was elected President in 1962 and refused a second term when he retired.
He served as professor of philosophy at the universities of Calcutta, Banaras, Oxford and Harvard and was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1954, eight years before he became President.
After his retirement at the age of 79, he returned to Madras as it was then known. He edited a volume on Gandhi to mark the centenary of the Mahatma's birth. His introductory essay proved to be his last piece of sustained writing wrote his son, the great historian Dr S Gopal in his controversial memoir of his father's life, Radhakrishnan, A Biography.
'The return to Madras was instinct with sadness. He missed the drug of public life. Though surrounded by the affection of his family, a future away from the centers of great events appeared joyless. His vitality ran low and he was reduced to muscle-and-bone thinness covered by a wafer-like skin. Only two functions broke his boredom -- when Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan held a short ceremony in his house to present him with its highest award and on September 10, 1968 Zakir Hussain, as President of the Sahitya Akademi, called on him to confer the fellowship of the Academy.'
He suffered a stroke ten days later and lingered for seven years, losing his mental faculties and moving in and out of a nursing home. It was during his long illness that he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
Dr Radhakrishnan died on April 17, 1975. Then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and then President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed did not attend the funeral.
Photograph: Press Information Bureau
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