The Last Word: Obituaries of 100 Indians Who Led Unusual Lives

By Rahul Bedi

Rahul Bedi has been a journalist for 38 years, beginning his career with the Indian Express in 1979. He was posted in London in the late 1980s after attending Oxford University as a Reuters Fellow. Presently, he is New Delhi correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly, UK, the Irish Times, Dublin, and the Daily Telegraph.

He was also Assistant Master at Mayo College, Ajmer and the Doon School, Dehra Dun in the 1970s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: May 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9788193704905

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The Last Word

ROLI BOOKS

This digital edition published in 2018

First published in 2017 by

The Lotus Collection

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Copyright © Rahul Bedi, 2017

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CONTENTS

Preface

1. Harkishan Singh Surjeet

2. Air Marshal Jafar Zaheer

3. Hrishikesh Mukherjee

4. Pramod Mahajan

5. Nadira

6. Capt Umrao Singh VC

7. K.R. Narayanan

8. Amrita Pritam

9. Syed Mushtaq Ali

10. Sunil Dutt

11. Lt. Gen. J.S. Aurora

12. O.V. Vijayan

13. Gemini Ganesan

14. Parveen Babi

15. Amrish Puri

16. J.N. Dixit

17. P.V. Narasimha Rao

18. Raja Ramanna

19. Mehmood

20. Johnny Walker

21. Lt. Gen. K.P. Candeth

22. Nani Palkhivala

23. Abu Abraham

24. Air Marshal Aspy Engineer

25. R.N. Kao

26. Harshad Mehta

27. Maharaja Madhavrao Scindia

28. Lt. Gen. Inderjit Gill

29. Rangarajan Kumaramanglam

30. Usha Mehta

31. Rear Admiral Satyindra Singh

32. Rajeshwar Dayal

33. M.L. Jaisimha

34. Guru Hanuman

35. Lt-Col Michael Skinner

36. Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai

37. General Krishnaswami Sundarji

38. P.N. Haksar

39. Persis Khambatta

40. Nikhil Chakravartty

41. Minoo Masani

42. E.M.S. Namboodiripad

43. Ajit

44. Lalita Pawar

45. Biju Patnaik

46. Pupul Jayakar

47. Neville Wadia

48. Raaj Kumar

49. Aruna Asaf Ali

50. Krishnarao Shelvankar

51. Dinesh Singh

52. Maharaja Martand Singh of Rewa

53. Aditya Birla

54. Beant Singh

55. Gopalaswami Parthsarthy

56. The Maharaja of Bharatpur

57. Rajan Pillai

58. Morarji Desai

59. Zail Singh

60. Malcolm Adiseshiah

61. Swaran Singh

62. Tushar Kanti Ghosh

63. Dhirendra Brahmachari

64. Hajji Mastan Mirza

65. Devika Rani

66. J.R.D. Tata

67. Ghulam Khader, Prince of Arcot

68. Utpal Dutt

69. Swamy Chinmayananda

70. Girilal Jain

71. Srikrishna Mulgaokar

72. Field Marshal Kodandera Cariappa

73. Apasaheb Pant

74. Kalyan Sundaram

75. Justice Mittra Sikri

76. Mallikarjun Mansoor

77. Amjad Khan

78. Niranjan Singh Gill

79. Achyut Patwardhan

80. Lt-Gen Shankarrao Thorat

81. Kanan Devi

82. Sir Raghavan Pillai

83. Kumar Gandharva

84. Abid Syed

85. Ramnath Goenka

86. V.K.R.V. Rao

87. Shripad Amrit Dange

88. Govindan Aravindan

89. Nutan Behl

90. Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar

91. Vijayalakshmi Pandit

92. Atma Jayaram

93. Zia Mohiuddin Dagar

94. Vanakudre Shantaram

95. Suresh Mahindra

96. Balachandra Trimbak Ranadive

97. Angami Phizo

98. Ashok Birla

99. Keshav Shankar Pillai

100. Roy Axel-Khan

PREFACE

This anthology of 100 obituaries of prominent Indians from varied walks of life, written for two British newspapers over a two-decade period, came about entirely by happenstance in London in the late 1980s.

It was prompted by the passing away in 1989 of Roy Axel-Khan, the enigmatic, but little known Indian diplomat, who had become my good acquaintance during his last few years in London, where he increasingly spent most of his post-retirement years. This diminutive 80-year-old former Royal Indian Navy officer’s life story – encompassing calamity, pathos, adventure, glamour and success demanded telling, and motivated me to call the Obituaries section of the Independent newspaper.

Launched just three years earlier, and already the preferred choice of a burgeoning readership due to its lively and crisp writing and elegant, minimalistic design, it somehow seemed the obvious choice to carry Axel’s fascinating life story (featured on page 301). In comparison, the more established Fleet Street titles were far more staid and infinitely less approachable than the Indy, a start-up venture by three former Daily Telegraph journalists.

Louis Jebb the taciturn, but receptive Deputy Obituaries Editor listened patiently to my pitch, and almost immediately commissioned me to send in Axel’s obit, that was promptly published under my byline. The Indy’s practice of appending bylines to obituaries was an innovative feature for UK’s daily broadsheets at the time, having since become more commonplace.

Thereafter, over the next 19 years till 2007, when the Marxist leader Harkishen Singh Surjit passed on, I wrote the obits of some 150 Indians – politicians, diplomats, soldiers, civil servants, intellectuals, actors, businessmen, journalists, cricketers, maharajahs, gangsters and even a wrestler. Their lives spanned the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and without exception, were interestingly spent, as they all existed in restive times. All the subjects featured in this volume contributed in some form and measure in nurturing newly independent India into adolescence and adulthood, and were, to a person men and women of substance.

A few of the obituaries were written for the Daily Telegraph, for which I was New Delhi correspondent for over 20 years, and to whose foreign news pages I still contribute. But the bulk were carried by the Independent, where in later years, I had the pleasure of dealing with the droll Obit Editor Jamie Fergusson, formerly an antiquarian bookseller, and his two equally charming women deputies, as Jebb had moved onto grander pastures.

And in all the years of our extended association, not once did this witty Scotsman or either of the Indy’s Obits staff ever decline any of my offerings, continuing to accept obits of interesting Indians, however little known they may internationally have been. Their sole guiding mantra was that the subject needed to be captivating and had led an exciting, lively and colourful existence. Occasionally, they suggested the odd obit that I might have missed, or simply ignored for not being writable, but on further research, all their proposals proved worthy of narration.

The Independent’s catholicity in approving obits of personalities as diverse as Bollywood villain Ajit or character actor Lalita Pawar, cartoonist Shankara, cultural czarina Pupul Jayakar, Victoria Cross recipient Umrao Singh of the Royal Indian Artillery or spymaster Atma Jayaram, was generously matched by another indulgence: permitting me the use of the nom de guerre Kuldip Singh as my byline between 1990 and 2007.

The duplicitous reason behind the alias – taken from my father’s name – I can now safely reveal after all these years, was simply a protective ploy, as I then worked for the Daily Telegraph and was contractually barred from writing – even obits – for any rival British newspaper. Ironically, this also meant that the fictitious Kuldip Singh – and not Rahul Bedi – was the object of vilification by those dismayed by my forthrightness in some of the obits. To the best of my recollection, this indignation surfaced only on a few occasions, when Hindu Right Wing bigots in the UK objected to the loose association I made between the Hindu revivalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse.

Sadly, the last print edition of the Independent appeared on 20 March 2016, and the paper, including its obits, now available only in digital form, which to a person of my advanced years is a minor Greek tragedy. The paper’s new Obits staff, however, displayed the same chutzpah and magnanimity it had exhibited earlier in welcoming an overwhelming number of Indian obituaries, by waiving their copyright and granting Roli Books permission to anthologize them.

However, the obvious question – and critique – this obit collection might legitimately provoke could be the authors and publishers motivation in gratuitously publicising the life stories of scores of people long dead, irrespective of how renowned or noteworthy they may or may not have been.

My response to this putative reproach is that this anthology is by no means a macabre celebration of their deaths, but in reality a celebration of their quirky lives, escapades, vicissitudes and animated existences. In a sense, these obits strive to demystify death, simply by highlighting the dynamic and sprightly tales that lie interned within each one of the subject, featured in The Last Word.

Obituaries – derived from the Latin Obitus, meaning death or the last day – also provide closure in times of increasing uncertainty, anonymity and deracination. They offer the fading luxury of reminiscences – despite Internet’s supremacy – informality, nostalgia, irreverence, humour, sensitivity, and of course, long forgotten historical events. By transporting the reader to a bygone era, obits offer a transitory, but comforting reprieve from a dreary existence rife, amongst myriad other negatives, with disquieting technology and the equally bewildering and de-humanizing phenomenon of Twitter, Facebook and related obsessions.

The Obit pages – there are often more than one – in leading British, Australian and US newspapers, to mention just a few, are without doubt the most widely read five days a week, particularly by its older readers, for whom mortality looms. Conversely, these pages are, without doubt, the most elegantly written than the rest of the newspaper as, barring the odd exception they enjoy a longer gestation period in their construction.

All major foreign papers have a generous bank of elegantly penned obituaries of eminent and stimulating subjects that are periodically updated and re-worked, and in some cases even approved by the subjects themselves. According to some media accounts the narcissistic Lord Louis Mountbatten, for instance, is believed to have spent an inordinate amount of time and emotion during his lifetime to ensure largely bespoke obits in British newspapers. For him it was obviously important that he be remembered, just the way he perceived himself, and it seems he largely succeeded. Many obits also follow the dictum of not speaking ill of the dead but the liveliest ones, without doubt, remain those are candid and salacious. After all, the aphorism that no one can libel the dead is equally apposite.

After a certain age, most Indians too avidly scan newspaper death notices, not just to keep abreast of the depreciating scorecard of their acquaintances, but as a gratifying testament simply to being alive. But for the perspicacious obit writer, hidden amongst some of these approximate pictures and sketchy details of the deceased, lie buried riveting tales of lifetimes lived to the lees that quite simply need amplifying. Not doing so would be a disservice to their existences, all of which add up, to use a clichéd phrase, a rudimentary draft of history.

Of all the obits featuring in the book, some of the subjects I knew well, others superficially, a handful by association and the remainder, not at all. But substantial portions of them were published before the Internet epidemic, necessitating extensive inquiry, meetings with relatives or friends of the deceased and research in musty newspaper archives; information that is all available today the end of a cursor. All these years later all I can say is that the entire exercise was a challenge and above all, gratifying as my subjects’ lives revealed India’s rich, wide and intense human resource heritage.

Paradoxically the personages featured in The Last Word tend to show up our largely self-obsessive look-at-me post-Independence generation of leaders and public figures. For, unlike them many these present day somebodies, or what passes for them, sadly lack seminality, scholarship, self-effacement, gravitas, and above all humour with few exceptions.

In short, these obits are a sign to us all: act now to lead interesting existences. After all, as the adage goes life is not a dress rehearsal: make the show worthy of a racy obit once the finishing line has been crossed.

HARKISHAN SINGH SURJEET

16 October 2008

POLITICAL LEADER: BORN ROPOWAL, INDIA

23

MARCH

1916;

GENERAL SECRETARY, COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA

(

MARXIST

) 1992-2005;

MARRIED

(

TWO SONS, ONE DAUGHTER

);

DIED NEW DELHI

1

AUGUST

2008.

India’s veteran Marxist leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet was an astute and foxy politician who ensured that his country’s small band of Communists remained an influential political force in the world’s largest democracy. As General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the CPM, for 13 years until 2005, he exerted an influence that was in inverse proportion to the small number of MPs from India’s four leftist parties.

He was instrumental in almost single-handedly bolstering Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s ruling federal coalition following the 2004 general election. His support and determination to install Singh’s Congress Party-led government stemmed from a desire to prevent the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with its divisive communal and sectarian agenda, from assuming power.

Through his trademark plain-speaking, Surjeet persuaded parties on the Left to support Singh’s administration from outside government. This arrangement broke down recently, however, plunging India into political uncertainty, and many believe that this was because the old-style Marxist was ailing.

Earlier, between 1996 and 1998, ‘Comrade Surjeet’, as he liked to be called, successfully cobbled together two brief administrations with the express aim of keeping the invidious BJP out of office. But unfortunately the two prime ministers he backed proved highly incompetent, each lasting less than a year in office.

Though a Sikh himself, with his carelessly tied white turban as his most distinguishing feature, he positioned the CPM as the only political party that effectively combated the Sikh separatist movement. During the 1980s, he lost over 200 ‘comrades’ to insurgent attacks.

Surjeet was born in 1919 in Ropowal village in the Jalandhar district of India’s northern Punjab state. His was a poor household – his father worked briefly as a bus driver in Panama – and Surjeet was schooled locally. At the age of 14, he joined the national movement for independence from colonial rule by becoming a member of the Young Indians Organisation, founded by iconic Indian revolutionaries and socialists like Bhagat Singh, who was executed for assassinating a senior British police officer who had shot dead a freedom fighter.

In 1932, on the first anniversary of Bhagat Singh’s death, Surjeet displayed exemplary courage by tearing down the Union Jack fluttering above the Deputy Commissioner’s office in his home town of Hoshiarpur and replacing it with the Indian flag.

An army unit, one of many deployed across Punjab by the British administration, fired twice on the defiant teenager, but missed. When he was arrested and taken before the magistrate, Surjeet defiantly gave his name as ‘London Tod Singh’ – or ‘London Destroyer Singh’. Sentenced to one year’s imprisonment, he taunted the court by asking ‘Just one year?’ and duly had his prison term quadrupled. ‘Only four years?’ he then enquired of the magistrate, who helplessly responded that he was statute-bound not to give him a longer term.

During his political career, which spanned nearly eight decades, Surjeet spent a decade in jail: eight years under the British and two years as a political prisoner under Congress Party rule in the 1970s.

In 1934, he joined the Communist Party of India to better the lot of peasants in Punjab and four years later became head of the powerful state farmers’ organisation. Until independence in 1947, he opposed the British by joining several anti-colonial movements and he edited popular nationalist journals such as Dukhi Duniya (‘Unhappy World’) and the fiery Chingari (‘Spark’), which greatly irked the administration.

In 1964, when India’s Communist Party split on ideological grounds, Surjeet, who was opposed to revisionism, opted for the more radical CPM, which looked to Beijing for guidance instead of the rival, Moscow-leaning breakaway faction. By the 1980s, through his grassroots experience and inherent shrewdness, Surjeet realised that the debasement of Indian politics would take place along communal lines and positioned himself to oppose it.

He was deeply committed to the idea that the future of Communism in India was integrally and inseparably bound to India’s future as a secular and democratic republic. Surjeet also grasped the fact that coalitions would dominate Indian politics and he successfully worked towards making political space for Communism.

A close friend of leading Communists around the world, Surjeet was India’s ‘bread man’ to Fidel Castro, after he sent 10,000 tons of wheat to Havana to help the island fight the blockade by the United States in the early 1990s.

His personal regimen was spartan. He lived and dressed simply in homespun cotton; and in India’s rapacious political system he was a beacon of probity and freshness.

AIR MARSHAL JAFAR ZAHEER

9 April 2008

AIR FORCE OFFICER: BORN LUCKNOW, INDIA

14

JUNE

1923;

DIRECTOR, AIR STAFF REQUIREMENTS, INDIAN AIR FORCE

1973-74;

DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF CIVIL AVIATION

1979-80;

MARRIED

(

THREE SONS

);

DIED NEW DELHI

23

JANUARY

2008.

Jaffar Zaheer’s impish irreverence hid a steeliness that emerged in the unusually principled stand he took against India’s omnipotent political establishment during the premiership of Indira Gandhi. As the first Indian Air Force (IAF) officer to head the country’s chaotic Directorate General of Civil Aviation, Zaheer refused, despite relentless political pressure, to withdraw the case against Gandhi’s unruly son, Sanjay, for flying a commercial airliner with passengers without a valid licence.

He also declined to apologise to Sanjay, an unforgiving thug who drew authority from being his mother’s political heir, for the ‘inconvenience’ of charging him with the offence. The unrelenting Zaheer then further banned Sanjay Gandhi from flying a stunt plane and from executing dangerous aerobatics over the capital, New Delhi, in violation of all safety norms. Sanjay ignored the veto and continued; Zaheer quietly resigned in June 1980.

On 23 June, Sanjay, unable to exit from a complex loop in his single-engine two-seater plane, crashed and died, changing the course of Indian politics. Zaheer was asked to withdraw his resignation, offered palliatives like ambassadorships and state governorships. But he declined, preferring instead the anonymity of running the small, private Khambatta airlines in the western port city of Bombay for the next five years.

But Zaheer’s impetuosity as a newly commissioned officer in the then Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) in the early 1940s had almost ended his budding career after he poured a bottle of wine on his instructor whilst raising a toast during his ‘dining in’ at an RAF mess in England. As the stunned senior officer glowered under the onslaught, Zaheer declared with aplomb to a speechless, but secretly pleased, audience of English fighter pilots that the drenched gentleman had needed a spring cleaning.

The only Indian cadet at the RAF base undergoing an aircraft conversion course, Zaheer had found the chief instructor’s behaviour racist, an assessment the commanding officer possibly shared, as he merely demanded to know whether the offending wine had been white or red. And, instead of the court martial that was under serious consideration, Zaheer’s eventual punishment was merely to reimburse the officer for the cost of dry-cleaning his uniform.

Zaheer was born in 1923 into an aristocratic Muslim family in Lucknow in northern India, the son of a renowned politician who after independence became a government minister and later a diplomat. Schooled locally, he joined the prestigious Allahabad University but left before graduating to join the RIAF in 1942. Soon after, along with other Indian cadets, he was dispatched to Canada to undergo flying training and was commissioned into service in September 1943 in the rank of Flying Officer.

The Second World War ended during Zaheer’s journey home by boat, but he did see some action strafing restive Pashtun tribesmen in the North West Frontier Province – now in Pakistan – in the region bordering Afghanistan that remains in ferment even today, having changed little in over a century.

Zaheer was one of a handful of IAF fighter pilots to graduate from the Institute of Armament Technology, a discipline that helped him formulate the Weapons Planning Directive of 1963 that remains the template for all such activity at Air Headquarters even today.

From 1964 until he retired 15 years later as IAF’s deputy chief in the rank of Air Marshal, Zaheer held various staff and operational appointments in which he oversaw the air force’s modernisation and streamlined its Byzantine financial procedures. During the