Terms of Trade: Goodbye, Sankarshan Thakur

LIke to the highest degree people of their propagation from the say of Bihar, my parents got married betimes. This substance that they are still in their 60s while I am already in my 40s. Sankarshan Thakur, who passed away on Monday after a valiant battle with cancer, was 63, more my parents’ age than mine. And yet, in our brief, less-than-a-decade-long friendship, he was the one who could beat me, and many others in our peer group, hands down in showing the energy of an 18-year-old, be it for work or life. He was in his late 50s, covering the 2019 Lok Sabha election in Bihar, when he ran wearing broken chappals and out of breath behind the road show of a young candidate in whom he saw hope. The proverbial addas with him could go on from dusk till dawn without even a hint of a drop in energy or engagement levels.A lot of my comrades in the profession, young and old, celebrities and not-so-famous, have rightly praised Sankarshan for his prose. As a philistine who deals mostly with numbers and finds it hard to read fiction, I get their point even though I cannot appreciate it fully.I admired Sankarshan the journalist, or shall I say, the public intellectual par excellence, especially for my home state of Bihar, for a different reason which is almost Marxist in nature. “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter”, Karl Marx wrote in the introduction to his A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in 1843. This aspect -- Sankarshan’s radical streak -- first revealed itself to me when we were taking a class of sorts together for foreign diplomats in an embassy in Delhi before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Sankarshan was talking to them about Bihar. The crux of what he said was as follows: For more than three decades, the centre of gravity of Bihar’s politics had revolved around Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar, the twin characters in his cult classic The Brothers Bihari. This phase was ending and one of India’s largest states was entering a phase of the unknown, he told the gathering. His words sound almost prophetic today, as Bihar heads towards yet another election and both Lalu and Nitish are at the fag end of their political careers. Nobody knows what the future really holds for the state. Only those who understand Bihar’s politics, not just in terms of mundane political arithmetic, but also the chemistry which lends politics its magical, almost seductive aura in the state, will appreciate the import of what he said more than six years ago to a bunch of people as distant as possible from Bihar. Journalism will always have its share of people who write beautiful prose. What is rare is those who can also put real substance and foresight into this prose. Sankarshan was of the second variety.Amartya Sen, perhaps India’s tallest living public intellectual, told me something very profound in an interview I had the good fortune of doing with him when his memoir was released. Philosophy is a non-negligible part of being a human being, he said, underlining its importance in making us the human beings that we are, for better or worse. It has become a very useful benchmark for me to evaluate both myself and others in life.Sankarshan’s philosophy in life was quintessentially Gramscian: pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. The pinned tweet on his X (formerly Twitter) account is a profile of Narendra Modi titled The Man Who Could be Prime Minister, which he wrote back in 2002. His personal political views -- more than obvious from his public writing -- were bitterly opposed to that of the Hindu right or its tallest leader today. And yet, he could see what was to come much before anybody even thought of it, and was honest enough to put it in public. There has rarely been an election Sankarshan got wrong since I got to know him personally, and, therefore, had an opportunity to probe his thoughts, sometimes beyond what he wanted to express in his public writings.Even though the state of Indian polity did not give him any pleasure, he had this irresistible urge to go reporting during elections, especially in the so-called ‘cow-belt’. The field, villages, its dusty roads and the plebian mass of humanity to be found there, were his proverbial muse. They always inspired him to go on the road, no matter what happened. To be sure, his commitment to reporting was not just about elections. I still remember talking to him days before the Modi government decided to annul Article 370, taking away Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status. There were anecdotal accounts and rumours of security being tightened, an internet blackout and reportage becoming restricted, perhaps even hazardous. And yet, Sankarshan told me that he could not even imagine not going to Kashmir to report, and he soon managed to get there. The story always came before the journalist in his world.Once he took over as the editor of The Telegraph, the reporter in him had to take a back seat to make way for the editor; today’s editors are trying to achieve what can only be compared to British economist Lionel Robbins’s definition of economics on steroids: a study of human behaviour as a relationship between unlimited wants and scarce means.Our evening meetings in his post-editor phase -- he often worked out of Delhi rather than Kolkata -- saw him almost always working; clearing a page, checking a graphic, talking to the desk, instructing a reporter on how to write a story, etc. In the intermittent breaks he could take from work, we would join issue with his family: how he needed to take a break and go on a vacation. More so because he was suffering from symptoms of long-Covid. He would sheepishly agree to do all of it in principle, but he perhaps had a more honest answer to these questions in the opening lines of the introduction to The Brothers Bihari in both Maithili, his mother tongue, and English, the language of his tradecraft. “Appan maath ke tetar kakro sujhaai chhai? (Does anyone ever see the bump on their own forehead?)”. He continued working till he went in for the surgery from which he never came back.In his passing, journalism has lost a veteran foot soldier-turned-general who wanted to give back to the profession more than what he received from it. His loss is irreparable not because he possessed qualities which cannot be necessarily found in practitioners of the trade in today’s generation. It is a loss because he came from a generation which saw some of the most turbulent phases in the political history of India, and especially Bihar. It was this lived experience which made him aware of the fact that truth-telling, no matter how beautiful or articulate, did not always bring rewards or may not go unpunished.There is this telling anecdote of a famished Nagarjun – one of the most critically acclaimed radical poets of Hindi – landing at Sankarshan’s Patna home late in the night during the Emergency while he was underground and trying to evade arrest. Nagarjun asked the teenage boy that Sankarshan was then whether he could get him some mustard oil to fry a couple of eggs he was carrying. Nagarjun made these in the kitchen with Sankarshan still standing by and vanished after eating.This is a lesson many self-proclaimed radicals have forgotten today, sometimes deliberately, often making them look disenfranchised rather than dissidents while critiquing the powers that be. If they read Sankarshan carefully, they would find this moral compass of sorts, sometimes buried in an anecdote, sometimes in a throwaway line, but always there for the discerning observer.Of course, he wore all of this intellectual and philosophical outlook lightly, under a humorous and dismissive demeanour. The man I met for an adda, or spoke to on the phone, or exchanged text messages with during his illness, was always joking, talking about mangoes and sea food and the things we would eat and drink when he got better. He always inhabited with equal ease both his worlds: that of his village in Darbhanga, Bihar, and that of the English prose writer par excellence he was. It gave him the rare quality of being able to articulate Bihar and its worldview to the non-Bihari. A few years ago, when my wife (who is from Kerala) and I were driving back from work, I remarked that some singer did what we call in Bihar regha kar gaana. Despite trying my best, I could not explain to her what I meant, which is when I decided to call Sankarshan from the car and asked him to do the job. He paused for a few seconds and then said: it means you prolong your vowels while speaking. She got the point and all of us had a good laugh.Sankarshan was not a subaltern in his origins and social upbringing. He never even pretended otherwise. But he was committed to the cause of letting the subaltern speak, without filtering for political correctness, through his writings to the crème de la crème of society.It was this ability of his which made me adore him first as a distant observer and then as a friend. I am tearing up as I finish writing this column , but let me show some bravado and end with quoting a couplet from Faiz Ahmad Faiz to bid adieu to one of the best friends I made as a journalist and salute his legacy in our profession.jis dhaj se koī maqtal meñ gayāvo shaan salāmat rahtī haiye jaan to aanī jaanī haiis jaañ kī to koī baat nahīñThe style with which one goes to battleThat honour stays intactLife, after all is mortal,And one should not make much of it.