Malcolm Muggeridge’s Life of Christ contains the statement of windowpane transparency:
Christ’s mother, Mary, conceived him out of wedlock…
The sentence dispels, deftly but simply, the coyness with which narrations down the ages have veiled that unself consious provenance in a Bethlehem manager. Dr. S. Gopal’s absorbing biography of Sarvepalli RadhaKrishnan commences, Similarly, with a paragraph of refreshing candour.
Most of the major details about the birth of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan are uncertain. The official version is that he was born on 5 September 1888 at Tirutani, a very small temple town to the north-west of Madras city, the second son of a poor Brahmin couple, Sarvepalli Veeraswami and his wife Sitamma. However, Radhakrishnan himself was inclined to believe that the date of his birth was in fact 20 September 1887. More important is the doubt
whether Veeraswami was his father.
Parental responsibility lay, according to village
rumour, with an itinerant Vaishnavite official.