Seminar was started in September 1959, five years after I was born. And it has survived more than three decades after its founders, Romesh and Raj Thapar, passed away in 1987. What was so special about Romesh and Raj Thapar? Why is it so important to celebrate their lives and the fact that Seminar has survived almost 60 years, and especially the fact that it survives even today?

Romesh and Raj were very special people in many ways but their contribution, their politics and their lives cannot be comprehensibly understood separated from the times in which they lived or the age in which they were born. Romesh was born in 1922 just five years after the Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolution and the ideas of socialism gave birth to unprecedented optimism and hope about the future of the world. It seemed that if only people could learn to devote their lives to the cause and be willing to sacrifice themselves, it would be possible to have a world based on equality and political justice.

Intellectuals all over the world wrote and celebrated the ideas and ideals of communism and socialism and many were willing to go to jail and even sacrifice themselves for that goal. Ezra Pound captures the age in a few words: ‘Wot Izza Coming? I’ll tell you wot izza comin – Sochylism is a-comin.’

Romesh Thapar was born in Lahore where the communists were active and they attracted many poets, film makers and artists into their fold. Many of these people, for example, had a deep influence on Sheikh Abdullah in Kashmir who was struggling against the feudal rule of the Maharaja. Sheikh Abdullah welcomed the communists and counted many amongst them as his personal friends. There was Prof. M.D. Taseer, a Punjabi marxist from Lahore, who was invited to be the principle of S.P. College in Srinagar. He was married to an English woman, Christobel, and their nikkanama was drawn by Allama Iqbal.

Christobel invited her sister, Alys George and her fiance, the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, to Srinagar and they stayed in the Maharaja’s summer palace. Alys converted to Islam and took the name Kulsoom and their marriage rites were performed by none other than Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah in October of 1941.

The Communist Party of India had been legalized in 1942 and, therefore, communist literature was available in the Valley. The Party opened a bookshop in Srinagar called the New Kashmir Book Shop that was run by Niranjan Nath Raina; it also published a newspaper called Azad. In Jammu, another communist, Dhanwantry, ran a bookshop and published a daily called Shamsher. By the summer of 1945, the party weekly, People’s War, sold 270 copies every week in addition to the 100 sold to the regular subscribers.

The communists helped shape Sheikh Abdullah’s campaign against princely rule. In 1944, the Sheikh asked them to put forward a vision for the future. It is believed that the manifesto, which was called Naya Kashmir, was largely drafted by Baba Pyare Lal Bedi and his English wife Freda Bedi. They had based their manifesto on a Soviet Central Asian publication. The National Conference presented it to the Maharaja and later, it was adopted formally. Symbolically, the Lal Chowk in Srinagar was named after Moscow’s Red Square.

 

The Communist Party of India had a vibrant cultural front called the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). It was established in 1943 with 12,000 members. Some of the most prominent artistes who were active in IPTA were Balraj Sahni, Utpal Dutt, Dina Pathak, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas and Kaifi Azmi. Romesh Thapar returned from Britain in the 1940s and joined the Times of India under the editorship of Frank Moraes. He married Raj Malhotra in 1945 and together they were active in the Communist Party as well as in its cultural front, IPTA.

Romesh started CrossRoads, a weekly paper in tabloid format that published political analysis, comment and writings by eminent intellectuals of the day. The journal was critical of many political stands taken by the Congress Party and soon the government banned CrossRoads. Romesh and Raj were not going to take the ban lying down. Romesh challenged the ban in the Madras High Court and in a landmark judgement that established the fundamental right of free expression, the ban was lifted. They were in their late twenties at the time.

 

On 1 September 1959 the first issue of Seminar was mailed out of their home in Bombay. In 1961, the Thapars made their shift to Delhi. The Seminar office is in F-block of Conaught Place, close to my grandfather’s shop, Pandit Brothers. My grandfather, popularly known as Inder Bhai, was my paternal grandfather’s younger brother and for me he was Dada.

Dada sat in the shop surrounded by his circle of friends, mostly artists, musicians and poets. They spent hours discussing Urdu poetry and consulting the dictionaries that lay on shelves behind Dada’s sofa to understand the nuance of a word or the meaning of a phrase. I would sometimes walk over to the Seminar office to say hello to Uncle Romesh and Aunty Raj. When I announced I wanted to be a journalist, Uncle Romesh took me under his wing. It must have been in 1970. I cannot remember the exact day I first stepped into the Seminar office but I can still clearly hear Romesh Thapar’s rich baritone ordering: ‘Nandi, I want that article by tomorrow.’ ‘But…’ ‘Nandi…’ End of argument. The article had to be written, neatly typed and delivered by hand the next day. This was long before we had computers or had heard of email. The only reward: seeing the article, meticulously edited, and published in Seminar. Those were different times.

 

The other person who was training me was Nikhil Chakravartty, the editor of Mainstream. Mainstream was a weekly and Uncle Nikhil gave me books to review and sometimes even assignments to develop my skills as a writer. He said communists must write in a way that the most complex ideas can be understood by the common man (alas it was man) without oversimplifying the argument. For a period of time he called me to his home every Thursday where we had long discussions on history and conversations about the movement.

From him I learnt about how he was trained by P.C. Joshi (1907-1980), the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of India from 1935-1947. On one occasion Uncle Nikhil arrived wearing a new coat and P.C. Joshi asked him if he had another one. When he said yes, he was told to give it away to a comrade who did not possess one. In the same vein, when I got my first salary from the Indian Express, my mother suggested that I donate the money to Mainstream. I learnt, early in life, to work for the cause without expecting any remuneration.

But what I miss most are the conversations. I grew up in the midst of discussions, debates and wonderful conversations. The best were around the dining table at breakfast in my parents’ home in Delhi or in Papa’s study filled with smoke from his cigarettes and the fragrance from his pipe.

I remember the conversation with Yashpal, the Hindi writer, who had once detonated a bomb in a train carrying Lord Irwin and how it had only damaged the dining car. But he had been jailed for several years. The discussion I remember distinctly was around the decision of the Communist Party of India to support the British in their war against fascism instead of taking the Second World War as an opportunity to attack them when they were most vulnerable. Later I had read his novel Deshdrohi (traitor), which dealt with how communists were looked upon as traitors.

 

On another occasion I remember that Razia, the widow of the famous revolutionary, Urdu writer Sajjad Zaheer (Banne Bhai), had come over. She was passionately berating the Communist Party of India’s two nation theory and said: ‘I asked Banne, how he could justify such a theory.’ Most times I just and listened to these conversations and tried to understand the political issues. But sometimes I too joined the discussion. One morning Kalpana Dutt (1913-1993) had joined us for breakfast. My mother had told me that it was said that Kalpanadi could shoot through an apple placed on the head of her son. That was how perfect a shot she was. I plucked up the courage to ask her whether it was true. She smiled indulgently and I knew that humility would never allow her to boast. This must have been in the late seventies because I was grappling with feminist ideas and I asked her whether she thought women should wear sindoor and change their surnames after marriage. She said she had found it difficult to change her surname to Joshi (she married P.C. Joshi) specially since she was known as Kalpana Dutt.

Thousands of communists were being persecuted all over the world. More than 300 artists such as Paul Robeson, Orson Wells and Charlie Chaplin were persecuted on charges of supporting the communist movement and ideology. Recently Jay Roach made a movie called Trumbo on the life of James Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976) which captures the period brilliantly. What I thought truly remarkable was that though many of these artists, including Trumbo himself, were not members of the US Communist Party, they refused to denounce those who were. Trumbo preferred to write scripts for Hollywood films under someone else’s name. His script for Roman Holiday won an Oscar which he could not claim.

The Indian communists and their sympathizers were in touch with the communist movement in other parts of the world and felt themselves to be a part of the global movement. What is remarkable about these men and women is that even though many of them gradually became critical of the Communist Party of India as also of the Soviet Union, they did not give up on their dreams of socialism. My father had joined the party when he returned from London and organized the party unit in the Central Provinces where one of the members of his study circle was A.B. Bardhan, who later became the General Secretary of the CPI.

 

Another of his recruits was a man called Dhanraj Acharya, who had spent many years in jail just because he was a member of the then banned CPI. His mother would come to visit him every week and bring along his siblings to meet their elder brother, possibly instill in them a sense of pride for his struggle. When Dhanraj came out of jail, he had to support his family. He started working with extracting metals from waste and later produced television sets called Sanjay (after the Mahabharata character who tells the blind king about the battle). The television set in our home was the one gifted by Dhanraj Acharya.

On his father’s death, my father too had to support his mother and younger siblings. My father went to Allahabad and waited for the party to contact him, but no one did. Though deeply hurt, this ‘rebuff’ never diluted his commitment to his socialist ideals. Romesh too, though never a member, had distanced himself from the party after the CrossRoads incident in the mid-1950s. But he did not give up on his ideals or ideology.

Habib Tanvir, the legendary theatre personality, writes in his memoirs how Romesh Thapar ‘grew distant from the Communist Party but his political views remained leftist to the end.’ Habib Saheb remembers how in 1971 Raj Thapar helped him with his play Indira Lok Sabha. According to Habib Tanvir, the play helped to raise funds and mobilize support for Subhadra Joshi who had stood against the Congress party as an independent candidate; she won a landslide victory.

 

One of my most precious memories of Raj is of the day when Coretta Luther King (1927-2006), the widow of Martin Luther King, came to India to receive the Nehru Award for International Understanding in 1969, a year after her husband’s assassination. I had just finished school and was sitting in the Seminar office with my mother chatting to Aunty Raj. Both the women felt that there should be a special gesture of solidarity shown by ordinary people in addition to the official ceremony. Raj said she would do something.

I remember sitting in the Vigyan Bhawan watching the ceremony. It was all very formal and Mrs. King seemed to be feeling rather awkward. Just as she got up to make her acceptance speech, a crystal clear voice began singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Then a chorus. And from the dais Coretta King joined in . It was a magical moment of solidarity. I do not remember who the singers were – but the moment remains with me.

It is difficult today to imagine an entire generation of people who devoted themselves to defending their ideas and ideals without expecting any material returns. Romesh and Raj died two years before the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union imploded. But even in the Soviet Union, where so many rejoiced at the political changes and welcomed the coming of ‘capitalist freedom’, there were many who held on to their beliefs despite having suffered under the Soviet regime.

One member of the Soviet Communist Party said: ‘Socialism isn’t just labour camps, informants, and the iron curtain, it’s also a bright world: everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others. They say to me that you couldn’t buy a car – but then no one had a car. No one wore Versace suits or bought houses in Miami. My God! The leaders of the USSR lived like mid-level businessmen, they were nothing like today’s oligarchs. Not a bit! They weren’t building themselves yatchs with champagne showers. Can you imagine! Right now, there is a commercial on TV for copper bathtubs that cost as much as a two-bedroom apartment. Could you explain to me exactly who they’re for? Gilded doorknobs… Is this freedom?’ This is a quote from Svetlana Alexievich’s Second Hand Time which won her a Nobel Prize in 2015.

 

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) has disintegrated; the communist movement has split into many factions; many parties have fallen into disrepute. The generation to which Raj and Romesh belonged has all but gone. I searched the internet for many of their comrades, for their stories and the history of their times. It is almost lost. Yet, the relevance of those ideas, values and even ideology comes into focus again and again in different ways. The most dramatic was when the BJP government and its student wing attacked the Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2016.

I had returned to Delhi from Goa (where I live for several months of the year) and was driving past JNU when I noticed that the gates were closed and machine gun toting policemen were standing on guard. I had no idea what had happened but just the sight made my stomach turn and tears flow down my cheeks. It was a visceral reaction – like an attack on one’s very being. I had been a student of JNU and studied Indian history under Bipan Chandra, S. Gopal and Romila Thapar – Romesh’s younger sister. I remembered how the ABVP had attacked these historians when they were in Delhi University but in JNU we all felt we had found a refuge.

 

The first Convocation Address at the JNU was delivered by Balraj Sahni, the famous actor and member of IPTA. Now all that ‘history’ was under attack. Some people have even suggested that a tank be brought into the campus to teach patriotism to the leftist students. I saw the JNU students union president beaten up by lawyers in the court. It reminded of the Un-American Activities Committee (1938) in the US which had persecuted generation of artists, intellectuals and destroyed their lives. Only ten per cent of those intellectuals were subsequently able to rebuild their careers. But this new generation has proven to be even better in some ways. It has fought back and their protests have inspired students across the country.

I heard the famous speech by the JNUSU President, Kanhaiya Kumar, after he was released from jail. The rapturous welcome given to him by the students, staff and faculty was heartwarming and his speech moved millions of people across the country who watched him live on national television.

Kanhaiya Kumar’s family supports the Communist Party of India and he had fought the elections as a candidate of the students wing of the party even though he was not a member. He represented the same values but I believe his vision has greater depth. He spoke of what he learnt in Tihar jail:

‘Now I want to share something I experienced in prison. I was served in two bowls. One of them was blue and the other one was red. Now when I saw these two bowls, I was repeatedly reminded that while I do not believe in destiny, that I do not know God either, but something good is sure to happen soon in this country – after all, the red and blue bowls came together on one plate. And that plate seemed like India to me, the blue bowl seemed like the Ambedkarite movement to me and that red bowl seemed like the colour of ... [unclear]. It seemed to me that if this unity could be achieved in this country, then I tell you the truth – now we will have to see no more and send out the seller. We do not need those who are selling out [the country], we will make a government that would be able to ensure justice for all. "Sabkaa saath, sabkaa vikas" – with everyone, development for all – we really will establish this. And that is our battle.’

 

The older generation of communists clearly did not do enough to challenge the vicious caste system; possibly the intellectuals in their midst could be accused of an elitist mindset. But this generation has its roots deeper in society and I remain confident that the ideas, values and vision of comrades like Romesh and Raj Thapar remain alive and relevant. As William Morris said in his poem ‘All for the Cause’:

Mourn not therefore, not lament it, that the world outlives their life;

Voice and vision yet they give us, making strong our hands for strife.