I never met Romesh Thapar, but reflected through the gossip of his friends, I felt I knew him. It is almost as if I preferred the gossip of Thapar, the sense of him as a larger than life emboldened cartoon, than meeting him. He was a presence, a creative one, and he created it out of two bonds. He was a ganglion of friendships, but anchoring it all was the relationship with his wife. There was a complementarity between them that was aesthetic to watch; it was as if the magic of her commitment made Thapar possible. It was a love story that added to the power of public life. Thapar was to me the first of the public intellectuals whose sense of public life as an institution was democratic. Whether it was party, or club, or journal, Romesh Thapar wanted a normative frame, an openness to ideas, to debate. He understood that the alchemy of democracy lay in perpetual discussion, a community of playful spaces.

How does one describe one’s sense of the man? Words like exuberant, assertive, larger than life, sound somewhat stale. In fact, I fall back on a theory that a child gave me, a child soaked in comic books and fairytales. It is called the Three Bears Theory. According to the little one’s claim, everyone is made of three bears. Romesh Thapar, in that sense, was forty per cent Pooh Bear, with a simple exuberant sense of life. He was also forty per cent Baloo the Bear, the wise one closely loved by Mowgli and Kipling. When challenged, he was twenty per cent Grizzly, a sheer feat of courage. The child’s three bear theory captures him better than any psychological metaphor. The naïve affection of her worlds captures something about the physical and intellectual qualities of the man, which are rare today.

I remember Rajni Kothari would come back from a lunch with Thapar, content as if food and food for thought had blended perfectly. It gave you a sense of the aesthetics of the man, demanding that both food and ideas meet certain standards of taste. His sense of the intellectual in that sense was aesthetic and political and Thapar was clear that public life, like the drawing room, needs norms, an aesthetic beyond table manners. Form was important, but mere form was not enough. The content needed a sense of the classic and the experimental. If democracy and life did not have surprises, neither of them was worth living.

 

Romesh realized that in the immediacy of the colonial aftermath, public life could not survive on abstract paradigms like nationalism or development. It needed exemplars to demonstrate the power of debate and the excitement of ideas. Public life was like an everyday theatre, which needed to be lived out. It needed to be performative, memorable, eccentric, open-ended and hospitable. This man understood the hospitality of ideas and created spaces for them – from the India International Centre (IIC) to Seminar. Thapar understood public life and public spaces enacted out the pedagogy of citizenship and he created the Socratic spaces for it. He realized that power which was not interrogated became arrogant. The intellectual spoke truth to power but within a set of convivial spaces. Conviviality could become virtually confrontational. One accepted the necessity of it and the courage it demanded.

In fact, it was in understanding the sociology of public life that he was at his most inventive. Think of IIC. Governance needed a space where bureaucrats could let their hair down, play with ideas. Academics needed a place where policy was played out as gossip, as autobiography. The bureaucratic needed to see the intellectual possibility of a reform; the intellectual needed to see how ideas worked out as power. There was no attempt to direct the conversation and yet, IIC allowed for that interaction where the politician could join in and sense the differences between intellectuals and bureaucrats. It was the eternal triangle of power which needed to humanize and relativize itself, bring a certain laughter and comradeship to conversation. Even today IIC performs that exercise, though sometimes nostalgia might overwhelm the demands of the contemporary.

The Emergency was the one event that marked that generation as India’s much touted democracy confronted a stigma that it could neither explain nor erase. It exposed the hollowness of economics as a science and turned social science into a pluralistic endeavour. The Emergency also brought out the limits of language, raising the question: ‘Can secular social science explain a Sanjay Gandhi or a Jagmohan?’ Is the language of the Frankfurt School, a mix of Marx and psychology, enough to explain authoritarianism or does social science need a deeper notion of evil? It is true that the Emergency changed social science but did social science understand the Emergency?

 

In a way the best on the Emergency came from Seminar and CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) and yet, there is a sense that the Emergency as a phenomena eludes social science. I remember Mala once claiming that the proceedings of the Shah Commission were the only university that she attended. Yet, reading Seminar and the Shah Commission one has to ask whether Seminar’s critique of Congress was devastating enough to anticipate the rise of Modi. I think the jury is still out on that question.

Between Sachin Chaudhuri and Romesh, they invented intellectual journalism as India knows it. EPW was more studiously academic and left ideological and, like most left institutions, collapsed during the Emergency. It was the left liberal institutions that showed more stamina and courage. The two that survived the Emergency while standing up to it were Seminar and CSDS, headed by Thapar and Kothari. The Emergency was not only a turning point of the intellect for each, but became a creative enzyme producing new forms of theorizing.

 

Both Kothari and Romesh realized the need for new theorizing and both looked for every opportunity. Both were intrigued by the future as a new space to rethink totalitarian politics. Both moved from Nehruvian rhetoric to a politics of the concrete. Seminar debated policy and politics while CSDS tried to invent new possibilities of democracy. Lokayan, the grassroots journal, was in that sense a complement to Seminar, which interrogated policy. There was a creative complementarity between CSDS and Seminar which I think needs to be acknowledged more ethnographically. Deeply, it was tied to the friendship between two men dedicated to the idea of democracy as a pursuit of public good and the creativity of public spaces. Every idea created a new network of friendships.

The Nehruvian years were innocent years, despite the Partition, despite Hiroshima. There was an effervescence of hope, a bubbling of expectations around the idea of India. When you watch the best, one sensed a group of boy scouts creating little communities of promise. A club, a community, a panchayat, a department, a journal, anything was a part of nation building. With it came a faith in social science, in goodness, in friendship, the creativity of conversation. The Emergency ambushed all this. It surprised everyone because it showed the paradox of social science, that good intentions could lead to evil, that hope can be ironic, that goodness can be ineffective. The switch between Nehru and Sanjay was a bit like the hologram chains, which gave you two alternate gestalts of the same reality. I remember one of which showed a serious looking nun; when you angled it, she winked wickedly at you.

 

There were those in the Emergency who realized that innocence and goodness had to be inventive to fight evil, that democracy demanded a daily spring-cleaning. To sit pretty was enough for fascism to take over. That India could become fascist was unbelievable and democracy had to sit and unravel this unbelievable occurrence. How did India succumb to the Emergency? One needed a matter of fact honesty to realize that we all erred. One needed a common sense about evil, a new readiness to say no, to face up to the Sanjay, Indira, Jagmohan, Bansi Lal in all of us. Romesh and Rajni were among the few who could do it. But to do that they had to exorcize the Congress and Nehru in them, look for alternatives, cross-examine the words they cherished.

It must have been both painful and euphoric to realize that many in the left were greedy for power and many in the right had the courage to fight. It was like resettling private spaces. Seminar, CSDS, even IIC became part of the spring-cleaning of the mind. Inventions like the Saturday Club created a folklore of wisdom and policy around democracy. There was a sense that IQ guaranteed little of democracy; one needed wisdom, shrewdness, courage, and a new set of virtues to rework the Nehru-Indira era. Romesh Thapar sought to create the space for that experiment, bringing to it exuberance, a generosity, a hospitality to a new generation.

 

Neither Kothari nor Thapar were paradigmatic in style. One could not formalize their method, or ideology. It was perpetually inventive, but each was an exemplar who could not be imitated. When one discusses memories of them, a rich anecdote always pops up which can be turned into an Aesopian fable of friendship. One senses Romesh’s style in Mala, the willingness to learn, the fearlessness to judge and a zest for life, where intellectual life has to have a sense of chutzpah, a commitment to playfulness, which saved politics from becoming a dismal science. Whether it was lunchtime at Seminar or CSDS, there was a sense of anticipation, a toast to friendship, a sharing of ideas. Ideas whether glib or profound, experimental or silly, were debated at lunchtime. Without such a gossip of democracy, Indian social science would have been an arid place.

Institutions like Seminar and CSDS undermined the pomposity of power and policy and made Delhi more humane and liveable. A friend of mine once told me you can go to Chandni Chowk and Qutub for their historical power. But for a young intellectual, Seminar and CSDS had this same legendary power. At their best, both were cottage industries. Both sensed that intellectual creativity as a cottage industry had a sense of scale, lacked the grandioseness of planning and yet possessed a durability that later generations were grateful for. As cottage industries of the mind, these were two of the greatest intellectual experiments of our time.

Looking back on that impossible era with improbable people and unexpected friendships, one wonders what sense a new generation devoted to digital narcissism will make of it. Kothari and Thapar look like characters from a different world seeking an even more fascinating one. There is a sense of friendship, of mutual respect that went beyond ideologies, creating a perpetual sense of the unexpected. The little communities they created embodied a sense of laughter, hospitality, an old-fashioned pursuit of ideas that one probes for archeologically today.

For the men and women around Seminar, democracy was what you invented everyday, subjecting ideas to debate. Unlike clubs, these groups were open, perpetually looking for the eccentric and the talented. All one needed for entry was a question and the courage to hold your own. Seminar still remains a dharamshala of ideas, playfully tweaking the possibilities of democracy in other directions. Oddly, when one thinks of Seminar or the old CSDS, one sensed a confidence of scale, the need to be different to explore difference. One misses it in the current anonymity of journalism and social science. A Thapar, a U.R. Ananthamurthy, a Bashir Ahmed would be respected as icons, but treated as anomalies in an everyday sense, an old-fashioned generation that anticipated the unruliness of the future.

 

Intellectual life was a combination of adda and workshop where the newspaper and the social science journal reinvented the idea of democracy. This exuberance created a new common sense of democracy, which lasted till the beginning of the Modi era. One needs a group like that to reappear again not to echo the past but to respond to the new tyranny of our time. Modi, one had to realize, was more frightening than the Emergency. But worse, he had a more acute sense of evil, of technology. India needs to respond with another spring-cleaning of concepts, another attempt to rework the fundamentals to challenge this new mix to totalitarianism and mediocrity. One can take inspiration from the past but, as Thapar would be the first to remind us, one has to reinvent an ethics that can tackle the new forms of evil. One has to have the humility of the craftsman to begin again.

It was a different kind of sophistication. Not abstract and intellectual. Not brahmanic or ideological, but an ode to simplicity which was a toast to life. The confidence of the few to say we were wrong, that the Emergency surprised us and yet the integrity to move on and rectify things, focusing on small spaces to help clear great contaminations, allow for common sense to question ideologies and celebrate language to become surprise. Where EPW and other efforts failed was in this inability to be open, to be muscular rather than abstractly formal about thought. Allow for experiment instead playing the first class first, and admit that the canonical and the classical did not always work in new situations. Encourage decency because it created a durability of democracy.

Romesh and Rajni created a moral world without moralizing too much about it. The intellectuals, they reminded us, were neither gurus nor ideologues. There was a tremendous sanity to the effort. The sadness was there were few with the leadership, the magnanimity to sustain it. As one of that generation once said, ‘Get your hands dirty so that your minds may be clean again’. If Romesh were alive, he would be rolling up his sleeves, telling us Modi does not need an Emergency because our minds are already imprisoned.

 

I can imagine Thapar and Kothari reading so far and then smiling. They would not settle for nostalgia. Memory, they would respect but, for both, nostalgia was death without reinvention. I can see them wait expectantly, Rajni suggesting tea while they wait for the next three paragraphs, a recipe, a plan, a hypothesis, but without a debate of ideas they would not let this go. For them, that is why Seminar was one of the great cottage industries of the mind. Rajni would start scribbling on the back of envelops, doodling questions, possibilities, like an imaginary interview with Modi, a follow up on Ashis Nandy’s piece after Ayodhya. He would suggest a piece of psephology and Amit Shah, or even a comparison of Chanakya and Shah, a droll piece by O.V. Vijayan on the new KVIC calendar, a piece on the role of the universities, a re-reading of Arun Shourie’s piece on fascism today, a piece differentiating Seminar and the think tanks. The ideas would pile on, people lined up, and the democracy of ideas would evolve again. The therapeutic of Seminar would revive to take on the regime.

 

For Thapar and Kothari, social science had to invent its way out of trouble. There was an everydayness to their protest that I found reassuring. It demanded a return of the storyteller and the philosopher to the anvil – begin again, begin together as the story of dissent unfolds.

Democracy lives only as long as you believe in it. Seminar responded by suspending publication, refusing to submit copy to the censor during the Emergency. It should rebound against Modi with an assessment of his era. My hands and mind are already throbbing with excitement. One can sense that Seminar will be back doing what it did best – debate, dissent, create a feast of ideas unpalatable for the regime. A new recipe for democracy reinvented for a different era. What Romesh Thapar believed was that democracy is best when it has an unfinished quality to it because surprise, ambush and hope wait around the corner.