( Sham Lal 1967 )
( Sham Lal by R K Lakshman )
( Sham Lal in his study )
( Sham Lal )
( Sham Lal in his office 1967)
REMEMBERING SHAM LAL (1912-2007), THE ICONIC
JOURNALIST OF INDIA
“ On this earth,
many worlds remain uninhabited, yet people live in wrong places and waste their
lives.”…………Nirmal Verma
All along his
life, Sham Lal remained a friend of Hindi writer Nirmal Verma. Verma dropped in
unannounced at his Mumbai residence. He also kept visiting him in Delhi. Nirmal
Verma had lived in Prague (Czech Republic) for more than 10 years. He was
invited by the Oriental Institute( Prague ) to initiate a programme of
translation of modern Czech writers like Karel Capek, Milan Kundera, and
Bohumil Hrabal into Hindi. Frenz Kafka ( writer and philosopher ), Jaroslav
Seifert ( Nobel laureate poet ), Karel Capek ( famous writer ), Bertha von
Suttner ( Nobel laureate novelist ), Alphonse Mucha ( famous artist ), Rainer
Maria Rike ( poet and novelist ) and Jan Hammer ( the great musician ) belonged
to Prague. Sigmund Freud was born in Prbor just four hour's drive from Prague.
The well-known film director Milos Forman was a Czech from Caslav just one
hour’s drive from Prague. In Prague, Verma had been fully exposed to the great
corpus of European literature and art. With Nirmal Verma and Mexican poet/ philosopher Octavio Paz, Sham Lal felt intellectual compatibility. He shared
this compatibility with many more persons within the country and outside.
If one looks at
the index to “A Hundred Encounters”, a collection of Sham Lal's writing, one
gains some sense of the generous breadth of his world. It begins with Adorno
and Akhmatova, moves through Baudelaire, the Bible and the Bhagwad Gita and
traverses via Vishnu, Vidal, Van Gogh and Vyasa to, finally, Andrei Zhadnov.
This anthology is a selection of his travels and encounters, of places and
people - with a difference: his destination is the mindscape, and his
encounters are with the people who challenged the limits of ideas. The book is
a brief history of ideas in one hundred chapters. And the minds that pass
through the pages are Adorno, Pound, Genet, Sartre, Kafka, Kundera, Said, Paz,
Mann, Fuentes, Grass, Havel, Fukuyama, Derrida, Beckett, Auden, Malraux. Many
elders still remember the illuminating write-up of Sham Lal in the TOI on Kafka
and Thomas Mann. He begins with this:-
"For long, I
have had the uneasy feeling that the doctrine of karma takes us straight into
Franz Kafka's world. For, when most religions which had their birth in this
country seek release "whatever the name by which they call it" from
the cycle of rebirths, and explain away all that the individual suffers as a
consequence of his or her deeds in a previous life about which he or she knows
nothing, the story is not very different from what the Czech writer tells in
The Trial."
Sham Lal’s
editorials were discussed in coffee houses. His column, ’Life And Letters’ created debates in the intellectual circles of
the country. I am told that copies of the Times of India that had his write-ups
were physically sent to his admirers living in the US and UK. In India, his
admirers included P N Haksar, Indira Gandhi, Dr Manmohan Singh, Narasimha Rao,
L K Advani,, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Raj Kumar ( actor ), Devanand ( actor ),
Akhtar ul Iman ( poet ), R N Kao, M F Husain, Harivansh Rai Bachan, Ali Sardar
Jafri, Satyajit Ray, R K Laxman, Sombhu Mitra, Ram Kumar ( artist ), Prof Ratan Parimoo and many more. The list
is endless. He had a sizeable readership in Kashmir. I remember Peer Gias ud
Din, P N Jalali, Bansi Parimu, Wahid Raina, Capt S K Tikoo, Janak Singh, V K
Dethe, college professors and many more intellectuals discussing Sham Lal’s
write-ups in Srinagar’s Coffee House. There used to be many more who I don’t
remember or recollect at the moment. From Rainawari, I would include J L Raina,
Predimen Wattal, Farooq Nazki, Sadiq Ali, Chaman Lal Abhay, Prof Puran
Kachru, P N Kachru ( artist ) and many more including my friend Neter Raina.
Visitors to Sham
Lal's residence at Gulmohar Park in New Delhi felt as if his house was
constructed of books. From the floor to the ceiling in every room, one could
only see books. He had original issues of many international magazines.
Comprising of more than 25000 books, he had a vast collection of poetry,
drama,, history, philosophy, religion and every important work ever published
in the fields of criticism and humanities. The books were orderly arranged and
well-stocked. People used to tell possibly an apocryphal story about the
thieves who broke into his Delhi house and were disgusted that there was
nothing but books from floor to ceiling in every room . Into this private
library, those who dropped in usually included Octavio Paz, André Béteille, Ian
Jack , Bipan Chandra , Nirmal Verma , Giri Lal Jain, Subhash Chakravarti,
Sukhomoy Chakraborty, Gautam Adhikari and many more friends of Sham Lal.
Born in 1912, Sham
Lal took a master's degree in English literature in 1933. In 1934, armed with a
degree in English, he arrived at the office of what was then a stressed paper
called The Hindustan Times. The paper was on the verge of closure but didn't
die because of its financier Seth Ghanshyam Das Birla. In 1950, Sham Lal moved
to the Times of India rising up the ladder to become its editor. Post
retirement from the TOI, he joined The Telegraph in 1993. For over 60 years,
Sham Lal chronicled the birth of the Indian nation, its pains, its anxious
moments, its disappointments, and its rare moments of ecstasy. But his has not
been a chronicle of events or even a commentary upon them. His has been,
throughout, a chronicle of the ideas that shaped the birth of the Indian nation.
Sham Lal had the exceptional skill to combine material with clarity to yield a
style that bordered on poetry. Very few non-English-born writers have succeeded
in this rare art. He could combine the colloquial, often the humdrum usage of
English with the sublime, to create prose that was bright in its originality.
The veteran journalist who wrote a weekly literary column in the Mumbai edition
of the TOI called Life and Letters was an institution unto himself. After
retirement, he continued writing this hugely popular literary column for The
Telegraph and occasionally wrote for a journal, Biblio: A Review of Books.
In 2003, the
second volume of Sham Lal's collected writings was released. It carried the
title 'Indian Realities - In Bits and
Pieces'. This collection of over a hundred of Sham Lal's writings as a
columnist analyses the larger forces at work in today's world and their impact
on the course of events in this country. Sham Lal provides a nuanced view on
complex issues such as globalisation, democracy and economic liberalisation.
His interaction with historians, sociologists, economists, political
scientists, poets and novelists reveals a collection of writing that is
multi-layered, analytical and intelligent and, above all, extremely relevant in
today's times. Through this book, one comes to know his amazing understanding
of the kind and malicious forces at work in India . About poets, playwrights
and novelists, Sham Lal says this:-
“It is they, in
contrast to social scientists, who are primarily concerned with existential
problems and seek answers to questions which bug the more sensitive today, who
wonder why, even in affluent societies, people look so distraught, personal
reactions get so skewed and so many are afflicted by ennui, and a sense of loneliness
or of loss of meaning.”
Octavio Paz, a
Nobel Laureate and Mexican Ambassador in India, referred to Sham Lal as -The
brilliant Sham Lal... as deeply read in modern Western thought as in the
philosophical traditions of India. When Paz died, Sham Lal paid this
magnificent tribute to his friend Octavio Paz,: 'In his death, the world, with
large parts of it under the sway of moral cretins, has lost a sane voice
sensitive to the ignominy of a modernity gone berserk.'
About Sham Lal , Darryl D'Monte writes this:-
“He had no time
for pedants or publicists. Prem Shankar Jha remembered how he once accompanied
Sham Lal who had, much against his better judgement, accepted an invitation to
dinner at the French Ambassador's residence. They were first kept waiting while
the host came down. But Sham Lal's discomfiture was compounded when the
Ambassador insisted on using the occasion for some sales pitch about the
Airbus, a subject about which the editor knew little, and cared less. He had a
few friends, whose company he enjoyed. The writer Nirmal Verma was one of them.
The poet Baqar Mehdi was another and colleagues would regale themselves with
anecdotes about Mehdi coming to visit Sham Lal shortly before he left the
office at 5pm, the day's editorial page done. After some perfunctory
pleasantries, they would both read their respective tomes (books )in total
silence. This would continue in the car en route to the editor's residence off
Nepean Sea Road, till Mehdi would take his leave later that evening.”
Sham Lal was followed
by Giri Lal Jain. And Jain was
followed by Dilip Padgaonkar as
editor of the TOI. Of the three, Sham Lal was the unapologetic ivory-tower
intellectual, who concerned himself with intellectual currents and used it with
great acuity to discuss politics and society. Sham Lal had in depth knowledge
of the works of major philosophers ( Indian and Western ), poets , writers ,
novelists, playwrights and historians. He also had a profound study of the
Bhagwat Gita, Buddhism, Upanishads, Mahabharata and many more ancient religious
texts. Jain was sharp, practical and the inveterate political commentator who
had a brilliant understanding of the interplay of political forces within the
country and outside He had a profound knowledge of world history and political
movements that shaped modern states. Jain believed that the political-economic
order that Jawaharlal Nehru had fashioned was as much in its last throes as its
progenitor, the Marxist–Leninist-Stalinist order. Jain was the only elite
journalist who sympathised openly with the sufferings of Kashmiri Pandits
through his write-ups and speeches. Padgaonkar was nearer to Sham Lal in his
interest in ideas. Padgaonkar faced sharp criticism from journalists who
believed that he devalued the position of the editor by playing along with the
paper’s owner, Samir Jain. And that he was responsible for the death of the
editor as readers from the 1950s through the 1980s knew in India which Sham Lal
and Giri Lal Jain firmly maintained. Padgaonkar studied in France and received
a doctoral degree in Social Sciences from the Sorbonne University. He would
argue for Indian secularism, however, at the same time, he was not hostile to
the idea of religion as French secularists and their Indian counterparts were.
Padgaonkar had studied Yogvashishtha and Kashmir Shaivism. Both Sham Lal and
Giri Lal Jain were respected by the political leadership of the country, I mean
the ruling and the opposition alike. Sunil Jain, a senior journalist and son of
former TOI editor, late Giri Lal Jain has written this:-
" Sham Lal
was like a Guru to my dad. He was among his closest friends. Even after Sham
Lal, my father, who was the editor of TOI at the time, would regularly visit
Sham Lal. And this practice continued even after my dad retired."
Sham Lal lost his
eye-sight for reading books, yet he retained his passion for literature, men of
letters and things of the mind, heart and soul till the last breath of his
life. He died in sleep . Sham Lal loved his family comprising two daughters, a
son and gracious Vimla Ji, his wife. One of his daughters Neena Vyas is a
journalist, working with the Hindu newspaper. Rarely shall we again see someone
like Sham Lal in the field of journalism. If the generation senior to me had
every reason to remember Sham Lal, my generation has every reason not to forget
him.
Today, In the arena of journalism, we have new players who are better equipped with technology , education and exposure. They are sharp, intelligent and well connected . However, a serious reader finds something missing in this field that is now driven by values of expediency and utility. I am convinced that Jigar Moradabadi was right when he said:-
"Vahi maikhaana o sehaba
vahi saagar vahi sheesha,
Magar aavaaz e nosha-nosh
maddham hoti jaati hai...
Vahi hai zindagi lekin
'jigar' ye haal hai apnaa,
ki jaise zindagi se zindagi
kam hoti jaati hai "..........
( Avtar Mota )
CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.
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