Krishna Raj: Soft-spoken but firm in his views

OBITUARY

In 1965, Sachin Chaudhuri, the founder editor of the Economic and Political Weekly, then called the Economic Weekly, asked Professor K N Raj to recommend an assistant editor for his magazine.

K N Raj immediately suggested one of his students, who had just finished his post-graduation with a third division from the Delhi School of Economics.

For obvious reasons, Chaudhuri wasn't very happy with the recommendation. However, in deference to K N Raj he hired the young post-graduate as his assistant editor.

Three months later, Chaudhuri sent K N Raj a telegram, "Send me another Krishna Raj". K N Raj, telexed back, "Order placed with his mother, wait for nine months!"

Since then, Krishna Raj, who passed away on Saturday in Mumbai at the age of 67, became synonymous with the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) - a weekly that defies description and is perhaps the only one of its kind in the world.

In the 34 years of his life that he dedicated to the EPW, he made it a weekly that combined the seriousness and quality of thought normally associated with an academic or a research journal while discussing issues of a current nature appealing to a wider public platform just like a serious magazine.

The biggest contribution of Krishna Raj to the intellectual landscape of India was to make EPW a forum for issues that were marginalised in popular discourse.

It is a tribute to his editorship that every single debate on the Indian economy - be it on industrial stagnation, agricultural mode of production, factor productivity or liberalisation - was started and carried out in the pages of the EPW.

Every one of the top academics of the country - Sukhamoy Chakravarty, K N Raj, Amartya Sen, T N Srinivasan, Krishna Bhardawaj, Prabhat Patnaik, Isher Ahluwalia - have contributed extensively to the EPW.

While Krishna Raj, and the EPW under his editorship, was admittedly Leftist in its editorial views, Raj made it a platform for discussion of all kinds of views and published articles of all kinds of views and analysis. That has been the greatest strength of the EPW.

The other great contribution of Krishna Raj to the knowledge base of our society was to get EPW into areas like women studies and environment much before they became fashionable.

Even as he made EPW the finest institution of debate and discourse in India, Krishna Raj himself kept a very low profile.

He was rarely seen in public and, to the best of my knowledge, had never allowed anyone take his picture as the editor of EPW! He wanted to be read, not seen. Most of his writing in the EPW was unsigned edits.

He was soft-spoken to the point of being inaudible and so polite that one could never imagine that he would ever disagree with anyone on anything.

Yet, he was very firm in his views. As an individual scholar, he combined an amazing repertoire of anecdotal wisdom and academic detail with activist concerns and classical values.