To those reared to believe in the protective parental shadow, Shamlalji’s passing away this morning represents the closure of a final chapter of childhood. The senior-most member of a tight-knit trinity comprising the late Prof. Sisir Gupta of Jawaharlal Nehru University, my own father and Shamlalji’s successor at The Times of India, late Girilal Jain, he endured into the twenty-first century and witnessed the dissipation of their grand vision for India.
Shamlalji was famous throughout India’s intellectual firmament for his erudition, his wide reading in Western and Indian classical and modern thought, literature and poetry, his stupendous personal library, but above all, for the fact that he wore his scholarship lightly. Though personally shy and soft-spoken, he could be communicative and even gregarious in the company of friends, and was like many stalwarts of his generation, extremely open and generous towards the younger generation, sharing ideas and helping mould opinions and worldviews. Indeed, it could be said that the struggles and aspirations of the youth, struggling to make their way in what was still a controlled economy with limited opportunities, was his greatest private passion and concern, a fact that endeared him to all those fortunate enough to come into contact with him.
My father’s propensity to keep his children close to him gave us close familiarity with many of the towering intellects of the age, of whom Shamlalji was surely one of the tallest. Like many intellectuals of his time, he was deeply influenced by the trauma of Partition and the finest traditions of the Western Renaissance, and wistfully yearned for an India that would transcend the painful ruptures of the past and arrive at a civilized equilibrium. He believed in economic well-being and a social order that did not oppress any section unfairly, and was a progressive in the best sense of the word, especially as he eschewed the corrosive rhetoric of contemporary activists.
He was a powerful advocate of women’s empowerment in an age when this had not yet become a slogan, and no doubt helped many of us to grow up into self-confident, yet non-radical, women. A firm believer in the family, he was both modern and conservative in his approach to working women, and could never have imagined a world in which career women in several professions would face problems of sexual harassment.
Yet Shamlalji was in many ways a realist and a staunch nationalist; he believed firmly in a strong nation-state. During his stewardship of The Times of India, the country witnessed several communal riots and other internal turbulences. Shamlalji’s left-liberal leanings never made him vulgarly anti-Hindu, as is now the fashion among lib-left professionals, and like Sisir Gupta and Girilal Jain, used his intellectual eminence to positively influence the nationalism of the then Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi. They passionately supported the Bangladesh war, and all were aware of India’s atomic programme and supported Pokharan-I.
The landscape has changed tremendously since those halcyon childhood days. The decades since Shamlalji demitted office have seen an economic boom, but its benefits have been far from uniform. The mindless rhetoric of a borderless world has only enhanced the insecurity of the common man, and rising social unrest has belied his faith in economic progress married to social stability. Ultimately, the world upon which Shamlalji closed his eyes was far removed from the one he dreamed of at the dawn of his career. Sadly, this is the fate of many great men.
24 February 2007, Times Online