In memoriam
Dileep Padgaonkar 1944-2016
IN the final chapter of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes portrays a defeated, ill, sad and dying Don Quixote. In his final moments, Don Quixote admits to his mistaken belief in the existence of knights errant in the world. Witnessing his transition from madness to sanity, a distraught Sancho Panza implores Don Quixote not to die. A man like him, pleads Sancho, must die a glorious death at the hands of someone rather than be killed by his own melancholy.
Dileep Padgaonkar too died of sorrow, defeated by a world that was crass, intolerant, cynical, disenchanted and unreasonable. Like a knight errant, he believed in a world that never approximated to reality; his ‘madness’ consisted in believing in one that was inhabited by books, music, taste and conversation. When he died on 25 November 2016, he had spent a life in trying to defeat a world he detested and working towards realizing one that spilled out from the pages of fiction, philosophy and poetry. Of course, there were medical reasons too. To paraphrase Auden, the provinces of his body had revolted and the squares of his mind were empty; silence did invade the suburbs and the current of his feeling failed too. But the physical decline was just one reason.
Don Quixote of La Mancha was mad but reverted to being Alonso Quixano the Good in his dying days. This passage from madness to sanity is not about morality or ethics but a reflection of the complexity of life and of the world. Dileep lived this complexity throughout his life and it defeated him in the end. He was resolute and compromising, convivial and reserved, snobbish and down-to earth, cerebral and trivial, giving and acquisitive, sensitive and indifferent, formal and friendly. In later life, he frequently spoke of an individual inhabiting multiple selves, a phrase that became for him a shorthand for explaining his own contradictions arising out of complex choices in a hostile world.
For Dileep, the Times of India was such a choice. In his first stint as editor, he admitted that he had the satisfaction of building the paper into a meaningful and modern newspaper. But those of us who witnessed his second innings at the TOI saw him reduced to serving a paper that was nothing more than an advertisement broadsheet with spaces left to fill incidental content. He lived with this shrunken mandate, often fighting for good writing and stories but also often enough capitulating to the pressures of post-literate wealth creators. For him, the phrase ‘barah pachaas’ signified the state of the ‘times’. This was part of the long and protracted pricing meetings for the paper resonating continuously and resoundingly with the banality of the ‘barah pachaas’ phrase (the significance of the offending phrase lay in ensuring that the weekly collections ought not to fall below rupees twelve and fifty paisa for the paper to remain eligible for auditing by the bureau of circulation). All meaning, all purpose, all effort and all questions of quality and relevance, it seemed, flowed effortlessly into this vast and capacious ideal of ‘barah pachaas’. Taking a cue from this, all anecdotes and narratives conveyed to close friends would invariably be suffixed with Dileep saying ‘barah pachaas’. As Siddharth Varadarajan has evocatively written, Dileep remained a ‘Times Man’ long after the paper had ceased to be itself. Truth no longer prevailed, as the motto of the TOI suggests. Rather, all that prevailed was necessarily true. The talismanic ‘barah pachaas’ had won. Dileep invoked it as a joke to hide his hurt and disappointment.
The sense of loss came not from a loss of sense of power. Despite the intellectual laziness of perennially associating Dileep with the ‘second most important job’ quote, there was nothing in him that was self-righteous and sanctimonious. He had a strange fascination of power. Making sure but hesitant overtures to power, his resolve to court the powerful invariably failed at the crucial moment. Fear that his freedom to think and express might be smothered was one reason he never managed to become a full-time courtier like a few of his epigonic contemporaries. But there was another more compelling reason.
Dileep was a cultural evangelist. One evening, handing over a copy of Satyajit Ray’s screenplay of The Chess Players to me, Dileep spoke of his favourite scene in the film. The British resident asks Wajid Ali Shah to desist from singing and dancing in the court because Empress Victoria disapproves of it. On hearing this, Wajid Ali Shah (played in the film by Amjad Khan) is shocked and devastated. How could the most powerful person on earth not like to sing and listen to thumri, he wonders. Dileep increasingly lived in a world where politicians, bureaucrats, CEOs, corporate honchos, and journalists never read, watched great cinema or listened to khayal or thumri. The names of Isaiah Berlin, Ustad Amir Khan, M.S. Subbulakshmi, Ritwik Ghatak, Kurosawa or Kiarostomi did not matter to them. Therefore, despite his abstract and unrequited love of power, he feared the mediocrity of the powerful.
Dileep rejected the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture conventionally offered by those in power to pander to the lowest common denominator. Nor could judgement of culture be relegated to reductive obsessions of our time like postmodernism or the market. Hence, rising to his feet, Dileep danced around a small room after hearing Ganapathi Maharaj singing abhang and paused to say: ‘This is our pop music.’ Another time, after hearing a long discourse in the TOI on the perceived toxic effects of ‘high culture’, he emerged from the room and said in a voice that signified both exasperation and fatigue: ‘Man doesn’t live by Dada Kondke alone.’ A few days after this particular meeting, he approvingly copied and sent across a quote from Godard which said: ‘Art is the exception while culture is the rule… it is part of the rule to want the death of the exception.’
To navigate contradictions, complexities, and identities sometimes took its toll. His friends bore the brunt of this more than most people, especially if they also happened to be his colleagues. Some of Dileep’s choices and actions surprised, angered and alienated his close friends. This would lead to communication and contact ceasing for short or long periods. Always, without exception, Dileep would initiate the process of reconciliation. He did it in a way that resembled reclaiming of something that was rightfully his, and his alone. This act of reclaiming friendships was what defined Dileep. Sometimes, it seemed as if insignificant things mattered to him. More so, the compromises he made to attain those were larger than necessary. But no ambition and no compromise for him was large enough to merit losing a good friend. I once asked him about this. He said he will answer the question in his next trip to Hyderabad. When he arrived a few months later, he came armed with a copy of Robert Musil’s Diaries. He opened page 91, entry 30.V, handed the book to me and asked me to read it aloud. This is what it said:
‘With the regularity of some law at work the following process runs full circle within me: I am arrogant, dismissive, reticent, refined, happy. Some or other sense of power takes territorial hold. I have taken too much pleasure in my muscles while I was rowing or I am working at philosophy with an intensity that blunts the senses. I feel first that my arrogance, with its conciliatory frontage on the outside world, is deserting me. I am no longer so friendly; I am less witty. I feel empty and work out of sheer desperation. My behaviour in company deteriorates. I suffer a defeat. I feel that, by comparison with some other person, I am stupid. I behave with spectacular ineptitude, I cannot find an appropriate rejoinder to some insult. A few hours later I am, once again, arrogant, dismissive, reticent, refined, happy.’
Having finished reading, I looked up. There was a moment of awkward silence, a quiet acknowledgement of the accuracy of the writing but also of Dileep’s deep identification with the description. The talismanic ‘barah pachaas’ came to our rescue, dissolving both of us into loud guffaws.
In the twenty years I had known him, I never called him ‘Dileep’. He was always ‘Mr. Padgaonkar’. The only concession to this formality, something that he heartily approved, was an act that we would perform mimicking the various new-age gurus that we regularly met as part of our job at the TOI. In this act, he was ‘prabhu’ and I was ‘baalak’. The prabhu-baalak duo emerged only to offer social satire and political criticism. And now, the act is over for ever. And there will never be another one like him: refined, cerebral, generous, witty, and complex. Towards the end of the prologue to his fine book on Roberto Rossellini in India (Under Her Spell: Roberto Rossellini in India, Penguin/ Viking, 2008), Dileep sums up Rossellini as a man and a filmmaker by quoting a line from Walt Whitman: ‘I am large enough to contain all contradictions.’ These lines could as well have been written for Dileep.
Jyotirmaya Sharma
Adieu Dileep
‘We have to repair the web of time when it is broken…’
– Chris Marker, Sans Soleil
AROUND ten to twelve days before he was admitted into the ICU, Dileep called to ask if I had ever met Chris Marker, once upon a time his favourite film maker. For me, as well, he stands out as the finest ‘documentarist’, along with Joris Ivens. With an exchange of a few words Dileep and I agreed that Chris Marker was perhaps the most significant of the Left Bank cineastes, because he was constantly examining his own position, inviting colleagues and viewers to do so as well.
Now that Dileep is gone, I wonder what was on his mind. Was it to tell me that he was very unwell, not just upset that we had not met on my last trip to Pune? Did he want to say adieu and that there may be few occasions left for us to discuss, dispute or relish the moments of truth that we most often did on the streets of Paris and in the auditorium of the Cinemathèque Française at Trocadero?
I had first been introduced to him in the foyer of that auditorium, where the founders themselves (Madame Meerson and Henri Langlois) sometimes sat and ‘sold’ the subsidized tickets!
Dileep lived within walking distance of the place, at Avenue Kleber, completing his thesis in a chmbre-de-bonne in an attic room meant for the maids of the bourgeoisie that had yet to consolidate its glory, often rented out instead to students and artists from all over the world. It was a classy address, soon to become the location of the Vietnam peace negotiations between Le Duc Tho and the pugnacious Kissinger.
While Dileep theorized over verisimilitude and cut the onions appropriately for a Sindhi bhuna gosht to be had the next evening, our illustrious neighbours quarrelled over the seating arrangements for the peace talks for days before they began. In the meantime, the bombing of Vietnam escalated, making a mockery of the mise-en-scène, the narratives of democracy and la condition humaine.
Andre Malraux, the celebrated freedom fighter, had taken to whitewashing monuments and institutions as De Gaulle’s Minister of Culture. No longer oscillating between action and meditation, he who had gifted to France the voices of silence from far away shores like Elephanta, had clamped down on the very foundations of the secular, the critical, the activist. Diderot, Rivette, Langlois. Godard, for whom he had been a source of inspiration, called him a coward. We had all joined a satyagraha at the Place de Trocadero around two or three months before the events of May 1968.
In that context alone, one must congratulate the French for giving Dileep the highest civilian award – the Legion d’Honneur, many years later.
In 1971, during Indira Gandhi’s trip to Paris, I think, Dileep was both charmed and amused by Andre Malraux’s touching offer to relive his heroic participation in the Spanish Civil War by leading a liberatory march from India, across the Padma to Dacca in what is now Bangladesh and was then East Pakistan.
Indira Gandhi was building her charisma at that time and almost everyone I knew – including Dileep – was under her spell. As she ‘shyly’ sat on edge through those tumultuous years of a growing nexus between Nixon and the Gang of Four, the oil crisis that has perpetuated the Crusades into our days, the dollar denomination of world trade that is perhaps mimicking Rauschenberg’ s art object – the Machine that Destroys itself.
Nobody really understands the entropy signalled by the virus, self-generated by the system into which we are wired in, not even the designers of manga comics. I think that Dileep had to deal with that entropy from the very first steps that he took to enter the halls of power: to become ‘the second most important person in the country.’ He was, of course, ironical about it all through, as he was about everything personal, above all of ‘insights’ generated by ‘false consciousness’ of all sorts, from any vantage point of view. In his last days, I am told by Arun Khopkar, he joked about all his assets that were turning into liabilities – the heart, the liver and the kidneys.
Thus it is with the fourth estate, since words and images themselves lose significance under dispensations of monopoly ownership and management control. Thus, it happened during the notoriously cruel Emergency and the parallel times that we are living through now, on a scale that includes more individuals, more nations, across the globe. The triumph of technology over human interaction, the failure of society to evolve restorative citizenship in the ever growing electronic supremacy within the nature-culture continuum can lead to more than mere asymmetries of fiscal and monetary policies, the unprecedented attacks on the institutions and instruments of justice. We run the risk of losing our limbs, the synapses that interconnect our senses and give us our prise de conscience, our empathy.
Dileep kept his friendships alive across continents and decades. When he and Latika decided to leave Delhi and relocate in Pune, Aruna Vasudeva almost broke down. It was a long and sustained relationship over a span of nearly fifty years, cemented by what they valued in the cinema and the publication of Cinemaya from Defence Colony, where they resided for years.
It was always great to be hosted by them together almost every time, to savour the wine and food, ranging from kotambir wadi, through lotus seeds to the delicious plateau of cheeses. Very often, we also met in Mumbai, to savour the delicacies of the subcontinent’s western coast, while Dileep regaled us with mimicries of the honchos and politicians that he had most recently met.
By coincidence, in Delhi, I had sometimes seen him handle – at public functions and private parties – the dubious postures of these gentlemen-criminals that have been ruling us. He was calm and dignified while they wished to ensnare him with their threatening charm or strident rhetoric. The only public figure who matched his dignity was I.K. Gujral.
When Dileep agreed to chair the Kashmir interlocuters’ group, I wondered if he were exposing himself to the violent and crude shenanigans of terror that coil the citizens from all sides, alienating the nation from the state, the people from the nation, snatching sovereignty from the individual. I believe that he and his team met the challenge with the true elegance of a classical liberal.
His manner and his tastes were catholic in more senses than one – multicultural like his well-wisher Pere Deleury (the translator of Tukaram’s poems), who had inspired his initiative to pursue his studies in political science and cinema in France. Dileep loved the abhangs of the great poet especially as rendered by Bhimsen Joshi.
The last time that I met Latika and Dileep in Pune, as we looked out from their magnificent balcony-verandah, he hummed one of Tuka’s creations that he used to sing out loud, above the din of traffic in Paris and New York, to feel at home and at peace with the world.
Beyond the lights of these bustling cities, he has reached that ‘elsewhere –
Là,tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté.
Luxe, calme et volupté.
Kumar Shahani
Javeed Alam 1943-2016
I remember quite vividly the first time I read something written by Javeed Alam. It was an article written early in 1983 in Social Scientist on the approach to the peasantry and Marxist historiography as represented by the inaugural volume of Subaltern Studies. The article was, of course, combative and very critical of the latter trend. I did not quite know the context of the provocation or understand the significance of Javeed’s robust defence of ‘Marxist historical understanding in India’. I was completing my postgraduate studies in sociology then, and my initiation into Marx and Marxism was structured accordingly through the placid terrains of ‘classical’ sociological thought. But I was seized by the prospect that I was confronting something distinctive: a sharply honed mind, argumentative and polemical, formulating a line of critique in a language that was nuanced and theoretically stringent. It was a analytically charged and yet historically nuanced kind of Marxism.
Many years later in the mid-1990s, as I found my foothold in academia, I met Javeed in person – literally on the road to Shimla. Needless to say, I was both surprised and delighted. Could the extraordinarily warm and gracious man across from me at the roadside dhaba be reconciled with the combative ideologue of ‘Marxist revolutionary theory’ in the polemic just alluded to? This was the puzzle of Javeed Alam, or rather, his achievement: a gracious man whose generosity of spirit flourished in concert with others, and could do so even as he articulated, in person and in print, the sharpest of arguments. It was a mixture that won him the loyal and adoring friendship of many people in a long and successful life straddling academia, politics and administration. In his final years, in private conversations with his friends and admirers, Javeed seemed to take pride in the fact of reconciling the organized Marxism of a revolutionary left with the traditions of liberalism and social democracy, and was increasingly given over to consolidating his insight into what he publicly proclaimed as the ‘indispensability of secularism’. Equally, it is not surprising that Javeed devoted his years to theorizing the peculiar alchemy of democracy and equality in contemporary India.
I take it that ours – Javeed and I – was a strange and anomalous friendship that both spanned and transformed our mutual lives. To be sure, and quite unlike me, Javeed enjoyed gossiping about others, trading anecdotes about the celebrated and the famous, often offering rich insight into the making of personalities. More than everything, yet, he delighted in talking philosophy – specifically the modern and early modern western philosophical tradition – while also striving to embody a philosophical approach to the political in modern and contemporary India. Of course, Javeed’s ‘personal’ life – I mean his romance and ‘inter-religious’ marriage with Jayanti Guha – is the stuff of legend and historical commentary, and I will not rehearse that part of his journey here. But more emphatically, even as his upbringing and youthful years in Hyderabad in a family and public milieu sensitive to questions of armed struggle, minority and class politics were crucial to the shaping of his leftist commitments, I am inclined to think of his evolution as a Marxist intellectual and activist as a singular combination of philosophical culture, ethical moorings and enormous generosity of spirit.
It has been said that what distinguishes the sagacious is their extraordinary strength of will and capacity to overcome their former selves. Even as his father, the venerable Alam Khundmiri exhibited this in good measure as reflected in his life and work, Javeed seemed to take this capacity to another level. Thus, while retaining his Marxist credentials, he displayed an unusual measure of sociological and ethical sensitivity to the socio-political realities of India’s public life (specifically, the peculiarities of caste and its associated structures of discrimination/oppression). This is an aspect of Javeed’s work within the Marxist intellectual tradition of our contemporary times that awaits consolidation; it also means coming to terms with a specific ethical twist to Marxism and the structures of its theorizing in contemporary India.
I shall now in what follows pass over personal reminiscences, important as they are to the remembering process. I would like to highlight the manner in which Javeed’s distinctive approach to Marxism has a lesson for all of us, given over to articulating rival and competing ideas of India. We can see Javeed Alam working towards a renewed understanding of the ethical imperatives of Marxism in India in his India: Living with Modernity (1999), and I shall here dwell at some length with this axis of his philosophizing. In this complex piece of work, geared to reworking modernity as a ‘living need’, Javeed raises the possibility of disturbing the identity of modernity by opening up to its untapped potential, and in doing so actively strives to transform that potential into a necessity, at once moral and political. The logic of this inversion is Marxian, of course, albeit recuperating ‘modernity’ both as a historical condition and as an ideological claim: the condition of modernity and the claims of modernity upon that space. (Incidentally, the central point of developments inside India’s electoral democracy that Javeed later explored in his strongly charged ‘tract’ entitled Who Wants Democracy? (2004) similarly takes off from a thought about a process of change detaching itself from the infirmities and inconsistencies surrounding it and acquiring an ‘autonomy of its own’.
It should by now be evident that Javeed wanted his critique to meet two seemingly incompatible objectives (and there perhaps lies the methodological challenge of his philosophizing). On the one hand, his theory of modernity is designed to account for the transition to modernity as a process, among other things, of individuation. Indeed as Javeed constantly reminds, precisely in order to do this, it must incorporate a differentiation between a condition of modernity and the claims of modernity upon that very space. On the other hand, his theory must also account for how context-specific developments within the space of the modern are thematizable. Javeed is here astutely clear that an idea (or an ideal) will be logically compelling, and serve to justify a politics, if and only if one could reasonably reject it as a foundational principle: if and only if it is, in that sense, contingently irresistible.
Thus his insistence through the space of his philosophically charged work that modernity is now being conditioned as much by its own consequences in the course of its historical development. With the necessity historically entailed by modernity having accordingly been rendered contingent, modernity is now open to correction; much of it can be reassembled in new creative ways, ‘integrat(ing) and harmoni(zing)’, as he writes, ‘the best in different cultures around the world’. For Javeed, then, there is no going outside modernity to live-in and rework modernity.
Undeniably, given the configurations of our political present, it is by no means clear that the battles about the nature and object of India’s modernity are not entirely pointless. But, as with every question of modernity in which an ethical and political charge is concealed, it makes sense to add to the question: to attempt understanding how the development of modernity causes a flutter in the fabric of social relations and situations, and also to look for threats to modernity and the logic which provides their rationale. For every question of India’s modernity, therefore, as Javeed passionately reminded us, we need to supplement a more crucial and complex question, that of the trajectory and sequence of modernity’s ethical promise. The issue must now arise of how, or whether, independently perceived sequences (of histories) might be related to each other – the idea of connected and contingent histories – and whether, in order to apprehend the specificity of these connected histories, it might be necessary to institute certain distinctions and analytic separations as a guarantee of ethically charged modes of investigation and argumentation.
Controversies accordingly about whether certain terms currently in use in discourse have been illicitly borrowed from the West are sterile. In fact, this is the primary reason, as Javeed affirms, why a contextualist determination of modernity is persuasive. As he puts it in India: Living with Modernity: ‘For a society on the path to modernity, there is a sense of unfamiliarity and strangeness to the individual experience. How does this experience become (socially) communicable? Can the earlier languages and their conceptual reserves articulate this experience?’ This goes hand in hand with a second reason which, for Javeed, allegedly supports such contextualism: namely, that the concepts mediating India’s experience of modernity – such as rights, secularism and the nation – have never been put through ‘the prism of a grounded critique’ so as to take care of ‘the linguistic or cultural specificities, regional peculiarities or historical memories’. This failure in turn, Javeed is convinced, has put enormous strain on the Indian polity to cope with questions of national unity and secular integrity.
Without doubt, this synoptic commentary encapsulating aspects of Javeed’s philosophical work translate into the point that there could be Marxist accounts of modernity which operate at a different level of analysis from the concepts of Marxist political economy; and, what is more, that ‘modernity’ could yet be served as our primary secular category of historical totalization. Obviously, much work needs to be done to fill out this picture of the structure of Javeed’s philosophizing about the ethical imperatives of Marxism and the historicization that he effects about modern India in particular. But hopefully it is clear that in traversing this space, there is more than simply friendship (or comradeship) in remembering our departed colleague.
What matters is that we intellectuals and activists alike, whether adhering to a Marxist intellectual tradition or otherwise, develop a philosophically and empirically acceptable account of how historical and ethical complexity is built into the structure of our theorizing. There are lessons yet to be learnt from the precise contours of Javeed’s Marxist philosophizing and historicization. Precisely because nothing would be more futile than mandating another set of imperatives to judge the legitimacy of how modernity is represented and invoked, it is all the more important to consider Javeed Alam on his own terms. Adieu, my senior friend and comrade, I hope our conversations will continue in that little hilltop where you now rest.
Sasheej Hegde
Sulabha Brahme 1932-2016
Sulabha Brahme passed away quietly at her residence on the morning of December 2016. Her death emulated much of her life – alone in her Pune bungalow, quietly, without fanfare, surrounded by her books. Not that she was lonely. The multitude of people who gathered to pay their last respects reflected the vast spectrum of political and social movements that she maintained close contact with for over five decades. Whether it was activists of the organized left parties, women’s organizations, Dalit groups, the People’s Science Movement, trade unions, peasant cooperatives and organic farming collectives, or environmentalists, writers, poets and cultural activists not just from Maharashtra but across the country, Sulabhatai, as she was popularly known, reached out to all, and equally. That was a hallmark of her relationship with them – she treated each with respect for their ideas and work, yet never yielding ground and compromising on the core humanitarian values that she held dear to her heart.
She inherited these values from her parents. Her father was the Cambridge educated Dhananjayrao Gadgil, eminent economist and Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, who strongly believed in people centred development. Her mother Pramila Kale was actively involved in the education of girls, widow remarriage, and initiatives for greater dignity and ‘empowerment’ of women as part of the social reform movement in Pune during the early part of the 20th century. Born on 2
February 1932 in Satara, young Sulabha grew up in a liberal atmosphere that eschewed casteism and religious bigotry, espousing the values of scientific temper, women’s emancipation and the dignity of labour. She remained fiercely uncompromising about these core values throughout her life. She was an avid reader, delving into her father’s rich library of literature, history and autobiographies that exposed her to progressive thought. Her quiet rebellion started in her school days at Hujurpaga, with a refusal to adorn herself with ‘kumkum’, as was the practice with Hindu girls of her age.After finishing her schooling, she followed in her father’s footsteps and went on to study Economics at the SP College, Pune. After her Masters, she joined the Gokhale Institute of Economics and Politics, and submitted a doctoral thesis on the textile industry. She went on to do post-doctoral studies at the London School of Economics in 1958. She also visited Harvard University to undertake special studies in planning. It was during this period that she imbibed Marxism, first as a philosophy and method of research, and eventually as an ideology that shaped her way of life.
Her strong belief in the need for socially relevant research led her to undertake some pioneering studies of the political economy of Maharashtra while at the Gokhale Institute. These included the landmark Regional Development Plan for Marathwada, and a Report on Land Use in Western Maharashtra. She was a Reader, and also a Registrar at the Institute, but that did not deter her from organizing researchers and staff members to strike in order to protect their autonomy and rights! Her 1966 visit to the USSR to study regional and urban planning left a deep and lasting impression on her about the socialist system, especially its people-centred programmes and its emancipatory impact on women.
But Sulabhatai’s academic career did not deter her from active involvement with people’s issues, which led her to found several initiatives. One was the Purogami Mahila Sanghatana, a progressive organization of left oriented women, and the bimonthly Marathi journal on women’s issues, Baija that she edited from 1977 to 1984. Another was the Lok Vidnyan Sanghatana, with the objective of promoting scientific attitude among the masses and popularizing science. Her deep interest in agrarian issues and the problems of the peasantry led to the formation of the Maharashtra Dushkal Nivaran and Nirmulan Mandal to the tackle the question of drought that Maharashtra experiences from time to time. But she never hankered after posts and positions, preferring to play a supporting yet definitive role in the policy and practice of these organizations.
While she firmly believed in activism, she was equally clear that it had to be accompanied by a thorough study of the problem, analysis in the Marxist framework, and most importantly, concrete people oriented alternatives. It led her to write and publish a plethora of pamphlets and booklets of several important issues, particularly in Marathi, aimed at field level activists and ordinary people and, therefore, also distributed at highly affordable prices. Some were polemical, like a somewhat little-known but important essay she wrote with another Marxist intellectual, Rajani Desai, called the ‘Materialist Basis of Women’s Liberation’ or on imperialism, world peace, nuclear energy, communalism, people-centric development models, and so on. Many were on immediate problems facing ordinary people, like price rise, unemployment and the agrarian crisis, or privatization of education. And several were centred around ongoing struggles, like the one against the Enron power plant at Dabhol, or the nuclear power plant at Jaitapur in Maharashtra. One of her most important recent contributions was on issues around the ban on cow slaughter. Each booklet was written precisely, every fact and reference verified. There is a story of how she wanted to include Vivekananda’s views on the subject; being unsatisfied with the secondary sources available in Marathi, she asked for the original Bengali and had it translated before including it in her text! The long list of references she always included at the end are testimony to this painstaking research, but they were also intended to encourage the reader to go beyond and read further.
It was these concerns that inspired her to start the Shankar Brahme Samajvidnyan Granthalaya, a lasting memorial to her late husband who died tragically young. But Sulabhatai bore her loss stoically, putting all her energies and material belongings into establishing it as a centre for radical thought, where left, secular and progressive activists and intellectuals could gather to discuss and exchange ideas, and plan struggles and movements. The span of her contacts was staggering; and it was as if each one of them knew but one facet of her personality. Yet she had an individual relationship with each one of them, and none of their personal travails escaped her attention.
Equally, she believed in showing the way through concrete alternatives. In 2004, she launched ‘Lokayat Vyaspeeth’, a project she started in Khalapur and Pen blocks of Raigad district of Maharashtra to develop an ecologically friendly and people-centric development model in agriculture, education and health and cultural values. Its basic purpose was to build a cooperative organization of rural working people to make agriculture sustainable and to improve their quality of life. She spent a considerable amount of her personal energies as well as resources in supporting such initiatives. For her, the political was truly personal.
Of late, Sulabhatai was deeply troubled by the negative impact of caste and religious identity politics that continues to pose a big hurdle to the class unity of the working people. The rise of Brahmanical forces to power in the Indian Republic was required to be countered, as she wrote in a detailed note that she circulated to several activists for discussion and debate, ‘by an alternative secular order’ based on ‘the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity, social justice, dignity of labour, gender equality, scientific temper and harmonious relations with nature.’ The Buddha Dhamma identified by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar was one such alternative. But for those who did not wish to embrace an established order, she proposed another concept, that of a Manavta Dhamma based on the above principles and in consonance with the values of the Indian Constitution. She was keen that people at large turn their backs on Brahmanical Hinduism, and adopted one of these alternatives, especially because she felt that this would, over a few generations, also help them to escape the shackles of the Brahmanical caste system, which she deeply despised. In turn, this would help to effectively fight the forces of neoliberal capitalism.
She had a zest for life that was not always apparent, especially because she led an amazingly frugal and simple lifestyle. But she had a love for poetry, painting and the fine arts, and an extraordinary appreciation of Indian classical music. When some of her family members took the initiative to organize a series of celebrations for her 80th birthday, she participated in them with a childlike enthusiasm that left many of us dumbfounded. It only showed that her intellectual stature could not take away her immensely human nature.
Age was never a problem for her, and she was active till her last days. Just a week before her death, she had visited Purandar block in Pune district, participating in late night meetings to listen to the people and particularly the peasants affected by the proposed international airport in the area. Her enthusiasm never once waned, and she was always ready with a new set of ideas and plans, seeking out people who would support them. Revolution may be a distant dream for many of us, but for Sulabhatai, it was always an achievable goal, if only one made the effort! Laal Salaam to a ‘Quiet Revolutionary’!
Kiran Moghe
Anupam Mishra 1948-2016
ON Anupam Mishra’s chair at the GPF (Gandhi Peace Foundation) is a sticker from an anti-dam campaign of the 1980s, its edges worn. Power Without Purpose, it reads. Three words that encapsulate the attitude of this low-key man who spent his entire working life – 47 years – in a low-key organization like the Gandhi Peace Foundation (GPF). Yet, since his death on 19 December 2016, after an 11-month battle with cancer, a string of condolence meetings have been held, numerous obituaries written, and even TV channels have talked about him.
Mishra’s death, just like his life, is a testament to the power of purpose. It’s a lesson he learnt from Banwarilal Choudhary, a friend of his father’s. An agriculture scientist in Madhya Pradesh who led the Mitti Bachao Andolan in the early 1970s (which segued into a wider anti-dam movement), Choudhary stressed that good work does not rely on resources. Mishra, then cutting his teeth as a social activist and journalist, was among the first to write about the farmland being destroyed by waterlogging due to the canals from the Tawa dam.
An inspirational person for many, Choudhary made a deep impression on the young craftsman. That was another quality of Mishra’s: he saw himself as an artisan, patiently working to produce something useful and attractive to another person. From his house to his office to each wall, each surface that he could access – most people he met – bore a mark of his craftsmanship. Not just gifts, but each little note, memo, letter, postcard, official file was embellished with a little hand-drawn motif, a tastefully made border with a discarded sketch pen. He was adept at taking useless things, even garbage, and turning them into something useful and beautiful.
He did this with people too. Numerous people went to meet him in his office for recourse, for advice, for hearing something deep and worthwhile, delivered with a light touch. His doors were always open to everybody. Among his regular visitors were a few mentally disturbed people. He used to patiently hear their babble, soothe them with his gentle manner, help them in some small way, and come back to his seat. If he had any visitors, he used to tell them this is a tax he must pay. He never forgot a kind turn anybody did for him, and considered it his duty to extend the same regard to others. If he was at the end of somebody’s anger or a distasteful deed, it ended with him; there was no response, no carry forward. Colleagues who mistreated him were at the receiving end of his compassion.
He took this craftsmanship to his language. Literary critics fawn over the quality and lucidity of his prose in Hindi. And yet his writing was stripped of learnedness, of any pretension to a classical education. He avoided using literary references or quoting weighty knowledge. If he had to use it, he made it a point to dissolve it, to put it within the grasp of any ordinary person who could read. Abstract ideas were turned into images in his prose, all depth and loftiness brought up or down to a level-headedness that is as rare as it is appealing. Over his last decade or so, he had turned into a prized public speaker, who could hold the attention of an audience for long durations. His speeches were often recorded and published and distributed by an ever-widening circle of admirers.
His sense of language owed much to his father Bhawani Prasad Mishra, a storied poet in Hindi, renowned for using the ordinary idiom and everyday words, as also an insistence that language is first and foremost a spoken form; he asserted that it is possible to write well by staying close to the spoken form. Mishra was no poet like his father, but plenty of readers swear by his lyricism and the grip of his prose. Journalist and editor Prabhash Joshi, also a disciple of his father’s, was a big influence on his prose.
A third remarkable quality of this purposeful craftsman was his eye. Not just his observation, but the motive and mode with which he went about his research, his writing and his editing. Mishra was deeply averse to the kind of academic eye that, in the name of objectivity, objectifies other people. He used to often warn about how academic research can boil down to the victors studying the vanquished, the powerful analyzing the powerless. For all that he knew and learned over nearly five decades of work, he had a deep interest in ignorance. He was always mindful of what he did not know, and he respected the unknown. As the editor of GPF’s bimonthly publication Gandhi Marg, he was always on the lookout for material that talked about the attitude towards the unknown. He published the thoughts of Vinoba Bhave on the subject, as also modern scientists such as Stuart Firestein.
Several obituaries have described his extraordinary humility, his regard for other people that used to sometimes make them uncomfortable. Some have said that, on meeting him initially, they thought such humility can only be affected. Those who knew him well knew its origin. His mother Sarla, a redoubtable matriarch to not just the family but an extended social world, had soft eyes and compassion for everyone. Mishra was raised by a hand that sought the divine in others.
When Mishra began working in GPF’s research and publication wing as a 22-year-old postgraduate in Sanskrit, he saw it as an extension of the world he was accustomed to at home. His first major assignment, along with journalists Prabhash Joshi and Shravan Garg, was to negotiate the surrender of scores of dreaded dacoits in the Chambal region. It was around this time, in October 1972, that he met Chandiprasad Bhatt, a Sarvodaya activist working for a bus union in Gopeshwar, Garhwal. Bhatt had led popular protests against logging permits granted by the forest department, because the people of this part of the middle Himalaya depended on the forest for their livelihood.
Mishra took Bhatt to meet Raghuveer Sahay, editor of the influential Hindi magazine Dinman, and helped prepare a special issue on the Garhwal region the following month. From 1973, Mishra began travelling in the Garhwal region to understand this unrest. Not as a journalist or a researcher, but as an activist out to understand his society. Wherever he went, he stayed for a while, letting himself steep in the people and their world. (Some of the relationships he built then are still alive.) It wasn’t till much later that he began writing on what would come to be called the Chipko movement, and which created a new environmental consciousness in India and the world. Perhaps the first major reported feature on Chipko appeared two years later in Dinman. It carried a photo of Gaura Devi, one of the protagonists of the struggle. Some people call Mishra the first historian of Chipko. Mishra insisted that he was no historian or journalist or environmentalist, merely a faithful messenger of ordinary folk.
Through the ’70s and ’80s, Mishra travelled to places where people were engaged in environmental struggles, taking other journalists and activists alongside. One such location was Bikaner, where journalist Shubhu Patwa was leading a campaign for the protection of common pastures. During such travels, he became familiar with the traditional means of water harvesting in the desert areas of Rajasthan. This became his biggest project, which would consume most of his working life here onwards.
Mishra was deeply impressed by the environmental common sense of ordinary people, most of them illiterate, in harvesting rainwater through a range of complex and time-tested systems. He began to travel and understand these. The result of this was his 1993 book Aaj Bhi Khare Hain Talab. Free of copyright, the book had attractive production qualities – Mishra’s long-term friend and associate Dileep Chinchalker had illustrated it by hand.
The book’s success has been overwhelming. More than 40 editions, translations in several Indian languages, not to mention Braille, French and English editions – an Arabic translation is in the works. It has sold more than 2,00,000 copies. Several readers have brought out their own editions. Newspapers and radio stations have serialized it. Its success made Mishra famous internationally. But what pleased him the most was ordinary readers writing to him, telling him that they felt inspired to revive and protect their waterbodies.
Herein lies the most outstanding part of Mishra’s work. Because he wrote about traditional water management as a son writing about his own society, he helped ordinary people imagine how their ancestors valued their waterbodies, how they maintained them – with love and labour. Mishra wrote about a society’s relationship with its environment in cultural terms, not in a technical manner.
The craftsman – with a grand purpose and a compassionate eye – described life, faithfully and vividly. His descriptions brought to life dead water systems in the hearts and minds of ordinary people. Not through prescription, but through imagination.
Sopan Joshi
