The Hindu & me   

An early lesson at a concert

By Gopal Gandhi

Gopal Gandhi's father, Devadas Gandhi (left), and grandfather Rajaji with Bhulabhai Desai and K.M. Munshi on their return to Bombay after a visit to Wardha to meet Mahatma Gandhi.

What does The Hindu mean to me? It means memories, cameos. Principally, of the Madras of the 1950s, of Bazullah Road in Tyagarayanagar, where my maternal grandfather lived his spartan life in a narrow and long upstairs room. There was always a scent of book-dust in that room, the kind you inhale on entering an unused archive. The walls were lined with books and various brown paper covers containing letters, manuscripts.

He generally sat by a corner window, beside a table lamp which bent double at its middle like a Praying Mantis' arms, a sliding magnifying slab in his hand, completely engrossed in reading. The material being read would generally be a classic or the draft of an article or a newspaper, invariably the dak (post-delivered) edition of The Hindustan Times, which his son-in-law and my father, Devadas Gandhi, edited or that morning's issue of The Hindu.

Few sounds were to be heard in that room, except the cawing of crows and the swish of coconut fronds outside. No telephone pierced the silence with its tring, for there was no phone around. No phone? Didn't he need that indispensable link with the outside world? Strangely, no. Preferring to be connected with his friends through the medium of letters (postcards, to be precise), he did not feel the need for that mediation. But in case there was any real need, like a national or world event nudging him to respond, there was a phone within walking distance, at his son C.R. Krishnaswami's, right next door. And CRK was News Editor of The Hindu.

Darker-skinned but as pedagogically bald and aquiline-nosed as his father, he had his paternity carved on the visage. But few sons could have been more independent of the pater as the News Editor of The Hindu was of his. If CR was inalienably associated with a pair of dark glasses, the son had his distinguishing accompaniment — a frayed umbrella. No khadi kurta and panchakaccham for CRK, a millmade jubba and cylindrical veshti did just as well. And no encumbering angavastram, thank you.

If CR made news, CRK made his own headlines too. In the newsroom of The Hindu office. Poor construction, wrong grammar would not pass him. And misspellings? An axe awaited the poor sub-editor. Not only that, CRK could actually use his editorial scissors on none other than his father's famous `statements', which the leader with some vehemence and style might well have read out to The Hindu's newsroom from CRK's own home phone. Would another News Editor have dared? Once, but only once, do I remember CRK telling me of the ultimate censorship he practised on the last Governor General of India. `I told the boys not to use father's statement for his sake. It did not do him credit. There is no record of what `father' thought.

Newspapers and newspaper editors had an elegant equation in those days. Devadas Gandhi and Kasturi Srinivasan were colleagues and peers. They were not, as editors today can be, buddies. They respected each other too much for any levity to enter their engagements. And there was, vibrating in the Madras scene like a buzzing bee with formidable powers of cross-pollination, Ramnath Goenka who was Indian Express.

I remember the three of them discussing in the upstairs penthouse of The Hindu where my father was Kasturi Srinivasan's guest and in Ramnathji's own ample drawing room, matters of the moment like `After Nehru who?' And I remember registering the name that secured a consensus then, U.N. Dhebar. Of such fragility is speculation, even of the well-intentioned and well-informed, made. But mortality (as the then Vice-President, R. Venkataraman, once reminded a member in Parliament) is independent of chronology. Devadas Gandhi died of a massive heart attack within two months of that speculative discussion. And Kasturi Srinivasan, two years thereafter. Only Ramnathji survived Nehru to see him succeeded by the Shastri no one had thought of in terms of Prime Ministership in 1957.

`Kasturi', as my father called him, was a princely host. He not only placed for nearly a month The Hindu penthouse at my parents' disposal — and of this 11-year-old truant — but would not hear of my father paying the enormous bill for the canteen from which sizzling `dosas' and steaming `idlis' flowed towards us at call. There was a recital in the city by M.S. Subbulakshmi that summer. Transporting it was, as always, even for one so young and untutored in Carnatic music as I. When it gave over, I heard my name being called. It was Kasturi Srinivasan. "You were shaking your head throughout the concert in enjoyment. That is good. But do you know how to tell one raga from another?" An early lesson that was in the importance of understanding what you enjoy — or dislike.

I also remember the Editor's bushy white eyebrows quiver in gentle admonition as I wove my sub-teen way through the building's grand stairs and lifts, arrested midstream, in sheer awe, by the arrival in orthodoxy's fragrant attire, of Kasturi Gopal. `Who is he,' I asked my parents. `He is a good man, a man of God.'

Fleet Street, London, found The Hindustan Times and The Hindu play owner and tenant. The Hindu had hired a flat in the building — long since demolished, alas — in a niche off that street called Salisbury Court which HT owned. I had insinuated myself into a visit to that city with my parents in 1956 and recall paying a visit to The Hindu's slice of that building.

Tucked away behind his desk, in a swirl of cigarette fumes, sat K.S. Shelvankar smiling in gentle knowledge of the folly of all arrogance. Forty years later, I was to see `Shelley' again (and again) in London and not unoften in the company of young Thomas Abraham, who now represented The Hindu in a very different London. The former Rep, who had gone onto be Ambassador of India in Moscow and in Oslo, still held the same opinion of that folly.

Lest the reader think The Hindu means just a memory-jog for this relic of the 1950s, let me say it means much more. It means I can open it each morning with the same faith in its swara, sruti and sahitya-suddhi as in my disc of Subbulakshmi's suprabhatam.

(The writer is a diplomat.)

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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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