03-09-2007, 01:27 AM
March 11, 2004
The Invisible Intellectual
By Sudhanva Deshpande
Unobtrusive, withdrawn, almost shy, he died as he lived: quietly, without fuss, in his sleep. Krishna Raj was responsible for creating, single-handedly, one of the most incredible intellectual institutions of our times, a journal called Economic and Political Weekly (EPW).
India boasts of one of the most vibrant democratic intellectual cultures anywhere in the world, even if the actual realization of political democracy on the ground remains imperfect, uneven, flawed, skewed, and currently - under the right wing dispensation that rules at the centre and in several states - under grave threat. The mark of this democratic intellectual culture is the vast variety of opinion that gets expressed in the media, and indeed in the very wide range of platforms that are available, in spite of growing corporatization of the media, for the thinking and concerned citizen to air his or her views.
While India has more than a dozen major languages - and each one of these languages has a robust intellectual and political culture - English is today undeniably the major language of intellectual discourse. And it is in English that we have four remarkable periodicals.
One is Mainstream, a magazine analysing current affairs, edited for long years by the late Nikhil Chakravartty. Then there is Seminar, a monthly devoted to debating a single problem from a variety of standpoints in each issue, edited by the husband-wife team of Raj and Romesh Thapar. Neither is alive today, but the journal continues publication with vigour. The youngest publication is Frontline, a newsmagazine edited by N. Ram.
While Mainstream has lost some of its sparkle after the death of its founder editor, Seminar, by its very nature, only commissions articles and caters to a somewhat shifting readership in each issue. Aijaz Ahmad, in the preface of his latest book 'Iraq, Afghanistan and the Imperialism of Our Time', rates Frontline the best English language newsmagazine anywhere in the world, and his verdict is hard to contest. But it is also to be noted that Frontline is the publication of The Hindu, a family-owned group of newspapers with a long and distinguished history, manned by professional journalists.
The most remarkable in this list of remarkable publications, the most open, democratic platform, is EPW.
To those unacquainted with India, it would be hard to explain the enormity of EPW's prestige and its achievements. Unlike any academic journal I know of from anywhere in the world, EPW was born, and has remained, a weekly.
For close to forty years, the journal's pages have been a clearing house of serious ideas on politics, economics, history, sociology, anthropology, and often the sciences as well. In addition to its weekly quota of some four or five academic papers, EPW also publishes, every year, reviews of agriculture, labour, industry, management and gender studies, consisting of about half a dozen commissioned papers by leading authorities in each field.
The very best of Indian social science research has been published by EPW, and often non-Indian academics have chosen to publish theoretical papers here rather than in journals of the west. As an academic journal, EPW holds its own against the best in the world. I have personally known academics who have waited for an year or more to get their name into EPW, for being published there is a mark of recognition for the quality of your research. An EPW citation invariably occupies pride of place in the curriculum vitae of a young scholar in any university anywhere in the world.
In this democratic republic of ideas, an unknown research scholar from an obscure part of the land gets as much space and prominence as an Amartya Sen or Romila Thapar. Over the years, senior bureaucrats, behind the protective shield of pseudonyms, have used the columns of EPW to critique government policy.
There is not a single debate of academic or political importance that has not animated its pages over the last three decades or more, be it the mode of production debate, or the question of imperialism, or underdevelopment, or the debt crisis of the third world, or the debates around subaltern historiography, or on the nature and direction of the Indian polity, or on questions of gender, caste, culture and environment. And remarkably for what was, for a long time, viewed as a journal of the (non-party) left, EPW has opened its pages to virtually every shade of rigorous thought.
But unlike any scholarly journal I know, EPW has also provided lavish space to commentaries on current issues, to columns by a number of top-class but somewhat idiosyncratic writers, to pithy and incisive editorials on a bewildering range of subjects of public concern, and to longer pieces that set out to provoke academic or political debate. In addition, EPW also publishes tables and tables of impeccably researched economic data and statistics, a lively letters to the editor column, and book reviews as well as review articles.
EPW defies every stereotype. It is a small, independent journal employing some twenty staff members on less than modest wages, but its professionalism is the envy of the best and biggest. Not a single issue has ever been delayed for any reason, including the death of its editor. Every single piece that appears in EPW is carefully and meticulously edited for style as well as content. It looks spartan, unostentatious, it is printed on inexpensive newsprint, carries no photographs, and makes no concessions to visual flourish, not even the use of fine typefaces or comfortable inter-line leading.
It is page after page of tightly composed text, and expects to be read with the same urgency as a dictionary or medical reference book. In fact, its functionality is itself an aesthetic, like those old, rugged, metal-bodied SLR cameras.
For a publication that looks nearly intimidating, EPW has phenomenal reach and circulation. University dons as much as undergraduates, corporate bigwigs and financial sector managers, bureaucrats and political leaders, social and political activists, anybody who has anything to do with the world of ideas and the state of the nation reads EPW.
We have all grown up on EPW, debating passionately this or that question that the journal threw at us, waiting anxiously for the issue next week to see how the debate was turning out. And the thrill of receiving the first acceptance note from the editor would surpass for a young scholar the thrill of many weightier honours in future life.
In the 1990s, as the neoliberal reform programme of the Indian economy gathered pace, EPW switched sides and began arguing in favour of the policies of liberalization and globalization.
Opinion on this policy shift was bitterly divided. Left intellectuals, particularly economists, felt a sense of betrayal, rightly so, and some of the best known among them boycotted EPW, perhaps not so rightly. Non- and anti-left liberals welcomed the change, celebrating EPW's 'glasnost'. Whatever one's opinion on the editorial shift, it is uncontested that the journal itself maintained high standards and commanded huge readership.
There is simply no getting away from it: EPW is a magnificent and unique intellectual institution.
On the left, we often think of movements as being more important than individuals, and perhaps they are, but in the process we underrate the individuals who build structures that enable movements to live and thrive.
Krishna Raj was one such man.
A master editor of other people's writing, he also wrote editorials on virtually every subject with care, economy and power. EPW is not a refereed journal. It didn't need to be, not with Krishna Raj in charge. He could debate with the best on most issues, but he chose an anonymous existence, never appearing on television, never granting interviews in print, never signing petitions.
Of all of India's public intellectuals, Krishna Raj was without doubt the most invisible, though arguably the most influential. EPW was his life's passion, his stage and his voice. The journal is what it is because of him, and it is a perfect reflection of his own personality: open, inviting, rigorous, unostentatious, quiet, curious, understated, fiercely independent, forceful.
And his personal integrity was at all times absolutely above the slightest reproach. Even when he turned pro-globalization, he did so not for personal gain - the only individual about whom I can say this - but because he genuinely believed he was right.
Apart from earning for EPW unprecedented stature and goodwill, Krishna Raj also put in place managerial and professional structures - including the ability to raise advertising revenue - that will ensure that EPW will continue to flourish for a long time to come. True to character then, Krishna Raj has ensured that we will not miss him.
But we still will; even those of us who, like me, had minimal personal contact with that gentle, charming man. He touched us all.
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/200...11deshpande.cfm
The Invisible Intellectual
By Sudhanva Deshpande
Unobtrusive, withdrawn, almost shy, he died as he lived: quietly, without fuss, in his sleep. Krishna Raj was responsible for creating, single-handedly, one of the most incredible intellectual institutions of our times, a journal called Economic and Political Weekly (EPW).
India boasts of one of the most vibrant democratic intellectual cultures anywhere in the world, even if the actual realization of political democracy on the ground remains imperfect, uneven, flawed, skewed, and currently - under the right wing dispensation that rules at the centre and in several states - under grave threat. The mark of this democratic intellectual culture is the vast variety of opinion that gets expressed in the media, and indeed in the very wide range of platforms that are available, in spite of growing corporatization of the media, for the thinking and concerned citizen to air his or her views.
While India has more than a dozen major languages - and each one of these languages has a robust intellectual and political culture - English is today undeniably the major language of intellectual discourse. And it is in English that we have four remarkable periodicals.
One is Mainstream, a magazine analysing current affairs, edited for long years by the late Nikhil Chakravartty. Then there is Seminar, a monthly devoted to debating a single problem from a variety of standpoints in each issue, edited by the husband-wife team of Raj and Romesh Thapar. Neither is alive today, but the journal continues publication with vigour. The youngest publication is Frontline, a newsmagazine edited by N. Ram.
While Mainstream has lost some of its sparkle after the death of its founder editor, Seminar, by its very nature, only commissions articles and caters to a somewhat shifting readership in each issue. Aijaz Ahmad, in the preface of his latest book 'Iraq, Afghanistan and the Imperialism of Our Time', rates Frontline the best English language newsmagazine anywhere in the world, and his verdict is hard to contest. But it is also to be noted that Frontline is the publication of The Hindu, a family-owned group of newspapers with a long and distinguished history, manned by professional journalists.
The most remarkable in this list of remarkable publications, the most open, democratic platform, is EPW.
To those unacquainted with India, it would be hard to explain the enormity of EPW's prestige and its achievements. Unlike any academic journal I know of from anywhere in the world, EPW was born, and has remained, a weekly.
For close to forty years, the journal's pages have been a clearing house of serious ideas on politics, economics, history, sociology, anthropology, and often the sciences as well. In addition to its weekly quota of some four or five academic papers, EPW also publishes, every year, reviews of agriculture, labour, industry, management and gender studies, consisting of about half a dozen commissioned papers by leading authorities in each field.
The very best of Indian social science research has been published by EPW, and often non-Indian academics have chosen to publish theoretical papers here rather than in journals of the west. As an academic journal, EPW holds its own against the best in the world. I have personally known academics who have waited for an year or more to get their name into EPW, for being published there is a mark of recognition for the quality of your research. An EPW citation invariably occupies pride of place in the curriculum vitae of a young scholar in any university anywhere in the world.
In this democratic republic of ideas, an unknown research scholar from an obscure part of the land gets as much space and prominence as an Amartya Sen or Romila Thapar. Over the years, senior bureaucrats, behind the protective shield of pseudonyms, have used the columns of EPW to critique government policy.
There is not a single debate of academic or political importance that has not animated its pages over the last three decades or more, be it the mode of production debate, or the question of imperialism, or underdevelopment, or the debt crisis of the third world, or the debates around subaltern historiography, or on the nature and direction of the Indian polity, or on questions of gender, caste, culture and environment. And remarkably for what was, for a long time, viewed as a journal of the (non-party) left, EPW has opened its pages to virtually every shade of rigorous thought.
But unlike any scholarly journal I know, EPW has also provided lavish space to commentaries on current issues, to columns by a number of top-class but somewhat idiosyncratic writers, to pithy and incisive editorials on a bewildering range of subjects of public concern, and to longer pieces that set out to provoke academic or political debate. In addition, EPW also publishes tables and tables of impeccably researched economic data and statistics, a lively letters to the editor column, and book reviews as well as review articles.
EPW defies every stereotype. It is a small, independent journal employing some twenty staff members on less than modest wages, but its professionalism is the envy of the best and biggest. Not a single issue has ever been delayed for any reason, including the death of its editor. Every single piece that appears in EPW is carefully and meticulously edited for style as well as content. It looks spartan, unostentatious, it is printed on inexpensive newsprint, carries no photographs, and makes no concessions to visual flourish, not even the use of fine typefaces or comfortable inter-line leading.
It is page after page of tightly composed text, and expects to be read with the same urgency as a dictionary or medical reference book. In fact, its functionality is itself an aesthetic, like those old, rugged, metal-bodied SLR cameras.
For a publication that looks nearly intimidating, EPW has phenomenal reach and circulation. University dons as much as undergraduates, corporate bigwigs and financial sector managers, bureaucrats and political leaders, social and political activists, anybody who has anything to do with the world of ideas and the state of the nation reads EPW.
We have all grown up on EPW, debating passionately this or that question that the journal threw at us, waiting anxiously for the issue next week to see how the debate was turning out. And the thrill of receiving the first acceptance note from the editor would surpass for a young scholar the thrill of many weightier honours in future life.
In the 1990s, as the neoliberal reform programme of the Indian economy gathered pace, EPW switched sides and began arguing in favour of the policies of liberalization and globalization.
Opinion on this policy shift was bitterly divided. Left intellectuals, particularly economists, felt a sense of betrayal, rightly so, and some of the best known among them boycotted EPW, perhaps not so rightly. Non- and anti-left liberals welcomed the change, celebrating EPW's 'glasnost'. Whatever one's opinion on the editorial shift, it is uncontested that the journal itself maintained high standards and commanded huge readership.
There is simply no getting away from it: EPW is a magnificent and unique intellectual institution.
On the left, we often think of movements as being more important than individuals, and perhaps they are, but in the process we underrate the individuals who build structures that enable movements to live and thrive.
Krishna Raj was one such man.
A master editor of other people's writing, he also wrote editorials on virtually every subject with care, economy and power. EPW is not a refereed journal. It didn't need to be, not with Krishna Raj in charge. He could debate with the best on most issues, but he chose an anonymous existence, never appearing on television, never granting interviews in print, never signing petitions.
Of all of India's public intellectuals, Krishna Raj was without doubt the most invisible, though arguably the most influential. EPW was his life's passion, his stage and his voice. The journal is what it is because of him, and it is a perfect reflection of his own personality: open, inviting, rigorous, unostentatious, quiet, curious, understated, fiercely independent, forceful.
And his personal integrity was at all times absolutely above the slightest reproach. Even when he turned pro-globalization, he did so not for personal gain - the only individual about whom I can say this - but because he genuinely believed he was right.
Apart from earning for EPW unprecedented stature and goodwill, Krishna Raj also put in place managerial and professional structures - including the ability to raise advertising revenue - that will ensure that EPW will continue to flourish for a long time to come. True to character then, Krishna Raj has ensured that we will not miss him.
But we still will; even those of us who, like me, had minimal personal contact with that gentle, charming man. He touched us all.
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/200...11deshpande.cfm