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. 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.
Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.
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