Punjabi Saga is a compilation of three volumes that tells the story of five generations of a Punjabi family. It is also the autobiography of Prakash Tandon who passed away recently at the age of 93. Denizens of the corporate world would be familiar with Tandon’s achievements which include being the first Indian chairman of Unilever’s local operations, head of the State Trading Corporation and the Punjab National Bank, so on and so forth. But it is in the pages of this thick book that one can find the story of an individual and a society coming of age. Tandon’s father was a civil engineer with the irrigation department of the government of Punjab. Tandon went to Manchester in the late 1920s to study chartered accountancy, an unusual profession at the time. He joined Unilever on his return. Most accounts of those dramatic times tell of political strife, of brave exploits during the independence struggle, fine speeches and the traumatic effects of events such as Partition. Tandon’s tale is unusual in that it describes the tussle for independence on a more mundane, everyday level. Through Tandon’s eyes we see an India with limited job opportunities and unspoken social barriers between the whites and the natives. We watch him negotiate the social thickets of dinner parties and office politics. We watch his growing confidence as he is exposed to new management systems in America and his determined but often frustrated efforts at pushing ideas of profit, expansion and efficiency in a country wedded to socialism and only just emerging from the womb. Years of Pilgrimage is the story of Raja Ramanna who also died last week, at the age of 79. It is the story of a boy growing up in the princely south. As a young man Ramanna was a proficient student of the piano and could, had he chosen to, have pursued a musical career. Rather than tinker with concertos, however, he decided to travel to the UK to study physics. He acquired a PhD from the Imperial College of Science and Technology. He was abroad when the Americans dropped the bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the event gave him a sense of the immense strategic possibilities of the new weapon. He returned to India and joined the atomic energy programme, one of free India’s proudest boasts in the ’50s, convinced about the desirability of developing a bomb for India. The 1974 Pokharan blast when it occurred, was to him, “an assertion of the technological advancement India had determined to perfect in the post Independence era”. Over the last fortnight India lost some of its most distinguished personalities. Shobha Gurtu, Arun Kolatkar and Mulk Raj Anand also passed away. Each had lived a long and eventful life, Kolatkar, the youngest, was 72. Mulk Raj Anand, the oldest and widely admired for his contribution to Indian English writing, his passionate opposition to social injustice and his immense appreciation of ethnic art and culture, was 99. They were men and women who were born when the country was still a colony and in their own individualistic ways — whether one agreed with their views or not — represented the heart and aspirations of free India. Their passing away raises many questions. Questions, for instance, about the future shape of India’s classical arts, about the survival of the indigenous in an era of sweeping globalisation, of assertion through technology, of combining enterprise and welfare and of the possibility of justice for the dispossessed and downtrodden. Prem Shanker Jha, in a tribute to Mulk Raj Anand in the latest issue of Outlook, identifies Anand’s lifelong efforts at promoting India’s rich cultural heritage as part of his struggle against colonialism and bemoans the present crass state of our political and social-cultural environment as a travesty of Anand’s vision. Pointing to vulgarisation in architecture, politics and so on, Jha goes on to ask: “Why unlike every metropolitan nation does India not have a classical music channel on FM radio. (why) has Marg been submerged under an avalanche of new magazines that ‘sell’ Bollywood and beauty contests as Indian culture?” In Punjabi Saga Tandon describes his encounter with a “mild mannered” businessman from Bombay who has been to Europe to “pick up some new ideas”. Struck by the lights and neon signs of Picadilly Circus the businessman wants to fill the entire length of Bombay’s Juhu beach with “hoardings to convey the latest marketing messages to the backward masses”. When Tandon remonstrates, suggesting that this might disturb the tranquility of the beach, his companion is upset. The “trouble with India”, he tells him, is that “things had been left alone for too long.” That was way back in the thirties. Time passes. Some things never change.
