M. C.’s link with “Triveni”

It was well over thirty years ago that I first heard of the name of M. Chalapathi Rau–thirty-nine years ago, to be exact. As a student in 1944-’46 of the Law College, Madras (which was curiously enough, then located in the buildings of the Holy Angels Convent in T. Nagar), after having done my English Honours at the Madras Christian College. I was as yet rather more interested in Literature, which I had not yet outgrown than in Law, which I had not quite grown into. To the result that good English, written or spoken, was likely to attract me a lot more than the dry bones of law, often exposed in a clumsy, inelegant, English idiom, even by those experienced teachers with an impressive string of British university degrees, after their names.”

Luckily for the academic mavericks like me, the Law College could then claim to have a fairly good reading-room, with supplies of outstation Indian newspapers in English, apart from a few British and American magazines. Among these dailies was The Hindustan Times from Delhi, which used to carry a variety of features, including serial and pocket cartoons by Ahmed, political cartoons by Shankar and the Weekly column, “Off the Record” by “Magnus.” Of special interest to me was the last one–brilliant, witty, sparkling, sarcastic and satirical, vivacious and wide-ranging.

It did not take much time for me to find out that the tell-tale initials, “M. C.”, as well as the suggestive pseudonym, “Magnus”, stood for the gifted journalist, M. Chalapathi Rau. He was then on the staff of The Hindustan Times as an Assistant Editor, writing editorials and special articles, apart from the column “Off the Record.” I had by now also heard of the National Herald of Lucknow, founded in 1938, under the chairman­ship of Jawaharlal Nehru, with K. Rama Rao as Editor. As the paper had to be closed, following its identification with the August Movement of 1942, both Rama Rao, the Editor, and Chalapathi Rau, an Assistant Editor, were jobless in Lucknow and were trying to make themselves useful in Delhi.

On the revival of the Herald, after the release of the Congress leaders at the end of the war in 1945, both Rama Rao and Chalapathi Rau found themselves at their posts of duty. As a regular subscriber and reader of the paper by then, I could see that most of the meaty editorials, on world affairs and other literary and cultural subjects that required depth of knowledge, bore the stamp of M. C., whose name had begun to appear in the imprint, as Assistant Editor, along with that of the Editor.

Very soon after that, i. e., on 1 July 1946, Chalapathi Rau became Editor of National Herald, and remained so for 32 years, which is perhaps an unbroken record for a working journalist in the annals of Indian journalism.

It is just possible to think of British or American journalists, like J. L. Garwin (Editor of Observer) and Strachey (Editor of Spectator), who might have had a longer tenure.

It is not, however, for length of tenure that one remembers the editorship of Chalapathi Rau. It is for the values he cherished, for the principles that he stood for, that his life and work have become memorable to students of public affairs, as well as to practising journalists. His public philosophy is eloquently summed up in the special article written by him on the day of his taking over, which should be required reading for all students of journalism in India. Under the title “Taking Over”, he discussed the role of the journalist with no inhibitions or illusions, but with a sense of inspiring idealism.

In this essay in historical stock-taking and professional self-analysis, which is also an example of vivid, vigorous prose, allusive and epigrammatic, he says:

“The newspaper is a battleship in action, according to Mr. Churchill, that ‘fighting Tremeraire’ among British politicians, and to take over a battleship in action is like the blind taking over from the blind...We shall not lose the Nelson touch.”

“The complexity of its traditions is Indian, journalism’s baffling problem. It has had two roots, one is Fleet Street, which has become in fact a multitude of streets and Indian nationalism, which has become as complex as a nation fight­ing for freedom. It is pleasant for book-browsers to think of Fleet Street...But journalism is not literature, if at all it is, it is literature in “a hurry–and Indian journalism is still nearer Burra Bazaar than English literature.”

“Integrity” and “Social vision” are the two vital elements on which he laid the greatest stress as a journalist. Shunning sensationalism of the too familiar sort, relating to sex, crime and other kinds of scandal, Chalapathi Rau believed that “the only worthwhile sensationalism is the sensation of social and economic change.”

Consciously or unconsciously, M. C. had never, in the rough and tumble of daily journalism, amidst the din and bustle of type­writers and teleprinters, lino-machines and the rotary press, quite given the gobye to literary values. In the least promising of circumstances, physical and mechanical, social or cultural, he never lost sight of a sense of style. He could not quite forget his own intellectual and aesthetic ground. It was through the Triveni Quarterly (which was then coming out as a monthly and two-monthly for some years) that he made his debut in journalism. And thereby hangs a tale.

In the years 1931-’32, as a Law apprentice, Chalapathi Rau was staying at the YMIA in Armenian Street, which was in those days a centre of cultural-political activity, with the Gokhale Hall as the forum and the Besant Statue as a source of inspiration. It so happened that the office of the Triveni Quarterly was situated in the same building and its Founder-Editor, K. Ramakotiswara Rau, had also his lodging there, during his stay in the city. It was here that the two met and were drawn to each other, with friendly respect on one side and affectionate, admiring interest on the other.

Some of the earliest articles of Chalapathi Rau saw the light of day in the pages of Triveni. They were excellent examples of literary composition, more in the nature of inspired appreciation than that of objective critical analysis and balanced assessment. The one on John Masefield, for instance, when he was nominated to succeed Robert Bridges as the Poet Laureate of England. “King Robert is dead. Long live King John!” – That is how the brilliant article begins – with a bang, not with a whimper, as has always been the case with the handiwork of M. C. This was followed, in due course, by an extremely well-informed essay on “Imagists, Futurists and Symbolists.” Later still, there was a dazzling tribute to the rollicking personality of Gilbert Keith Chesterton on his death, in a characteristically scintillating style – full of puns and paradoxes and packages, unexpected wit and wisdom.

It was on the advice of Editor, Ramakotiswara Rau, that Chalapathi Rau attempted a selective rendering of that rare, romantic lyric, Nanduri Subba Rao’s Yenki Paatalu (Songs of Yenki) for Triveni. The first few lines of which read as follows:

“My heart is stifled in my throat!
my heart is struggling in my throat!
I cannot sit, not sit awhile;
She looks at me, she makes me smile!

But to be silent with a will,
my heart cannot stop or still!”

It may be of interest here to mention that the present writer, stimulated by this experiment, followed it up with an article of his own, incorporating some new lines of translation, more than two decades later, in the same periodical. Fortunately or unfortunately, neither of them has been able to complete the translation of the whole book.

On the suggestion of the Editor, Chalapathi Rau had also done a number of reviews of books by Indian writers-like the novels of R. K. Narayan and Journalism by C. L. R. Sastri, as far as this writer is able to remember. His attitude to Indian writing in English became, however, increasingly ambivalent in due course. He was disappointed, in later days, to find that Indian writing in English was turning into a cult with its practitioners forming a coterie, self-consciously aesthetic, anaemic, with, not enough of the flesh and blood of real Indian or English writing. But how could he possibly have forgotten that he himself was a creative writer, with a critical sensibility as well, lost to the carnivorous jungle of daily journalism?

Short story and serious poetry, apart from satirical skits and light verse were only a few of the art forms at which M. C. tried his hand, and with admirable aplomb. To the Short Story magazine, edited in the middle ’Thirties (1934-’35) by his friend and admirer, Manjeri S. Isvaran, (also closely associated with Triveni) he contributed some half-a-dozen stories; including one relating to murder-detection, Murder at the Kutb. Of the others, Death of Midas is purely satirical, and pungently so too; Crowded Hours takes us to a variety of strange bedfellows; and Carnival to the dreamland of myth, magic and enchantment.

An inkling of his flair for vivid, perhaps a trifle too ornate, description, could be had from a few lines from “Murder at the Kutb.”

“We were faced by the birdless silence, no wind even; there were little clusters of pallid, pouting, hypnotic, faces, with something wise and ancient in their evil-suggesting eyes, and a leer between their carmine lips; a few ugly urchins making unnatural gestures; and famished dogs indulging in vigorous winter whoopee. And we saw a sudden the Kutb Minar, the resting place of sun and moon and stars, a column of fire out of which a phoenix had renewed itself, not time-­worn like the ghosts of Shahjahanabad, but an everlasting thing, roaring with life.”

Along with English literature, in which he was at home in the classical as well the contemporary works, Chalapathi Rau had more than an ordinary interest in Indian politics. He wrote a series of lengthy, but lighter vein, articles in Triveni between the years 1932 and 1938. They covered a fairly wide range, but with the focus on the National Perspective, as in ‘The Third Assembly,’ ‘A Decade of Indian Politics’, ‘The Viceroys of India’ and ‘The Congress Caravan.’

In ‘The Third Assembly,’ he wrote:

“The Third Assembly contained galaxies and constella­tions and scintillated with the most brilliant stars. They remembered the most ancient history and knew by heart the most recent anecdotes; and if, as Sheridan said of Dundas, they sometimes resorted to their memory for their jokes and to their imagination for their facts, they could show off, as occasion demanded, Balfourian elegance, Asquithian terseness, or Curzonian pomposity. They platitudinized and pot-boiled, they punned and parodied…..”

Epigrams, aphorisms, allusions and strokes of alliteration, seem to come tumbling down as in the ornate, chiselled prose of Philip Guedalla in painting his portrait galleries. That M. C. was not only a deep student of Winston Churchill, Lytton Strachey and Philip Guedalla, apart from the earlier masters like Gibbon and Macaulay, but an ardent and discriminating admirer of them all, was obvious to me not only from his profile-writing, but his critical essay on ‘Portrait-painting in English Literature’ in Twentieth Century (edited by K. Iswara Dutt).

In what he considered his regenerate days as a nationalist editor and public opinion-maker, M. C. used to make a conscious attempt to repudiate or at least ridicule our English literary heritage, but he used to give the game away by his unconscious quotations from English literature and citing of parallels from British and European History. Like many of our English-educated pro-intellectual Marxist and Socialist sympathisers, he knew rather less about Soviet politics and Chinese dialectics than about English literature and European History. But this need not be held against him now.

It was these articles in Triveni, which drew him to the atten­tion of Jawaharlal Nehru, himself an occasional contributor, but a regular reader of this periodical in the pre-Independence days, when he had a little more time for reading than after he became the P. M.

For some inexplicable reason, M. C., who was nobody’s sychophant, allowed himself to be surrounded by sychophants in the latter days of his close proximity to the corridors of powers. Unfortunately for him, these semi-literate and illiterate sycho­phants, who could hardly understand his writing, succeeded in keeping out those discriminating admirers who knew the value of his writing. He took it for granted that no one was exempt from his criticism and satire, but he himself was hyper-sensitive to any criticism from others, even those with the best of intentions. To the result that he drew around him interested cheer-leaders rather than genuine friends.

It is not clear if as a writer, unconnected with the politics of power, M. C. had fulfilled the promise of his Triveni days. As a profile-writer, he was probably more subtle but less lucid and pleasant than Iswara Dutt. His political judgments were less penetrating and less objective than those of Khasa Subba Rau. If readability alone be the criterion, my preference is for Frank Moraes. In subtlety and sarcasm, his writing had less finesse than that of S. M. (S. Mulgaokar). In the discussion of books and ideas, he had rather less of intellectual sophistication than Sham Lal. But as an all-rounder, he could perhaps outshine them all. As a writer and journalist with a mission, he was all in all, in his time, though this made him look self-righteous.