It was an enticing invitation. “Let’s go for a walk in Lodhi Gardens and talk about your book.” Gurcharan Das has been a mentor to many writers and an author of many books. Between selling Vicks Vaporub and Whisper sanitary pads he has written deeply engaging books on the economy, on philosophy, on love and life. His latest book is a memoir that maps the geography of his life and letters.
I first met Das on the platform of Old Delhi railway station in 1987. He carried branded bags and sported a lovely jacket. As we settled into our first class compartment on the night train to Kalka, along with our other unlikely co-passenger, the historian Amiya Kumar Bagchi, we discovered we were all guests of Professor Ravindra Kumar who was hosting a conference on ‘Forty Years of Independence’ at Simla’s Indian Institute of Advanced Studies.
Das was at the time CEO of a multinational company, and by then already a well known playwright, Bagchi a pre-eminent scholar, and I had just finished writing my doctoral dissertation.
Gurcharan Das, Another Sort of Freedom: A Memoir, Penguin Random House, India. 2023. Pp. 276
A few years later I was introduced to Das for a second time. This was at the home of Samir Jain, the vice-chairman of Bennet Coleman & Co Ltd. Publishers of The Times of India. I was then editor of the newspaper’s editorial page.
“You should invite Gurcharan to write a regular column.” Said Jain. I did. Soon thereafter Das migrated from the edit page to the Sunday paper where he became a regular and a much read columnist.
Das’s four books have been about life and loss. There is a common thread that runs through them, of hope and despair. In India Unbound, a bestseller about post-1991 India, Das is full of hope for a new post-Nehruvian India. Yet, the kind of market-based capitalism that he hoped 1991 would inaugurate did not follow. The India that worked well was still the India ‘that works at night’, rather than the one that functions by day.
Then came The Difficulty of Being Good. A book we discussed over wine at a wine cellar near Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. As the title suggests, the path of dharma is a difficult one and Das explored that space of doubt and moral conflict.
Years later, at a Lutyens’ Delhi soiree, Das shared a secret. “I have written about artha and dharma,’ he said, ‘my next one is about kama. You will enjoy it.” I did. At the book launch he was asked if Kama: The Riddle of Desire was autobiographical. He blushed.
After artha, dharma and kama, followed moksha, a memoir. It is, however, more than a memoir. It is a window into an India gone by. It is a guide to happy, nay liberated, living. It is about artha, dharma and kama. It is a philosophical treatise full of poignant reflections.
Das is a true blue liberal, neither enamoured by the political right nor the left. His ode to liberalism is the subject of yet another book.
Das has lived many lives in one. Born in what is now Pakistan, he has lived through the agony of partition and the opportunity of the early years. Free India was a land of hope and ambition. For Das life was made even more exciting when his father, a civil engineer, had the opportunity of working in the US. That opened new possibilities culminating in a graduate degree in philosophy at Harvard.
The Harvard graduate chose to return home to work in Nehru’s India. The family wanted him to write the civil services exam and become a government official. The height of middle class ambition at the time. Das opted for a career in the private sector, and that too at a multinational.
His assignments took him around the world and he was busy selling choco milk, detergent, soap and sanitary pads. In between he befriended Amartya Sen, Matilal, Santha Rama Rau and all manner of philosophers and writers.
Between the day job of marketing and cultural encounters, Gurcharan wrote a play that was staged off Broadway. His boss forced a choice. Marketing or writing. He hung up his boots and settled down to a life of a writer. We are all the beneficiaries.
Das’s memoir is evocative of a life well lived but interspersed with the angst of his times. Alisha, who makes an appearance in the memoir, was his first love and inspires Das to quote from the Kamasutra about the limitation of that temptation: “It is natural for a man to be attracted to a beautiful woman. It is equally natural for a woman to be attracted to a handsome man. But after some consideration, the matter goes no further.”
Between Delhi, Mumbai, the United States and Mexico Das meets Bunu. A life partner who has been as companionable for ‘corporate Das’ as she has been for ‘writer Das’.
Das’s memoirs have benefitted from his access to his mother’s well preserved daily account of life in her personal diary. His mother is the most important person in his early life as indeed Bunu has been in his later years.
The book is testimony to the range of his experiences and the breadth of his scholarship. He quotes with ease a Seneca as he does a Valmiki, a philosopher as he does an economist. Das believes that he has a ‘western mind and an Indian heart’, a British empiricist’s brain and a Buddhist’s soul.
Born into a middle class Punjabi family just before Independence, Das has lived a varied life in many worlds and embraced them all. The richness of that experience and the benefits of the opportunities that came his way have shaped his liberal persona and his inquisitive and exploring mind.
Yet, there is a sense of loss that each of his four themes convey. The hope in his first book of a more liberal and open economy has not been realised. The pursuit of dharma in his second book remains unfulfilled. The longing for love in his third book remains a longing. Has he found moksha through his fourth?
