In his farewell speech at an event organised by the Supreme Court Bar Association, Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud remembered a conversation with his father, former Chief Justice YV Chandrachud, about a flat in Pune.
“He bought this small flat in Pune. I asked him, ‘why on earth are you buying a flat in Pune? when are you going to stay there?’ He told me, ‘I know I am never going to stay there. I am not sure how long I will be with you. But keep this flat until the last day of your tenure as a judge.’ I said why is that. He said, ‘If you feel that your moral integrity or your intellectual integrity is compromised, I want you to know that you have a roof above your head. Never allow yourself to be compromised either as a lawyer or as a judge because you have no place of your own’,” the Chief Justice said, recounting the father-son chat. The Chief Justice said his father was very disciplined. “But he didn’t discipline us as children. He thought that we should learn the ideals of discipline looking at the way he led a disciplined life,” he said.
The event was attended by the Chief Justice’s family too. Remembering his mother, the Chief Justice said, “I was a sick child, I was prone to falling sick and my mother must have spent night after night awake to ensure I get well. I still remember her saying, ‘Medicine is like the Ganges and the doctor was in the position of Narayan (god)’. She told me while I was growing up, ‘I have named you Dhananjay, but the ‘dhan’ is not material wealth, I want you to acquire knowledge’.”
The Chief Justice’s mother, Prabha Chandrachud, was a classical musician for All India Radio.
“Like most Maharashtrian women, she was very powerful. Ours was a woman-dominated house. My mother dominated everything at home,” the Chief Justice said. He then added a parallel that drew a loud applause. “I think women from Odisha are in the same pattern. My lovely spouse Kalpana calls all the shots at home, but never messes around with the judgments,” he said.
The Chief Justice said he was disciplined as a child, but not overly disciplined. “I was allowed to live my own childhood without really compelling me to live the dream of my parents. They never tried to live the dreams through me.
He also remembered a household help, Bhimabai Bhanu Kamath. “She was completely illiterate. She learnt how to write her name when she joined our family. I was so sick, she really nurtured me and taught me so much about life beyond the urban area I was born into. She made sure that though my father had become a judge, I associated with young friends who belonged to the margins of our society. My best friend always wore two pairs of shorts, not because he had too many, but because he wanted to hide the holes in his shorts,” he said, adding that there is rarely a day when he and his sister don’t remember Bhimabai.
The Chief Justice also recounted his father’s intervention when he had to choose a subsidiary subject as a student of Delhi University. “Most of my friends were taking philosophy, which was a subject you read for one evening and passed. But my father insisted that I should take up Hindi. I knew only Bambaiya Hindi. But he insisted that I took Hindi, it was a difficult call.”
He said that in the course of learning Hindi, he was introduced to the works of legendary writers such as Mahadevi Verma, Jaishankar Tripathi, Nirala, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar and Munshi Premchand. “Almost 30 years later, when I was to go to Allahabad High Court, I realised how important it was. Very often, the advocacy in English will end with ‘please, your lordship’. Lawyers would accept me so much better. They realised the frailties of my language, but they felt I had reached out to them in a language which was close to their hearts. That’s one of the lessons I learnt, of trying to reach out to people in areas that make a difference to their lives,” he said.
Chief Justice DY Chandrachud retires from the country’s top legal post today, two years after he took over in November 2022. Justice Sanjiv Khanna will take the oath as the next Chief Justice tomorrow.
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