Memories: Sour and sad
Speaking generally
By Chanchal Sarkar

DEATH has snatched away two shining intellectual figures of the subcontinent. Nirad Chaudhuri, at 101 years, in the fullness of time but Neelan Thiruchelvam of Sri Lanka was only 55.

In his centenary year a lot was written and said about Nirad Babu and so there is little to add that is new. I knew him for 65 years for in 1934 his younger brother, a pediatrician, married my eldest sister. He was then a journalist in Ramananda Chatterjee’s Modern Review and later joined All India Radio and, even later, went to Delhi from Calcutta. His wife was a remarkable, even-tempered even-handed person who protected her maverick and at times anger-spitting husband as long as she was alive and shielded him from all trials and tribulations. This included financial problems because his writings never earned him much money. After he settled in Britain 30 years ago the British Government awarded him a pension which was of a special kind because he had neither lived there long enough nor paid enough towards a contributory pension fund. Such little generosities show the working of a mature democratic tradition. His wife died a few years ago. Before her death she was very badly stricken with arthritis and was nursed by her husband.

Nirad Babu was a cerebral person. The ambit of his reading was immense and his memory was prodigious. But his load of knowledge made him a poor conversationalist. His contribution was a monologue in a falsetto voice. No doubt what he had to say was interesting and worth listening to but at times it could get aggressive because Nirad Babu was the last to concede that he might possibly be wrong over anything.

When I moved to Delhi to join The Statesman in the fifties he and his wife were most kind to my wife and me whenever we visited them in their top floor flat in Nicolson Road near Mori Gate. In fact I had visited them earlier in my college days in 1945. The Constituent Assembly was about to meet then and Delhi was a very disturbed city. The Chaudhuris suggested that come to dinner and stay the night as it would not be safe to go home at night. I did and found, as the other guest, Tridib Choudhury the very well known radial socialist politician who later became one of the most popular, respected and long-serving MPs of the Lok Sabha. We had an enjoyable night of conversation, drank wine, listened to some music and broke up the next morning.

Nirad Babu was an encyclopaedic but maybe because of it he could not bear to be crossed or criticised. His ego was giantsized. I know this for myself. When his book A Passage to England appeared I reviewed it in a weekly Thought which has disappeared from the Delhi scene, edited then by two spelendid M.V. Royists, Ram Singh and A.K. Mukherjee. The review was not all praise, there were some critical spots as well. Nirad Babu was furious. I imagine this must have been sometime in the late fifties or early sixties. He never spoke to me again. His wife would ring up now and again to keep the link going, but he never did. I have never minded this. How can one be offended by a person so abundantly talented as Nirad Chaudhuri was.

Angela Gomes

Whenever the list of Magsaysay prize winners is publised I look to see if I have ever met any of them. This time there is the name of Angela Gomes of Jessore in Bangladesh.

I remember her very well, a tall lanky woman who did not look beyond 30. This is some 10 or 11 years ago, when I was going round Bangladesh in a minibus with 15 or 16 Bangladeshi journalists. In Jessore we were keen to see the work of "Banchte Shekha" (Learning to Live) which Angela Gomes had set up. Its object was to protect, help and support wives abandoned by their husbands. This is one of the great evils of Bangladesh, the unrestricted multiple marriages allowed by Islam in Bangladesh (not always elsewhere).

The women were literally driven into the streets with their children while their husbands married again. Angela Gomes told us how in her younger age she worked for a Christian Church organisation but grew out of it. She has organised the discarded women into a powerful organisation that teaches them crafts, finds them work and — what I loved — if necessary roughs up the recalcitrant husbands who refused to pay any maintenance. Years have passed but I remember how deeply impressed I was by Angela Gomes.

Neelan

We often don’t know the brightest stars of our neighbouring countries. Neelan Thiruchelvam of Sri Lanka, cruelly assassinated by a suicide bomber in Colombo a few days ago, was one of them. As everybody knows Neelan was a very fine intellectual conceptualist. Instead of being simply a theoretician he worked on the resolution of conflict between the Tamils and Sinhalese and was the architect of the devolution of power plan which was to have been presented in Parliament in August by President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s administration. Behind this was years of patient work and much study of constitutional and legal practices and democratic practices in other countries with ethnic divides and problems.

This does not mean that Neelan Thruchelvam was a "Tamil politician", he was a Sri Lankan all through though he did understand the wrong done to Tamils in Sri Lanka over generations. He was the only politician who could convene an all party dialogue for a consensus to settle the ethnic conflict. It is ironical that the extreme Sinhalese abused him roundly for daring to suggest the devolution of power and the extreme Tamils killed him for it.

Neelan was well-known in India where he had many friends. The bodies he founded, the International Centre for Ethnic Studies and the Law and Society Trust, were widely admired abroad and attracted funding. Latterly is was responsible for organising the observers from the subcontinent to the general elections in Bangladesh and Pakistan. I happened to be one such observer in 1997 Pakistan election which brought Nawaz Sharif to power. The organisation of the observers was flawless and one met many people from the sub-continent who became friends. For some reason India has refused to have observers at elections.

His colleagues say that Neelan realised that nationalism, whether Sinhalese or Tamil, had a limited and dated agenda. That I doubt. Both the Tamils and Sinhalese are capable of blowing up those who are for conflict resolution and Neelan’s death will push back the possibility of a workable solution.

Neelan was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father, whom I recall meeting once, was a very successful Q.C. and was also Law Minister.

Neelan belonged to the "Colombo Tamils" — not at all like the Jaffna Tamils but very wealthy and dominantly settled in Colombo’s professional life. No wonder his home and office were in a very upper class area not far from Rosmead Place, the home of the Bandaranaikes. Despite his wealth and advantages Neelan was a very modest and gentle person. His wife is a Muslim. I did see him in Karachi during the election observer visit but I remember much better this lunch he gave my wife and me at Hotel Renuka in Colombo, one of the nicest and quietest hotels in Colombo. Coincidentally it was Tamil-owned but Neelan took us there because we were staying at the Renuka.