THEY were good for India, the Nehru years, even some of Indira Gandhi’s. Capturing the sweep of that period in a few pages is difficult. But a focus on my friends Romesh and Raj Thapar, who lived through those formative years of Independence in Bombay, is easier and tells us enough – just as an inch on a sundial has so much to reveal about the heavens.

They had come back from England soon after Independence, burning with a faith in the new India. Idea mongers, invariably a centre of discussion at home and on public platforms, there was also something else, as one dictionary puts it: ‘A gift or power believed to be divinely bestowed.’ Charisma. Their ideas, energy, charisma sparked off and changed processes around them. Between where India currently dithered and where its potential could reach was a mismatch that preoccupied, obsessed them. It was a fervour that never cooled.

They were counsellors whom the world sought out, neighbours and prime minister alike. Later Romesh was to run a major public sector corporation and change its course, forever. But all this was yet to come when I first met them in 1951, in Bombay, their port of homecoming.

Hamid Sayani, dear friend and fellow of our Theatre Group, master conjuror and pioneer of commercial radio in India, sought a favour. Would I help in a presentation on some human rights issues to an audience invited by the Communist Party of India? Yes, of course, I would. We were rehearsing in a Churchgate college hall when I noticed that a couple had joined us, unobtrusively.

The man had a smile like a lighthouse switched on. ‘We thought,’ he said, ‘we’d drop in to see if we could help.’ We would listen to his baritone boom for the next 10 years from Films Division screens. It was they who had sought Hamid’s participation. He greeted them warmly and introduced us – Romesh and Raj.

When I met them again, we would set the seal on a long and close friendship and equally on infusing in me – they would never put it this way – the need, always, to be the best one can be. It began in the theatre, which was the setting of our next meeting.

 

A good friend of my mother’s and mine, Amina Shamsherali, telephoned one afternoon when I was banging on an old Remington. I had just joined the noisy PTI-Reuters office at Flora Fountain. Would I turn up for a reading of a play that some friends wanted to produce? Please understand, these were the Thapars. They would be good for my mind and my life. I went and they were.

The play we read that evening was Arthur Miller’s, All My Sons. A left-of-centre thinker, Miller wrote it as the nuclear dust was settling after World War II. It tells the story of Joe Keller, a manufacturer of aircraft parts who lets faulty cylinder heads go out of the factory one night, resulting in many pilot crashes. At the play’s end, Keller murmurs that perhaps they were ‘all my sons’, the boys who, in effect, he killed. The curtain comes down on the sound of a pistol shot from inside the house. The family rushes indoors and Romesh, the director, makes an incisive Arthur Miller point.

In 1952, English language productions never dared plan for longer than a two or three-evening run. All My Sons was booked at the Sundarbai Hall for a week and was still playing to full houses when it closed. We also did a few Living Newspapers, dramatizations of the Moscow/Peace Committee line on current events in India. Also, of all things, Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia, directed by the celebrated dancer and actor, Hima Kesarcodi. Raj played the Princess Sujata, ‘loveliest of all the dark-eyed daughters of the plain.’ I was her Prince Siddharth who gave her up in The Great Renunciation to become the Lord Buddha.

 

It was a puzzle how the Thapars found time for plays. Post his stint at the Times of India, Romesh edited CrossRoads, a nerdy public affairs weekly that inhabited a fuzzy no-man’s-land between the Communist Party line and what the government would allow. Romesh and Raj did everything – from commissioning work to distributing bundles of the magazine piled high in a toiling Vauxhall.

They were in theatre in part for the reasons that took them to Cross-Roads, the adventure of building a progressive society in an India recently freed, now at a junction of many ideas and options. This meant harnessing all means of opinion formation. They were also real people of the theatre.

It was the turn of the mid-century. The implications of Independence were just dawning upon us. Arthur Miller was not the legend he would become, nor was Clifford Odets in whose They Came to a City, Raj had already acted. Both were as yet seen as avant garde. Maybe that is what our group was, who knows, one with Romesh and Raj at its core, performing on a leafy street behind the Malabar Hill Post Office. A heterogeneous group but one with a unified focus, what united us was a shared quest a frequency of encounters and time to spare.

Bombay was a city that could both hatch and nurture this phenomenon. It was a home of the arts like nowhere else in India. Husain, Ara, Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta and Raza budded and bloomed near Kala Ghoda in the Fort area, where Edward VII bestrode a bronze black horse.

There was an unchecked influx of job seekers, but Bombay was a thriving city. Roads, water and power supply, availability of decent housing, parks and gardens still offered a quality of life where good minds chose to settle, a liberal city despite martinet Chief Minister Morarji Desai and his policy of prohibition. The municipality and police worked acceptably. So the turbulence of Bombay, a bilingual state (1956) becoming Maharashtra and Gujarat in 1960, were ‘noises off’, things happening off stage for us who milled and grew in number around the Thapars.

 

An American couple, Glorya and Arthur Hale, new in Bombay, asked me who constituted the intellectual leadership of the group that I was involved with. ‘Romesh and Raj Thapar,’ I replied instantly. The Hales were to cultivate a warm relationship with the Thapars. Only years later did Phillip Knightley in his A Hack’s Progress reveal that the Hales were running one of the CIA’s little operations in Bombay. The Thapars, unfrocked communists, had been an attractive quarry. The Hales had been Phillip’s employers in Bombay. Individuals of a certain stature were seeking new meaning in a reborn India and found themselves participating in the adventure. It was the era when Homi Bhabha in nuclear physics and Vikram Sarabhai in space research came to world attention.

Romesh and Raj lived in Mayfair, an elegant art deco building on Malabar Hill, the city’s best address. It was also the setting of what, to a callow youth, appeared like a melodrama, e.g. the Roberto Rossellini-Sonali Das Gupta episode, with the Thapars playing an enigmatic role in it. I could barely credit that this sweaty, slightly bull-necked gentleman whose hand I had shaken was a progenitor of Italian neo-realist cinema and the light of Ingrid Bergman’s life, to say nothing of the impact he had on the comely Sonali, wife of a Calcutta documentary film maker.

There was no consciousness of celebrity in the circles that gathered at Mayfair, though there were headliners aplenty. I met the great architect, town planner and thinker, Le Corbusier one night. A few others I watched, often mixing the drinks, were Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner and other Nobel laureates, the Joliot-Curies, chemists (Irene was a daughter of Marie, the discoverer of radium).

 

The Thapars were in the address books of visiting ‘fellow travellers’, the curious term for CPI and left leaners. One such was the English sculptor, Fredda Brilliant who arrived with good London references. She was inspired by a fatal incident which took place during one of Ram Manohar Lohia’s skirmishes on the border of Portuguese-held Goa. She resolved to cast a bronze to mark the tragedy which she planned to present to Nehru. She cast Raj as a lifeless form, symbolizing colonized Goa, held up in the arms of a heroic Lohia volunteer, me (other efforts at casting having failed).

Those were troubled times for the party and the Thapars. Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party had delivered a shattering blow in Moscow. Behind the Post Office, Bombay 6, one afternoon, garden shears in hand, Raj warned me in comically hushed tones of the party’s plans for a takeover of Bombay City, involving even political assassination. None of it had come off. The party had hugely overestimated its strength among the city’s working classes.

There were seriocomic side-bars. Police vigilance finally convinced Romesh that he was about to be arrested. Presenting himself to them, hands almost proffered for the handcuffs, he received instead a letter banning CrossRoads. The story ends both well and badly. The Supreme Court eventually struck down the ban in a landmark judgment, forcing the Union government to amend the Constitution to enable ‘reasonable restrictions’ on free speech. But the party took away CrossRoads from them. It did not take long for Romesh and Raj to conceive and launch their own monthly, Seminar, in September 1959. It was to be, and still is after 58 years today, a monthly excitement of ideas, from different minds, different pens writing on a single subject.

 

The future is mercifully inscrutable. It did not sour the1950s for us. In the writing of Manto and Mulk Raj Anand, as in the cinema of Satyajit Ray, the painting of the Progressive Artists Group at Kala Ghoda and the theatre of Ebrahim Alkazi, there was a creative questing that set up the arts for decades to come in India.

But all too soon, it was 1961 when the Thapars and Seminar took the Frontier Mail to Delhi. That’s where Nehru, policy and implementation now resided. The season of the Thapars closed in Bombay, but an extraordinary new one opened in the capital.

They were never to know that burning torches would, in the riots of 1992/93, change Bombay forever. Provincialism would strike with black paint brushes the shop-boards, first in English, and now, Gujarati. Self-censorship would numb creativity with a fear of patronage loss or of a midnight knock by people seeking 16 years’ books of accounts. We drove away Husain to Dubai and transformed a meat-loving deity into a vegetarian god. The Bombay of those times has become the Mumbai of these times.

 

I returned to Bombay in 1967 from a two-year posting in London at Lintas headquarters, the advertising agency which employed me, and Unilever the mega maker of washing products, cooking fats and toiletries, also the owner of Lintas. Romesh and Raj were as busy as ever in Delhi, but now at an unaccustomed elevation. Indira Gandhi, first as Minister of Information and Broadcasting in Lal Bahadur Shastri’s cabinet, and subsequently as Prime Minister of India, had developed a relationship of respect and trust with Romesh and Raj. They were now part of something that in Delhi slang is termed ‘kitchen cabinet’.

In addition, Romesh had been given charge, as Chairman, of the India Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC). Apart from owning the Ashoka and Janpath Hotels in Delhi, the ITDC had the responsibility of producing all the communications of the Department of Tourism, Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation. The ITDC subcontracted the work to the notorious Department of Advertising and Visual Publicity (DAVP) of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, whose output was as poor as their reputation.

Romesh, with high hopes in my abilities, arranged for Lintas India to lend my services to the ITDC. I got several magical years of helping to transform a government department and their work product, using private sector resources. Some of India’s best advertising agencies donated their creative thinking and talent, just charging their out-of-pocket costs: Mass Communications and Marketing (MCM with Kersy Katrak and the great Dom Moraes writing its brochures), Advertising and Sales Promotion (ASP, creators of ‘Utterly Butterly Amul’), ULKA (Bal Mundkur). Romesh’s savvy at board level neutralized resistance to using ‘outside’ services.

He was able to show, in the end, that India had promotional talent to compare with the best in the tourism business. With the Department of Tourism account, we were able to use the marketing technique of ‘sampling’. The department now knew the talents, skills and disciplines available outside government. These services also made commercial sense.

 

In the financial year 1966-67, DAVP had been able to employ only half the ITDC’s full budget of Rs 50 lakh for posters and brochures (a fortune in those days). In the next year, with the arrival of the agencies, the budgeted Rs 50 lakh was fully expended.

The work we did during those three years in the ITDC won the ultimate laurels of Raj Thapar’s applause. It also realized a hidden agenda of Romesh’s and mine: to set a precedent for using private industry communication services for departmental work.

My friend June Valladares sends me this anonymous and timely quote, ‘Providence works through loss.’ It would apply, among other things, to legacies of example, action and thought, therefore, to a lot that Romesh and Raj have left us. It is all now wreathed with the power of remembrance. In the 1950s and ’60s, most things were evolving. But time was on our side. How to make best use of it was the question. The Thapars had the answers. We wore a pulse of confidence at the wrist.

What they animated and drew together were us, the people and the judiciary, two vital powers of the Athenian State, plus the more recent one of the media. The other classic ones, the legislature and the executive, were usually what they were up against. The war is still on. As always, the needs are strategy and numbers, the forces we can gather under the banner we raise. There will be much to learn from this anniversary issue of Seminar.

 

Long ago, Kersy Katrak wrote an unforgettable introduction for the Agra brochure that the ITDC created for the Department of Tourism, 500 words instead of the seven pages in the previous edition of this vital item. He looked back and forward and wrote (it’s still relevant) in the deathless style of the Sufis, about the quest for Wisdom:

...‘What shall I say of the wine and laughter of those days, the passion

of the great winds and the serenity of the gentle breezes? What shall I say

of the sunlight and shadow which even now dapple the lovely monuments?

Shall I tell you how the greatest minds of five generations

gathered in the glory of the Mughal Court, to grace with intellect the bright loveliness of its days, to illumine with devotion the hushed piety

of its nights. Of how Sufi and scientist, poet and priest gathered for

a century at the feet of Emperors – in quest of the Beloved?’