Ramakoti will Live

RAMAKOTI WILL LIVE ... TRIVENI MUST LIVE

M. CHALAPATHI RAU
Editor, National Herald

Ramakotiswara Rau was an editor par excellence. He could have been many other things, separately or collectively–a writer of character, an artist of integrity, a teacher of unusual persuasiveness, or a critic of rare perception, or all in one, but whatever he had, all his resources, all his qualities, were cremated so that from the ashes might rise a journal of quality. The vicissitudes through which Triveni has had to go have sometimes created blotches of amnesia in the public mind, even among the elite. The qualities which Triveni has enshrined and its objectives, beautifully summed up as the Triple Stream, will live, and so Triveni will live and thereby the man who created it and gave everything of himself to it will live.

It is not of much use to recall parallels. When I think of Ramakoti, I may think of Blatchford or Massingham, but they are distant figures for me, and I knew him as I had not known them or any other editor, Indian or foreign. He was himself. If he has to be put in a class, he is in the class of Gandhi, who, though a Mahatma, is the greatest editor I can think of, the editor of the greatest weeklies the world has known and the only editor who successfully ran journals without the help of advertisements. In a slightly more commercial–and un-Gandhian–age, Ramakoti imperiously rejected advertisements, insisted on accepting only advertisements of quality, and cheerfully suffered in the process. It was a life of suffering. It was also a failure, in the material sense. But the greatest failures of life have been the greatest successes.

I saw Ramakoti edit; I saw him hack at manuscripts; and I saw him turn the most slovenly articles into very shapely essays. He did this to my manuscripts also, and from that inexorable impartiality of his blue pencil, I learnt much, and am still learning. There were moments of discovery and then ecstasies of creative satisfaction. This was how he shaped raw composers into writers with a future; and he lives in them.

In the making of an editor like Ramakoti, a writer has to be sacrificed. The more an editor tries to project himself or write too much, the less he is an editor, and I have known failures of this kind. Ramakoti suppressed the writer in himself so that his journal could be the vehicle of many writers. One day he wrote from the intensity of his agony an article entitled, “Bring Me Thy Failure”; it was one of the best things he wrote and showed how well he could write. I called it a lyric in prose. He was not satisfied, and praise made him tremble like a leaf on the tree of life. This softness could be misleading from one who was inflexible as an editor.

About Ramakoti’s human side, many others will write. Everyone who knew him will remember his sense of fun, in the midst of all troubles, the way he made fun not only of others but of himself, and fun even of his troubles. There could be no doubt about his strength of character, which emerged even from his sensitive moments, and his gentleness adorned that strength. It was reflected in his hand-writing, the bold, clear calligraphy, with its incisive strokes, and there was the simple, rock-like syntax. Among editors who achieved influence, and not mere circulation, real or manipulated, he will live, and if Indian journalism must be helped in the maintenance of standards, which have been steeply falling, Triveni must live.