Sumit and I perhaps had an unseen bond of affection, personally and professionally, though we hardly met in the past decade or so. The news of the distinguished editor’s passing in Kolkata on the night of July 26 reached me around midnight that day. It was hard to sleep afterward as a wave of sadness swept over me, and I lay with a book open without reading a page, thinking of Sumit, about journalism then and now, life and politics then and now.

I had known Sumit Chakravartty for some 45 years. He was a few years older, though I am not sure how many. We never talked about it. Indeed, Sumit perhaps looked younger than I did. He always had a brisk air and a serious look about him, although a very youthful face and jet black hair brushed back carefully – and respect for others written all over him, every bit the humanist Bengali Brahmo which he was from both sides of the family.

My guess is he would be 80 or perhaps 81 this August, and this is what a close  relative of his also said when I called to find out. But I did know – I cannot say how – that we were born in the same month. 

Sumit’s mother Renu Chakravartty was a well-regarded Communist Party of India (CPI) MP, and his father Nikhil Chakravartty an exalted name in Indian journalism, had founded the Mainstream weekly and edited it with flair, and not a little panache. Looking back, it was a distinctly Left-ish journal with a strong nation-building appeal; it decidedly had high order political writing. 

Some front rank journalist-analysts wrote for it, as well as other top drawer writers from different arenas of life. Occasionally, politicians of the highest order – both Left-leaning and Right-leaning within the framework of the Congress of that day, also sent contributions. All of this lent immediate appeal to the paper. P.V. Narasimha Rao, who would go on to become the prime minister, sometimes wrote under an assumed name. I knew that.

Among younger journalists of the time, especially those even vaguely on the Left, Nikhil had something of a fan following but I was not one of them, though I marvelled at some of his lucid editorials in which one picked up hints of goings-on in the higher planes of politics and gained  glimpses of the functioning of the state apparatus. Occasionally, I had the opportunity to be published in Mainstream and that doubtless pleased me.

I have written about Sumit’s father only to note the nature and stature of the journal it fell to Sumit to edit upon Nikhil’s passing in the late 1990s. Mainstream was hardly a business, and it would be ludicrous to call it lucrative or money-driven. It would have just about managed with occasional help from friends. 

However, I find it hard to imagine that any Indian newspaper offered the acuity of political analysis that Nikhil’s – and later Sumit’s – famous weekly did in its heyday. It is true that some journals like Frontier, on the far Left, or even RSS’ Organiser occasionally did have fine analysis but rooted in their deep ideological settings.

In fact, it may also be said that no top editor or political journalist in Delhi had the range of contacts that Nikhil did. This is hard to believe considering that he began life as a journalist for the CPI’s official paper in the 1940s after returning from Oxford University. The variety of the editor’s contacts translated to the quality of the writing in Mainstream. 

Sumit maintained the distinguished nature of Mainstream for many years after taking charge but the times were plainly changing. The nature and the themes of political debate in the country underwent a drastic makeover and the writers of the earlier type from within the system, and sharp and wise critics outside of it, were available less and less and would eventually fade. 

With costs rising and revenues dipping, the only way out was to go online. It is a credit to Mainstream – and great credit to Sumit and to his wife Tanya (Gargi), a retired college professor and respected women’s activist, who soldiered on with Mainstream online when things went really bad. 

A few intrepid souls helped run and edit the paper after Sumit’s health collapsed, culminating in two major strokes and several minor ones. Some fine journalists of earlier times who still write occasionally, including my senior colleague L.K. Sharma from my days at The Times of India, keep the publication thought-provoking.

I consider it a privilege and a great working experience to have worked alongside Sumit, and a raft of other top-end journalists and analysts, in the political bureau of The Patriot daily in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, and with Sumit afterward at the New Delhi bureau of Mumbai’s (then Bombay) The Daily, a Blitz group publication. Sumit excelled in reporting on India’s foreign affairs and Left-wing domestic politics, in the main. 

He wrote easily and quickly. He worried a lot about the country, as Mahendra Ved, an eminent journalist who was with us at The Daily after a long stint with UNI and had experience of reporting the Bangladesh campaign in 1971, reminded me last night. For a small paper, I must say we managed to kick up something of a little storm in those days!

When M.K. Venu, a founding-editor of The Wire phoned out of the blue to ask if I would do an obit for Sumit, it was a moment of freeze, a shock, a feeling of inner hurt. I hesitated, but agreed. The feeling is strange to write about someone with whom you walked the streets of politics. 

The gentle soul he was, Sumit could argue passionately, even vehemently, but never maliciously, nor in the way of cut and thrust of debating. He had just returned from Moscow as The Patriot’s correspondent there when I first met him. 

I had only known him from his bylines on the USSR developments. There were no airs about him, just a small hint of friendship at our first meeting.  

A long farewell, my friend.

Anand K. Sahay is a veteran journalist.

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