In memoriam

K.G. Kannabiran 1929-2010

AN obit that would do justice to this ‘just man’ would occupy a fair-sized book. I am sure a compilation ‘In Memoriam’ will in time be attempted by learned people who worked for him, and alongside him. I was a bystander most of the time and can offer only a few personal glimpses of a man whose name and fame and work filled over three decades of India’s human rights struggle. He was lean, taut and spry, and his commitment to universal justice blazed forth as from a pulsar. But at other moments he was a genial companion, learned and impish in turn, with an ineradicable sense of humour even about what he held sacred – his work – and an evergreen, childlike, romantic idealism he retained till the very end of his life.

During the period of the Internal Emergency promulgated in the mid-1970s, the Indian bourgeoisie saw for the first time a flicker of the ferocious aspect of authoritarian rule inherited from colonial times, which is experienced daily even today by the vast masses, the poor, the tribal and the Dalit, the Muslim and the rural women. That period drove many a brave intellectual into silence, or safe exile in the West. But it also brought forth Kannabiran, a middle class lawyer with insufficient means and a young family, a lonely champion of the undefended poor, and students innocent of everything but idealism. The state apparatus foisted on the hapless several conspiracy cases under draconian colonial laws, and it was Kannabiran who stood against this ferocious tide, fearlessly carrying out pro bono litigation, careless of how he met next month’s expenses. His sense of humour, ‘unknown to leftwingers’ as he put it, was his personal source of comfort during those dangerous days. In court, he declared that a dog which had been accidentally shot by Naxalites was ‘the first running dog of capitalism!’

The times, and Indira Gandhi’s flirtation with despotism, made this man an unlikely hero. He had struggled to complete his education suffering many privations. A relative supported him, but such was the frugality of those days that he had no money for a square meal in college. A cheap hot snack from a passing handcart was all that he could afford, but to get it, he had to leap out of a window during class. His benefactor caught him one day and slapped him for cutting class. He bore it without uttering a word, for how could he tell the man he owed so much that he had no money to spare for a regular meal. Such was the upbringing that shaped the character of our hero, and perhaps early on imbued in him an innate sense of empathy with the voiceless poor and the downtrodden. His dislike of the rich and powerful was for their callousness, setting his voice apart from the cacophony of the envious many.

But he was no puritan. He liked his drink, and on occasion before the onset of diabetes which finally felled him as the might of the powerful could not, he could eat half-a-kilo of sweets at a sitting. His life was unlittered with luxury, for there never was any money for indulgence, but his spirit soared into high romantic realms. He once told me that he never missed a single showing of Romeo and Juliet, starring Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard, when the 1936 film first came to Madras. He would quote dialogue from Scaramouche, and I could almost see him fencing with the Count. Cricket was another passion, but not that of the spectator, for he had once been a respected bowler in Triplicane.

One would not think that such a man, with typical middle class likings, would throw all caution to the winds, all hope of comfortable prospects as a lawyer, and stand alone and undaunted against the fury of an autocratic system, which seemed to have thrown aside all vestiges of democratic disguise. But he did. He used the tools of law, his knowledge of case-work, and his own simple, unblemished bearing to put forth arguments in defence of those falsely arraigned. The state pondered how to get rid of this man and when, luckily for India, Indira ceased to be India, an election was held and the people spoke, the babus, the police and the politicians realized that whatever might be the practice in other Third World countries, fascism in its naked form could not be adopted in India, at least not in the 20th century.

Yesterday’s friends who had once desperately sought the support of such as he, soon became rather distant friends in power in Delhi. Though George Fernandes proclaimed he was powerless to help as a cabinet minister, Morarji Desai could not but institute the Bhargava Commission to enquire into the atrocities committed in Andhra Pradesh during the Emergency period. The retired judge was very reserved at first, but soon warmed up to Kannabiran and the irrefutable case he put forward with eye-witnesses testifying in open sessions. In a memorable moment, a pious Muslim police officer was questioned whether he had witnessed his superior commit murder. When he hesitantly denied this, Kannabiran with great compassion told ‘Khan Sahib’ that he had told a lie on oath, and the look in the face of the unhappy man told everyone the truth. The prime minister hastily closed down the Bhargava Commission, and packed away that can of extrajudicial murderous worms.

Kannabiran had no regrets about his life’s mission, though he did mention once in passing that Morarji Desai could have made him a judge, but did not. He had no careerist ambitions, only a little frustration that even his so-called friends in power would not make it possible for an Indian to shape law like Lord Denning had done. Had the chance been offered, he would have made a greater people’s judge than Denning, for his lordship had illusions about British fair play when it came to the question of Irish rebels opposing British domination. Life afforded Kannabiran no such illusions. For Kannabiran, it was always a clear question of principle and justice. His friendship with Arun Shourie ended the day he uttered anti-Muslim opinions. While Kannabiran remained a firm and dependable friend to many, his incisive wit would spare none in response to any opinion he considered against the interests of the people. Many around him had to suffer such put-downs from time to time, but his palpable goodness of spirit restrained all from making any retort.

The state never believed in his commitment to civil liberties, despite his 15 years service with the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC) and his founder-presidentship of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), and even though different governments depended on his help to conduct dialogues with Naxalites. Disregarding his repeated statements against violence from any source, it even contemplated doing away with him in 2003, just as it had earlier tried to do with the banker-turned people’s balladeer, Gaddar. His family was threatened in a rather clumsy way, and his house was cased by the ‘Green Tigers’ – perhaps not unlinked to the ‘Green Hunt’ now unleashed in Chhattisgarh. All these threats made no difference to Kannabiran – they passed by him like the idle wind which he respected not. Ultimately, the same fear of uncontrollable people’s anger which made the British government protect Mahatma Gandhi’s life, led the Andhra Pradesh government to stay its hand.

Not surprisingly, he retained the respect of political leaders as diverse as M. Channa Reddy, N.T. Rama Rao and Salauddin Owaisi. Swami Agnivesh was a valued friend. The spotless S.R. Sankaran, a legendary IAS officer in his time, was a daily visitor to his home. His regular circle included such notables as Professor Keshav Rao Jadhav and M.T. Khan, who had worked for communal harmony and local democracy, and Dr. Jaiphal Christian, whose life among leprosy patients demands a book of its own. Feminist leaders from Hyderabad, many with international reputations, who had formed the Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies, and the Asmita Resource Centre for Women, were family to him in more senses than one.

In his fight as a human rights lawyer, Kannabiran filed more than 400 Public Interest Litigation cases single-handed. Along with other immortal stalwarts like the late K. Balagopal, he established the APCLC as a redoubtable people’s organization. The PUCL also owes its creation and survival to his efforts. Despite failing health, he was a member of the Concerned Citizens Tribunal which brought out the most authoritative report on the 2002 state-managed carnage of Muslims in Gujarat. Kannabiran also wrote a seminal book on a subject on which he was the undoubted authority: The Wages of Impunity: Power, Justice and Human Rights, published by Orient Longman in 2004. A film about him, ‘The Advocate’, was recently made by the well-known documentary maker, Deepa Dhanraj, a long-time admirer of his.

Justice Krishna Iyer wrote to Vasant, his wife and love from their youthful days: ‘It is men like Kannabiran who in their heroic struggle for civil liberties really stand for the daring challenge against authoritarianism.’ Shabnam Hashmi said: ‘Human rights activists of our generation always drew strength from him.’

In keeping with his principles, he wanted his family to perform his cremation as quickly as possible and without any ceremony after his end. As a result, several tens of thousands from the districts were denied a chance to pay their last respects, but he has left them the legacy of standing up against injustice and in support of the people, whatever it takes. He had one personal wish. In a rare romantic moment, he told me that he would be singing in the ‘Todi Raga’ as he died. I am as sure of this as I am of anything.

Vithal Rajan

 

A daughter’s tribute

P. Lal 1929-2010

Kamala Das, in a Sahitya Akademi documentary film on her life, opens her life’s recollections by paying tribute to my father, saying: ‘If not for P. Lal publishing me, I would never have become a serious writer in English. I am eternally grateful to this great man, himself a poet.’

This list of great Indo-Anglians discovered and published when they were struggling unknowns by P. Lal is immense – it includes Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Raja Rao, Pradip Sen, Asif Currimbhoy, Kewlian Sio, and hundreds of others, many of whom went on to seek pelf and international glory. Some of them expressed their gratitude to my father; many did not. But I am P. Lal’s daughter, now an artist and a writer myself, and I want the world to remember the Original Idyll where it all began: a small sunlit garden ensconced within halcyon rose bushes in Lake Gardens, Calcutta, in the 1960s. This is where my father’s historic movement, the Writers Workshop, establishing Indo-Anglian literature as a deeply significant literary genre, quietly took inception and flourished, becoming an international publishing phenomenon.

My father was born in Kapurthala, Punjab, on 28 August 1929, and moved with his parents as a very young child to Calcutta, then India’s most sophisticated city. P. Lal was a nationalist. He had no interest whatsoever in page-3 or pelf. The original idealist and visionary who began the entire movement of Indo-Anglian writing, he and his movement are now much larger than life. But we need to remember that WW’s first printing press was a humble little hand-operated Indian machine in a small Calcutta garage in 1958, and that my father never took recourse to any kind of corporate or mercantile ‘sponsorship’. He genuinely believed that small was indeed beautiful and he looked after every detail of his idealistic enterprise himself.

Baba lovingly designed each book in his own inimitably Indian style, hand-binding it in jewel-hued Indian Orissa handloom sari cloth, embossing it with his beautiful calligraphy within the peace of his own library. While he thus diligently published thousands of writers from his own residence, with no commercial backing or mercantile marketing, he also went on to render into English the first ever and only shloka-by-shloka complete transcreation of India’s greatest epic, the Mahabharata. (‘Transcreation’ is a term originally coined by P. Lal; it is now in the Oxford Dictionary.) For his pioneering work, the Government of India under Indira Gandhi awarded him the Padmashri as well as the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship.

I remember Baba’s literary dream that he made so real and continue to live by it with the deepest gratitude and admiration. My childhood was blessed in the shade of this remarkable haven of creative communion, entirely my father’s single-handed vision. His creative ability gently nudged India’s post-Independence urban publishing environment towards genuine cosmopolitanism, self-expression and sophistication.

Salons were held in my father’s library every Sunday. Aside from India’s many Indo-Anglian writers, the guests included Pearl Buck, Allen Ginsberg, Christopher Isherwood, Gunther Grass, F.N. Souza and numerous others who made their pilgrimage to this remarkable haven of creativity.

As a schoolgirl, I remember coming home one afternoon to see a genial, burly, bearded and very tall White man cooking machher jhol (fish curry) merrily inside our kitchen. ‘This is the Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg,’ my father quietly informed me. On another evening, we found Pearl Buck seated gracefully on our terrace reading from her work over Bengali chai and pakoras. Smoking was only grudgingly permitted by my father in his wonderful salon, but absolutely no alcohol. The Writers Workshop held no 5-star page-3 parties – my father was a purist who operated from his own simple precincts and did not ever compromise with mainstream ‘marketing’.

My father gave up wearing western clothing while in his 20s. He only wore pure white Indian kurtas with open sandals, and hence was initially denied entry into Indian colonial clubs.

The Writers Workshop became an amazing cultural phenomenon worldwide, viewed with awe by conventional and commercial ‘mainstream publishing’ cartels. WW Books were, by contrast, radical and elegant marvels of truly Indian content and design. They are now coveted items for bibliophiles everywhere on this planet. But despite being completely Indian, no country or culture was ever omitted from the WW lists: its imprints in the thousands include practically every genre of world literature, as well as transcreation.

My father is my guru, and I must say a few words on my own experience of learning from him. Aside from being first published by the Workshop, under my father’s urging I also became the Workshop’s first literary illustrator and in-house designer, crafting hand-painted logos for WW books and illustrating some of WW’s finest fiction and poetry. I designed the ‘Mahabharata Family Tree’ that was the frontispiece to my father’s condensed version of the Mahabharata published by Vikas. My first book of poems, The Window, with my own illustrations, was published by my father. I went on to publish two more books of poetry and art that were well regarded internationally.

P. Lal was not only a publisher: he was himself a brilliant modern poet, whose razor-sharp style influenced several generations. His poetry is prophetic, idealistic and beautiful. I speak from experience: I learned everything I needed to know about literature, art, calligraphy, philosophy, society and the correct approach to living at the feet of my father, who fastidiously instructed me in all possible intricacies of metre, rhyme and harmony as well as commented sagaciously on every nuance of my writing and art. He referred to me in his poem as the ‘Child of his Heart, Srimati’. I live on by my father’s vision, which is the leitmotif of my own vocation as a writer and an artist.

P. Lal’s long poem, ‘The Man of Dharma and the Rasa of Silence’, written in his maturity at the time he was awarded the Nehru Fellowship, has been one of my greatest inspirations. As a prophetic commentary on contemporary man’s eternal dilemma as ‘hilarious, he dangles precarious’ in the frightening, confusing chasm between life and death, this brilliant poem needs to be rediscovered in today’s milieu as a classic template for Indo-Anglian verse.

Equally significant are my father’s early poetic volumes, Change! They Said, Love’s the First and The Parrot’s Death. And surely one of the most powerful books of prose ever written is P. Lal’s Lessons: Testament of a Survivor – an amazing autobiographical recap of his own near-death experience in February 1989 at the Toronto Harborfront Literary Festival. Baffling doctors and surgeons by his sheer willpower and stamina, P. Lal miraculously survived this terrifying, unexpected near-fatal illness in the US with two complicated surgeries, to return to his beloved homeland and continue his work in India for twenty more fruitful, courageous and peaceful years.

My father loved birds and flowers. One of my most cherished memories is of Baba quietly placing an antique marble birdbath in his peaceful garden. This was filled each day with fresh birdseed and water so that joyous bird sangeet could be heard as a background score to all the Workshop salons. The WW logo was known as ‘Birdbook’: I designed several bird emblems for its gold embossed imprint. My father’s first library salon with its long bay windows was on the ground floor next to this garden full of birdsong.

In his heartfelt tribute to P. Lal at Delhi’s India International Centre on 1st December 2010, Dr. Karan Singh noted, ‘My good friend P. Lal was a perfectionist and a pundit in everything he did.’ Publishing and poetry were no exceptions. I consider my father’s design concept in publishing an aspect of art as well. The Writers Workshop’s design imprint bravely threw off a burdensome and completely outdated colonial legacy.

I salute my father, a pioneer, a warrior and a literary hero, with the deepest gratitude and admiration.

Srimati Lal