The Hindu & me   

Correcting Churchill

By K.V. Ramanathan

MY earliest recollections of The Hindu go back to 1936, when, as an eight-year-old boy, I followed the fortunes of the Indian cricket team touring England. Lala Amarnath had been sent back, our record was nothing to write home about till the Manchester Test in which both Merchant and Mushtaq Ali scored centuries but the accounts of every match were read avidly. The Hindu's sports coverage, particularly of the British football and cricket scene, was quite comprehensive in those colonial days. It was still an eveninger and so the local news was mostly pre-lunch, so to say.

Soon my interest spread to the other pages and the paper became an important part of my education. It had several distinguished columnists, Indian and foreign, contributing to it. B. Shiva Rao, youngest of famous set of brothers, and K.S. Shelvankar (like me, an alumnus of the P.S. High School, and, later, an Ambassador) were among the regular correspondents. The editorials of N. Raghunatha Iyer set an extraordinarily high standard and, whether one agreed with him or not — and he could be excruciatingly conservative — always gave pleasure. I can say of myself, and of a number of my friends, that our general knowledge, political awareness and love, for, and comfort with, the English language owed not a little to The Hindu.

One of the fascinating portions of the paper was the Letters to the Editor column. In the late 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s, great issues of politics, literature and culture were debated in it by distinguished personalities. When Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain used the word `Triphibian' to describe the three-pronged nature of the Allied attacking forces in the Second World War, V.S. Srinivasa Sastri corrected his English, pointing out that the word should be Tribian. This set off a flurry of letters from scholars and grammarians not to mention some humbler folks. Other equally fascinating debates were on whether Sita, in the Valmiki Ramayana, uttered a lie when she impliedly denied to the demonesses guarding her any knowledge of who Hanuman was and who exactly was Satyakama, the mother of Jabala, in the Upanishads. I can still recall K.S. Ramaswami Sastri's learned arguments on these issues. The letters of R. Naga Raja Sarma (that was how he spelt his name), professor at the Presidency College, were noted as much for their scholarship as for their acerbity (particularly on issues connected with S. Radhakrishnan), no less interesting and scholarly were the contributions on Carnatic music by persons such as C.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, K.V. Ramachandran, E. Krishna Iyer and Sambamurthy. The first three didn't believe in pulling their punches.

The Hindu became a morninger and then the first page was, at long last, converted to a news page and we, the faithful, continued with it. So strong was The Hindu habit that, when living in Delhi, most of us from Madras made it a point to get it everyday. The day's Madras edition would reach us in the afternoon. But once the Delhi edition started we expatriates were deprived of the local Madras news but the habit could not be shaken off.

And so The Hindu goes on, part of one's life and as necessary as, yes the morning coffee.

(The writer is a former IAS officer.)

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The Hindu & me

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Stories in this Section

• An early lesson at a concert
• 'It belongs to all of us'
• Growing up with it
• Those shattering editorials
• The wealth in the archives
• Striking the right note on reform process
• Presentation always fair and full
• Correcting Churchill
• A 'born fighter' and his close ties
• A case of love at forty
• 'I have one grievance'

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