5th H Y Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture: Introduction (16.4.2016 IIC)

 Welcome to the fifth H Y Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture. I thank you all for joining us on this occasion, which is being held one day after what would have been Sharada Prasad’s 92nd birthday. 

For those in the audience who did not know him: Holenarasipur Yoganarasimham Sharada Prasad was a journalist, editor, freedom fighter, writer, translator, bureaucrat, teacher and cultural scholar. 

He was News Editor of the Indian Express, Bombay at the age of 24, and the first Indian Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1955-56. He joined the Government of India in 1957 (at the injunction of U. S. Mohan Rao, who asked him if he had worked for Goenka then why he couldn’t work for Nehru), working first in the Publications Division and then succeeding Khushwant Singh as Editor of the Yojana magazine of the Planning Commission, before being picked by Indira Gandhi to join her staff. 

He was Information Adviser to three prime ministers for over 20 years from 1966. He received the Padma Bhushan in 2000, and the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration. He served as Vice-President of ICCR and Chairman of NID. 

Sharada Prasad wrote and edited several books, one called The Book I won’t be Writing, and was an editor of the Selected Works of Jawahar Lal Nehru. He also translated RK Narayan’s Swami and Friends into Kannada, and several of K. Shivarama Karanth’s books into English. 

Sharada Prasad, or Shouri, as family and old friends called him, had a wide range of interests, and was involved with a large number of institutions. The concept behind the Memorial Lecture is to celebrate the diverse engagements of Sharada Prasad – the freedom movement, the Indian nation, media and journalism, language and literature, Kannada, Design, music, culture, nature and many other things such as mangoes. 

• Mukul Kesavan delivered the first lecture on “India and Republican Virtue”; 
• Dr Sanjaya Baru the second on “Media, Business and Government”. 
• The third lecture was delivered by Sugata Srinivasaraju on “Negotiating Two Worlds: Bilingualism as a Cultural Idea’’; 
• and the fourth was by Dr K. Ullas Karanth, on “Recovering Nature in a Crowded Subcontinent”. 

Today, India’s pre-eminent independent historian, writer and environmentalist Dr Ramachandra Guha will speak to us about “The Art and Craft of Historical Biography”.

A friend asked me some days ago: ``How you manage to get speakers one would run to hear, even if there wasn't this special Shouri connection?’’ I think it is because of who Shouri was and his ability to befriend a wide variety of people, including the finest minds and talents across generations and cultures. One such person is today’s speaker. 

Ram Guha needs little introduction to most of you, so I will spare you a long recitation of his biography (look it up on Wikipedia, it is mostly correct), other than to note that he is the recipient of 

• the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society for Environmental History for 2001, 
• the RK Narayan Prize (2003), 
• the Padma Bhushan (2009), 
• the Sahitya Akademi Award for India after Gandhi (2011), and 
• the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize (2015).

He’s written many books, of which I will list only a few:

• This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (OUP) (with Madhav Gadgil, 1992)
• Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, his tribals and India (University of Chicago Press; OUP) (1999)
• A Corner of a Foreign Field: An Indian history of a British sport (Picador) (2001)
• India after Gandhi: The history of the world's largest democracy (Ecco) (2007)
• Gandhi Before India (Penguin) (2013)

Instead I will try to give you an idea of my father’s friendship with Ram. In an article several years ago, Ram wrote that he first met my father at G Parthasarathi’s house, an occasion when GP mama was in full flow (probably about cricket). In that article, Ram noted: 

``When Sharada Prasad writes, if you have any sense you drop everything else and read him.’’    

If I were to guess why Ram became a friend of my father —it’s probably hinted at in these words he wrote in another article:

If I was to describe Sharada Prasad in one word, it would be “civilized”. He’s the most civilized person I know and that is embodied in his appreciation of the four great arts: music, painting and aesthetics, literature, and cricket

I first came in touch with him through the book on Karnataka that he and T.S. Satyan did in the late 1970s. It was a celebration of the State, and in it Sharada Prasad wrote: “The grace and elegance of Karnataka are expressed in the brush strokes of K.K. Hebbar and the square cuts of G.R. Vishwanath.”

In yet another article in The Hindu titled ``The Good Indian’’, Ram wrote: 

A friend of mine once described Sharada Prasad as ‘the thinking man’s Khushwant Singh’. The characterisation was accurate as well as incomplete. For the scholarship was subordinated to an integrity of character and a selfless commitment to the country that he shared with his readers. This quiet, learned, dignified,and always decent man was, above all else, an Indian.

I recall my father telling me (it was perhaps after reading a cricket-related article in the newspaper), “you know, he is not a Bengali”. And that is how we learned of an older family connection. Among my parents’ circle of friends soon after their moving to Delhi in the late 50s were people like Sheila Dhar and Ram’s aunt/cousin Dharma Kumar. But I’m convinced that even more than that, it was due to his deep admiration for Ram’s great-uncle K Swaminathan, editor of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, the 100 plus dull olive-green volumes of which occupied a prominent place in the massive bookshelves of our living room. 

The first time I recall meeting Ram was at the Nehru Memorial Library, when after a talk by him, there was a private meeting with him, BR Nanda-ji and my parents. In that conversation between them, there was a warmth and respect and the familiarity of kindred minds and equals. 

My father was a great admirer of Ram’s approach to history — of going beyond the Marxian method of ascribing events to economic and social forces alone, in recognising the extraordinary and significant roles played by individuals. And not merely the well-known, big names (the Gandhis, Tagores, Nehrus), but others, who contributed substantially and had interesting life stories, such as Verrier Elwin. And several other people who contributed to the literary and cultural richness of our nation. That is why they were such great admirers of RK Narayan, Shivaram Karanth, MS Subbulakshmi, Mallikarjun Mansur, Gangubai Hangal, DG Tendulkar, KV Subbanna (G R Vishwanath) and so on. Shouri’s own approach was to write short almost exquisite sketches about such figures; Ram’s approach is more systematic and scholarly but just as elegant. 

This is not to say that they saw eye-to-eye on every matter. My father famously did not maintain a diary for future generations to understand the inner workings of Indian politics of the 60s through the 80s at the highest levels, something that is invaluable for a historian such as Ram. 

The other thing is not something he voiced directly but hinted at a couple of times — that the environmentalist in Ram failed to acknowledge the sterling role played by Indira Gandhi in conservation and in protecting the environment, starting with what he considered one of the finest speeches on which he had worked — her 1972 Stockholm conference address, a speech that has been twisted in so many ways by so many people. Perhaps good speeches are meant to be quoted, great ones misquoted.

Ram, I’m sure Shouri would have eagerly read your book Makers of Modern India, marking it with his editor’s pencil, as well as Gandhi before India and also your upcoming book.

I’m not sure how you and he manage/managed to write so prodigiously, often over 5000 words a day. But we hope to see many more books come from your pen, to keep our Umberto Eco-esque anti-libraries full.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mesd0giZ8HM