I figured out how to do this. Incase anyone else is interested, here's how I did it.
Basically add the bean property 'requestContextAttribute' on the InternalResourceViewResolver as below. 'requestContextAttribute' is of type org.springframework.web.servlet.support.RequestCon text and is made available as a request attribute ("rc", in this case) to the view and has convenience methods to look up messages from the configured messageSource.
<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResou rceViewResolver">
<property name="viewClass"> <value>org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView</value>
</property>
<property name="requestContextAttribute"><value>rc</value></property>
<property name="prefix">
<value>/jsp/</value>
</property>
<property name="suffix">
<value>.jsp</value>
</property>
</bean>