RIP, Pritish Nandy: Bold, brash, brilliant, and a man for all seasons

Veteran writer, poet and filmmaker Pritish Nandy breathed his last on Wednesday at the age of 73

The year was 1986. The Illustrated Weekly, one of the best-known magazines of the day, had published what was possibly one of the first exposes of a chief minister’s sexual escapades. The target was Janaki Ballabh Patnaik, an Indira Gandhi loyalist, who was then in his second consecutive term as the Odisha (then Orissa) chief minister. The cover story sent shockwaves through the state, even the country. Patnaik’s response was as swift as it was ruthless – all remaining copies as well as a follow-up edition were confiscated from retailers and, rumour had it, burned. But the damage had been done. The ghosts of that scandal refused to leave Patnaik and he lost the next Assembly elections. All thanks to Pritish Nandy, then the editor of the ‘Weekly’, as it was popularly known.  

 

When the story came out, it was seen as a major win for Nandy’s brand of journalism, fearless, unapologetic, pugnacious, in-your-face, and occasionally salacious. Nandy was already a household name; this only cemented his fame, especially given Patnaik’s grip on power at the time.  

 

But as always, there was a twist in the tale.  

 

Three years later, around the time that Patnaik was ousted, Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd, which published the Weekly, published an apology in response to a Rs 1 crore suit Patnaik had filed, admitting that the source material was incorrect and ‘politically motivated’. The announcement mentioned Nandy and a colleague S N M Abdi by name, regretted the damage done to Patnaik’s reputation, and offered an apology.  

 

The damage, though, to the Weekly and Nandy was possibly greater. The magazine shut down two years later, and Nandy never made a return to formal journalism, instead dabbling in some television, and then making a mark in Bollywood as a producer.  

 

One could argue that Nandy was the last of a line of editors who never shied away from the hard-hitting stories. Keep in mind, there was barely any TV then (only a single channel, state-run Doordarshan that had more holy cows than all the pilgrimages of India put together), no clamouring caravan of channels, no social media, no smartphones. All one had was newspapers and magazines. Among these, Nandy took the Weekly to dizzy heights, making it the go-to magazine for those who wanted a higher quality of writing and aesthetic. Nandy himself was a ‘character’, given to temper and profanity, but also a swashbuckling figure who could joust with the best of them and publish their deepest secrets. Or as my former editor Nikhil Lakshman, who worked closely with Nandy at the Weekly, calls him in his tribute on rediff.com: ‘The duke of unending drama’. 

 

Indeed, his interviews have been the stuff of journalistic legend.  

 

The one with Kishore Kumar remains a crowd favourite, almost in the realm of magical realism, yet illustrating in manic detail the maverick that the Bollywood actor-singer was. Perhaps they were both kindred souls. In today’s time, when India is highlighting the Khalistani presence in Canada, it would behoove us to remember that Nandy was the first to interview Frank Camper, a mercenary who trained the Sikh terrorists who went on to execute the tragic Kanishka bombing of 1985 when they blew up Air India 182 off the UK coast, killing all 329 people on board.  

 

Or the one with Chandraswami, at whose feet the well-heeled once bowed, and behind whose high-walled ashram in the Qutub Institutional Area many deals were rumoured to be struck. The godman, not realising Nandy was sitting across from him, having snuck in with a fellow journalist, abused him roundly even as he talked about his money deals, all of which Nandy published, setting off the government’s sleuths after the godman.  

 

But perhaps Nandy’s greatest gift was his ability to fight and survive in the face of adversity, the skill of being able to turn on a dime. After his journalistic career came to an end, he did a couple of interview shows for television, and when that came to an end, became a Rajya Sabha MP, sent to Parliament by the then-undivided Shiv Sena, of which Balasaheb Thackeray was the undisputed patriarch.  

 

He soon pivoted to Bollywood, which was perhaps a good fit for his own flamboyant, larger-than-life persona. In 1993, he founded a production house, naming it, naturally, after himself – Pritish Nandy Communications. As in journalism, he soon made PNC a name to reckon with, producing films that ranged from crowd-pleasers to critical successes. Among them were The Mystic Masseur, Kaante, Jhankar Beats, Chameli, Shaadi Ke Side-Effects, and Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi.  

 

Indeed, it would not be off the mark to say that perhaps he, too, had hazaaron khwaishein still beating in his mortal heart at the time of his passing. At 73, he is gone too soon, and Indian journalism has lost one of its better-known exponents.