A tribute

DCA – an exploration in aesthetics

MY late husband, Professor M.L. Sondhi, was a member of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh as it was in those days, and a star member of the 4th Lok Sabha. A political neophyte, his 1967 election publicity campaign had helped him win a convincing victory, and though he lost in 1971 during the Indira Gandhi ‘wave’, he was given charge of the BJP’s publicity for the Delhi Metropolitan Council elections of 1972.

In search of new ideas, his friend R.G. Desai, the PRO for Esso, introduced him to DCA – a design firm with a large first floor office in Connaught Circus, where the Chowdhurys, Dilip and Madhu, their office staff and four dogs (two Doberman Pinschers and two dachshunds) were ensconced. This, as the saying goes, was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship.

Talent is a kind of unnatural protuberance in some part of the persona. As it happened, both Dilip and ML were talented and they recognized it almost instantaneously in one other. They also shared a highly developed aesthetic sensibility and a sense of the absurd. Both were dog lovers, except we ourselves were not in a position to keep pets since we led a very unsettled, unpredictable gypsy life, shifting house every two or three years with two young children.

Our immediate task was to design an election poster for the Jana Sangh, and we sat down for a powwow: Dilip put on his Holmesian thinking cap and chewed on his Sherlockian pipe while ML verbalized different alternatives. Indira Gandhi had carried out a coup inside the Congress Party by playing the youth card against the older so-called ‘syndicate’ leaders, and it seemed appropriate that the BJS, a young party with young members, should project its own fresh energy. For that, young people were required, and Dev Raj Shuchi, an RSS worker suggested recruiting JNU students; however on the appointed day only one showed up for the photograph. The young photographer then recommended that Dilip go down to the parking space below the office and see whom he could find. Positioning himself under a tree, Dilip managed to waylay some boys and girls, tempting them with ice cream from newly opened Nirulas if they would come and pose for a group photograph. They bit the bait, came upstairs, and between much laughter and ice cream, posed for some very good pictures which Dilip and Madhu turned into a delightful poster.

The BJS was not too pleased with the result for, despite its visual qualities and the presence of the party symbol, there were no recognizable grim political leaders fixedly staring into space, only anonymous happy young people cheering for the party! However it was printed and pasted up – and hopefully got across its message of youth for the BJS. For us it led to further collaboration: DCA designed the cover for ML’s 1972 book, Non Appeasement: A New Direction for Indian Foreign Policy based on a sketch by artist S.L. Parasher, which they later made into a poster for the Pragati Maidan book fair.

Between 1964 and 1980 we brought out Shakti, a journal that underwent several metamorphoses. It started as a monthly, became a quarterly, then a broadsheet Sunday newspaper and finally a weekly tabloid. It was during its last two incarnations that we worked closely with DCA.

But I must record, since I am writing for Seminar – how Seminar acted as a kind of reference point for our own efforts when we started Shakti in 1964. In the early fifties as a first-year student at St. Xaviers, Mumbai, I had known Raj and Romesh Thapar as friends of my sister and brother-in-law, Anasuya and Subram Swaminadhan, the latter sharing with them a left of centre outlook. Apart from publishing Crossroads they had launched Theatre Group with a production of Arthur Miller’s ‘All My Sons’ (in which I minimally participated between scenes by carrying props on and off the stage).

Returning to Delhi in 1962 after a longish educational spell abroad, I caught up with the Thapars who had shifted to Delhi and had their Seminar office in Janpath’s Malhotra Building. I was on the lookout for an academic post and they gave me some useful contacts in Delhi University including Ashish Bose at the Institute for Economic Growth, a good friend of M.L. Sondhi’s, soon to be my husband. As it happened, ML had his own ambitions for publishing a monthly journal. He already had a fair idea of what he wanted – a review along the lines of Commentary or Encounter – i.e., a think journal with articles on culture, politics, society interspersed with literary pieces in the form of short stories and poetry. There were several monthly reviews being published from India’s major cities, some dating back to the days of the national movement, and of course, there was Seminar, a prominent think journal – so what was the rationale for another?

Some of this was answered in Shakti’s statement of aims: to give a new direction to Indian education and culture by reconnecting it to the aspirations of the 19th century renaissance. It hoped to re-evaluate India’s own interrupted political heritage while searching for organizing principles in sync with the nation’s current needs, including challenges from new technologies and ideologies. All this with due respect for human rights and freedoms. Nationalism was to be both modern and non-left – an innovative idea at a time when for most Indians modernity and socialism were almost synonymous. Another innovation for those times was our declared policy of publishing only Indian authors (many publications would look for heft by soliciting articles from foreign contributors). Oh yes, and there was our cover design – the head of a growling stone lion occupying half the cover page drawn by sculptor friend Ajit Chakraborty, then at the Baroda School of Art, later at Santiniketan. That landed us in a controversy – the stylized lion shocked both the traditionalists (who could not accept the lion mount without its rider, Devi) and the modernists (who wanted neither mount nor Devi).

We had good friends on the self-declared left of the political spectrum – some even wrote for us. However we were mostly in touch with a range of ‘centrist’ Congressmen like Jagjivan Ram, Atulya Ghosh, Lalit Sen (PPS to Lal Bahadur Shastri), opposition leaders like Rammanohar Lohia, the Kripalanis and Dr. Raghuvira, and eminent Lok Sabha personalities like Nath Pai, Hem Barua and L.M. Singhvi. Of these, Singhvi and Raghuvira were published in Shakti; others like Atulya Ghosh, Nath Pai and Kripalani gave interviews. And on the right we had friends and readers in the Swatantra Party: Minoo Masani, Rajaji, the Jan Sangh Balraj Madhok, A.B. Vajpayee and RSS Guru Golwalkar, D.D. Upadhyaya and Chaman Lal.

Shakti outreach was in the academic and cultural spheres. Regular contributors included S.K. Ray on the Indus script, Ajit Mookerjee on Tantra, Jogendra Saxena on Mandana Art, A. Ranganathan on Coomaraswamy and Indian science, philosophers S.S. Barlingay and K.J. Shah on the quandaries of modern Indian philosophy, A.C. Bose on Tagore. Occasionally we brought out special issues like on East Pakistan; on Ben Gurion or on the Indo-Pak relationship, but mostly it was a mixed menu.

Frenetic political activity thanks to ML’s election to the Lok Sabha in 1967 put restraints on this essentially husband-wife (mian-bibi) project, and we reduced the frequency of its publication from monthly to quarterly, until it ground to a halt with the Emergency. By the end of the Emergency our coffers were empty. Adversity never dimmed M.L. Sondhi’s ambitions or style, and after the Emergency, in discussion with friends, it was decided to publish a Sunday newspaper supported by advertising. I was deeply sceptical as my dear husband, despite his manifest talents, had never exhibited any flair for business: I know I certainly had none. But he exuded confidence and prophesied that one day Shakti would occupy an entire floor in an office building on Ferozeshah Kotla Road. (He did succeed in getting advertising from some big companies but not nearly enough.)

Dilip had much experience with newspapers: at the time with Delhi’s Hindustan Times he had earlier designed Asia Magazine, a prestigious Hong Kong weekly and worked in London with The Times. Shoulder-to-shoulder with him worked his youthful designer-wife Madhu, coiffed in a distinctive ponytail. Our first task was to come up with a proper logo – we perforce bid goodbye to our stone lion: it would have been ludicrous to reduce him to a small motif at the top of a page – and we welcomed Dilip’s choice – a banner in a font amazingly called ‘Stop’ modified to suit our purpose. ML and I had much learning to do with this new and very demanding type of production: offset technology, new composition rules, printer jargon, the discipline of broadsheet space and print columns, catchy headlines, respect for diminished reader attention-span and most of all, use and placement of photographs and illustrations.

Dilip came up with a suggestion that instantly appealed to ML: whereas there was a socially agreed upon need for measuring intelligence through IQ tests, there was no stress on appreciating or cultivating aesthetic awareness: why not devise AQ – awareness quotient tests, to refine and define a person’s aesthetic sensibilities? We could use the newspaper’s centre page for displaying photographs or other artworks illustrating a particular theme – not to pander to popular taste but guide it – and the first two spreads were on modern furniture and glass design. However, this feature did not prove sustainable and soon yielded place to Hiranmoy Ghoshal’s memoirs, Trekking Through Mayaland, mostly illustrated by Dilip, but Shakti routinely carried articles on art along with artistic presentation of its material.

Bringing out the first issue dated November 1972, was a memorable experience. The chosen offset printer was handling a newspaper for the first time (till then in Delhi offset printing was used primarily for advertising and small jobs). Dilip and Madhu and we sat there from after office to the early hours of the morning, overseeing the printing of each page. Even the dogs had to be brought in from the car for a stretch. Printing conditions were somewhat primitive – for example the page negatives once removed from the chemical wash were clipped with clothes-pegs to dry on wires, which might for all the world have been washing lines inside the premises. Dilip’s professionalism was affronted, but one had to grit one’s teeth and go through with it.

We soon found another printer and an excellent compositor, after which we sailed along with marvellous art reproductions, Dilip’s (sometimes Madhu’s) illustrations for Ghoshal’s serialized memoirs, apart from the usual newspaper content. But even these more usual topics had a touch of DCA graphics making Shakti both aesthetically and news-wise interesting – at least so we thought. Friends helped with securing advertising, and although we were not completely unsuccessful, the limited print order was a handicap. We gradually took over design and production ourselves, built an illuminated glass table in our own office for page setting, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves (paradisal conditions for children also).

Then Indira Gandhi declared an Emergency, inhospitable to any independent views, and Shakti was suspended. But the Emergency led to another type of image building exercise with DCA: having evaded arrest on the ‘night of the long knives’ ML was advised to alter his appearance and leave Delhi. Not having worn trousers since leaving the IFS, he now needed advice, and Dilip – not quite able to ‘dress’ ML as elegantly as he would have preferred, since he was to pass off as a trucker’s assistant – took him to Connaught Circus and helped select appropriate jeans and shirts.

Shakti perforce went into cold storage till the Emergency was withdrawn, and in 1980 we resumed publication as a weekly tabloid. Definitely not as highbrow as before, it cultivated a more conventional image but with art not in complete neglect. Tragically Dilip passed at a very young age in 1982. We continued with Shakti for another couple of years and then other compulsions took over. ML passed away in 2003.

It was not till 2005 that I got in touch with DCA again for a professional job: some friends had urged that ML be commemorated on a more permanent basis and so we registered a Prof. M.L. Sondhi Memorial Trust to hold lectures, support an M.L. Sondhi Institute for Asia-Pacific Affairs and award an M.L. Sondhi Prize for International Politics – for all of which the requisite literature and the handsome trophy were designed by Madhu. She did an absolutely brilliant job, and has continued as our art adviser till the present: her logos and graphics define all our letterheads, publications, visiting cards, conference backdrops, notices – giving us a unique profile and presence. Some of the more memorable occasions on which we have worked together have been lectures by President Abdul Kalam and HH the Dalai Lama, and award of the prize to numerous personages.

Earlier we had a trust in my father’s name, the Pt. K. Santanam Smarak Samiti and Shakti in its weekly incarnation had been a publication of this Smarak Samiti. In 2001 the Government of India sanctioned a stamp to commemorate K. Santanam’s political and entrepreneurial role in undivided Punjab (to be distinguished from K. Santhanam, journalist and Railway Minister, for whom later a commemorative stamp was also issued). To whom should I go but to Madhu for assistance in stamp and first-day cover design? And so on 25 August 2011 the Postal Department released the stamp, with pictures of the Lahore, Karachi and Kolkata Lakshmi Buildings, and the Memorial at Jallianwala Bagh (he was Secretary of the Committee and publisher of the Congress Enquiry Report) at a ceremony presided over by old Lahoris Kapil Sibal and Mani Shankar Aiyar, while another old Lahori, B.G. Verghese, included it in his ‘Post Haste’, a philatelic history of independent India.

And so it continues…

Madhuri S. Sondhi