My Father, page 12
In 1955, as assistant secretary in the Medical and Health Department, Father was able to get an Ayurvedic dispensary sanctioned for the village. He then began working on getting a post office and a public call office (PCO) opened in the village. This required prolonged correspondence with the central government, but he was eventually successful in getting both done for the village.
In February 1959, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had planned a visit to Bhilwara. Father thought that this was a good opportunity to bring him to the village. He met Manikya Lal Verma and lobbied him to include a visit to Suwana in Nehru’s itinerary. Being fond of Suwana, Verma agreed, on the condition that my father would take full responsibility for making the arrangements. Verma got Nehru to agree.
Father went to Suwana and took charge of all arrangements for Nehru’s visit. The visit took place on the morning of 9 March. Nehru came at 8 a.m. sharp, with Verma and Chief Minister Sukhadia accompanying him. The villagers welcomed him with a one-sentence welcome address inscribed in golden letters on a silken cloth:
‘Bharat ke Hriday Samrat Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru ka Suwana ki Janata Hardik Abhinandan Karti hai.’
[‘The People of Suwana Welcome the King of Indian Hearts, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’].
The warmth of the villagers visibly pleased Nehru. He addressed the large gathering for fifteen minutes, had breakfast with the several hundred villagers and left at 9 a.m.
Verma and Sukhadia were pleased with the successful visit and thanked my father. Sukhadia then asked if the state could do anything for the village. Not one to ever miss an opportunity to advance the cause of his village, Father asked the chief minister to bring electricity to the village. Sukhadia agreed, and within three months, Suwana had electricity. It became the first village to be electrified in Rajasthan after the formation of the state. The impact on the people was deep. The Congress won their hearts forever. The village remains loyal to the party to this day. Even during the 1977 elections following the Emergency, it voted for the Congress.
On 2 October 1959, Rajasthan introduced Panchayati Raj. My father met Verma and pleaded with him that Suwana should be considered as the location for the Panchayat Samiti of Bhilwara. It was an ideal choice, he felt. Verma once again obliged Father and asked Sukhadia to consider the matter. Alongside, Father also spoke to Chief Secretary Mehta, who was in charge of Panchayati Raj institutions and with whom he had a good working relationship. The state government eventually granted my father’s request, and Suwana is now the headquarters of the Bhilwara Panchayat Samiti.
The next facility for the village was the supply of piped water. Father successfully got Suwana included among the villages where piped water supply would be installed in the 1973 annual plan. Accordingly, Suwana got piped water supply in 1974. The same year, with the help of Dada Bhai, who happened to be the MLA from Bhilwara, Father could get Suwana an allopathic dispensary and a veterinary outpost.
My father now felt that the village needed a high school. Once again, he made a push for it at the relevant places and got a high school established. All the children from Gram Vidyalaya shifted to the Government High School, and the Vidyalaya was closed. The Government High School later became a higher secondary, and finally a senior higher secondary school.
Before my father retired from the state government on 30 June 1976, he saw to it that Suwana had all the basic amenities that the government could provide.
Retirement from the government, of course, did not mean retirement from professional life. An eternal optimist, Father decided to launch a whole new career as an author in the years that followed. Given the life expectancy at the time, he must have scarcely realized that this career would turn out to be just as long as the one he had in the government of Rajasthan.
During his stints with Lokvani and Mewar Praja Mandal Patrika, Father had discovered his talent and passion for writing. Therefore, at the personal level, he found this second career yet more fulfilling than his first. I used to return home for extended visits during the summers almost every other year for nearly two decades after his retirement. On those visits, he and I would sit on the lawn in the front yard of the house under the shade of tall trees and discuss for hours his writing projects of the previous two years and those on the horizon. His passion and excitement for what he was doing never diminished. Memories of those precious moments spent with him shall forever remain etched in my memory.
7
New Horizons: An Author and a Historian
ASSISTED BY THE THRIFTINESS of my mother that matched his own, Father had been able to plan his finances well. Until he retired, the family was dependent exclusively on his salary, which was not very much in those days. High salaries, which today attract even qualified engineers and PhD holders towards Class IV government jobs, came many years after his retirement. I would dare speculate that his pension at the time of his passing away in 2006 exceeded, in real terms, the last salary he drew in active service by a significant margin. It is testimony to the sound management of finances by him and Mother that at the time of retirement he had no liabilities whatsoever left to discharge. Instead, they had enough assets to carry them for the remainder of their lives, with all their children able to support themselves.
Father deposited the gratuity, provident fund and insurance money received upon retirement in a bank account. The pension and interest income from these funds were more than enough for his and Mother’s simple living. Indeed, they could have chosen to treat themselves to a few luxuries since Father now had another source of income from a job with a business house that he had accepted a week before he retired. But the only luxury he allowed himself was a post-retirement job that would use up no more than a day’s time per week, leaving him free to pursue other interests.
Back in 1946, Karpoor Chandra Kulish, editor of Rajasthan Patrika, had worked with my father as a proofreader at Lokvani. Later, in 1956, he had launched the Patrika, which in due course displaced its competitor Rashtradoot as the top daily in the state. Though Dainik Bhaskar, launched in Rajasthan in the mid 1990s, challenged its supremacy, Patrika remained popular, not just in Rajasthan but also in much of the Hindi heartland of India. In July 2017, it had the formidable circulation of 3.5 million and it had editions in multiple cities in seven states as well as in Delhi. Upon learning that my father had just retired, Kulish approached him and extended him an invitation to write for Patrika. For my father, the invitation could not have come at a more opportune time.
During his last four years with the government, Father had worked in the Department of Finance and had acquired intimate knowledge of the state’s economy and finances. He was disappointed, however, that hardly anyone wrote on this subject in the media. Therefore, his first thought was to contribute articles on economy and finance. But upon reflection, he came to the conclusion that the readership for these subjects would be small, even in a city like Jaipur, and it would be difficult to keep it engaged beyond eight to ten articles per year. He wanted a subject that would have wider appeal and could keep readers engaged on a regular basis for at least a few years. Keeping these considerations and his own expertise in view, he eventually settled on the history of Rajasthan as the subject of his articles. Having observed and experienced it first-hand, he felt that he was uniquely positioned to provide a perspective on princely rule in Mewar, the formation of the United State of Rajasthan, and then greater Rajasthan.
In the following two years, Father wrote more than a hundred articles on the history of Rajasthan. He became a ‘hit’ with the readers, who flooded the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section in the Patrika with comments on his articles. Occasionally, he also wrote articles on the state’s economy and finances. Contrary to his original expectation, these too proved popular. In particular, they got the attention of the political class. Soon, the finance minister and the leader of the Opposition began visiting him around the time of the state budget. On one occasion, they both wanted to come the same day. To avoid the embarrassment of having them run into each other at his home, Father had to schedule one meeting in the morning and the other in the evening!
For a serious writer, writing is a means to learning. I began writing on Indian economic policy on a regular basis in the media in 1999. Because of my scholarly work in the field, I had a deep understanding of economics. Even so, I rarely write an op-ed without thorough research of the facts and what other informed authors have written earlier on the subject of my piece. The process results in much learning and greater clarity of thought on the subject. The stock of knowledge so created feeds into future scholarly writings that take the form of longer articles and books.
I suspect that as my father wrote articles in the Patrika on the history of Rajasthan, he underwent a similar process of learning. To verify facts, he had to read books on the subject and consult other reliable sources. As this process progressed, his stock of knowledge grew. By 1980, he had reached a stage where he felt confident that he could now try his hands at a book on the history of Rajasthan. He derived courage and inspiration from the fact that many distinguished historians of Rajasthan, including Muhnot Nainsi, James Tod, Kaviraj Shyamaldas and Gaurishankar Hirachand Ojha, had come from the ranks of administrators. He felt that the existing books were often bulky, revolved around the ruling houses, neglected the socioeconomic and cultural aspects of people’s lives and lacked the contemporary context. Therefore, he felt he could make a real contribution by providing a compact history of Rajasthan that was more inclusive and extended to recent events leading to the transition from princely rule to the modern-day state of Rajasthan.
That ambition eventually translated into not one but four books on the history of Rajasthan, two in Hindi and two in English. The first of these books was Rajasthan ka Itihas (A History of Rajasthan), which was a compact 350-page account of the state’s history from ancient times till 1956. It was published in 1982. The book was formally released by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on 2 March 1983. The release function at the Prime Minister’s Office, then located at 1, Akbar Road in New Delhi, was a low-key affair, but the mere fact of Gandhi’s involvement in it was enough to attract the attention of the media on a wide scale. The following summer, Amita and I came to Jaipur to offer our newborn son Hirsh’s hair, still uncut, to Balaji of Sindri. When Father and I got to sit together on the lawn in the front yard of the house to chat, he told me the story of the visit to the Prime Minister’s Office and the release of his book with great excitement. Referring to the publicity that book got in the press the following day, he said, ‘Thanks to it, I became a “historian” overnight.’
At a personal level, the release event was a source of immense pride and pleasure for my father. Indira Gandhi was the leader he had admired the most. Even her imposition of Emergency in 1975 had not diminished his admiration for her. He had dedicated his very first book to her in these glowing terms, ‘Respectfully dedicated to India’s Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi who added a golden chapter to the nation’s history by inflicting bitter defeat on the enemy on his own soil in the Bangladesh War.’
Distinguished historian Satish Chandra, the finance and education ministers of Rajasthan and my brother Ashok were present at the release function. I regretted that being in the United States at the time, I missed the opportunity. But I got my consolation prize in the form of a copy of the book, from which I did the above translation of the dedication. Affixed on the top right-hand corner of the dedication page of this copy is the familiar autograph of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in Hindi, with the release date noted right below it in her handwriting. By a strange coincidence, the copy of the book I picked from my father’s collection after he passed away turned out to be the one Mrs Gandhi had autographed for him.
When Mrs Gandhi released my father’s first book, she had asked him whether he had covered the history of the freedom movement in Rajasthan. Though he was able to answer her question in the affirmative, he felt that the solitary chapter in the book on the subject had not done justice to it. The topic required a full-scale book-length treatment. Upon inquiring, he found out that following Independence, the state government had tried to get an authentic book written on the subject. It had even commissioned, successively, three leading historians from the state to do it, placing substantial financial resources at their disposal. But none had been able to deliver. Father decided to undertake the task on his own without approaching the state government.
The project proved a real challenge since there was no major work on the subject on which he could draw. The states department had created Rajasthan by merging as many as twenty-two independent states in 1948–49. It was a Herculean task to collect material on all of them. To Father’s good fortune, however, he got two bags full of old newspapers published from Ajmer and Jodhpur from Jodhpur Praja Mandal leader Chaganraj Chopasani Wala. Those newspapers proved a goldmine of information. Having also had direct association with the freedom movement, he knew a number of freedom fighters personally. He collected a good bit of information from them too. He also went to personally meet several others whom he could identify as having been a part of the freedom movement. But he found that barring two or three out of this group, everyone wanted to talk at length about himself without providing concrete documentation of his contribution.
It took Father a good two and a half years to piece together all the material into a coherent narrative. He titled the resulting book Rajasthan mein Swatantrata Sangram (The Freedom Movement in Rajasthan). National Publishing House in New Delhi, which had published Rajasthan ka Itihas, was going to publish the book, but before it could proceed Rajasthan Chief Minister Hari Dev Joshi came to know of the manuscript. He immediately called Father and told him to withdraw it from the publisher. He wanted the State Hindi Granth Academy to publish it. With some difficulty, Father was able to rescue the manuscript from his publisher and give it to the academy.
The academy published the book, and Joshi gifted the first copy of it to Rajiv Gandhi, then prime minister of India, on 2 October 1985. Gandhi had come to Jaipur that day to inaugurate the centenary celebrations of the founding of the Indian National Congress. For my father, this was the next best thing to gifting the first copy to Indira Gandhi, who had been the inspiration behind the book but had fallen to her assassins’ bullets a year earlier.
Predictably, the book was a huge success. Being the only book on the important subject, and carefully written after serious research on primary sources of information, it quickly became the bible in its field. Long back, the state government had announced a cash prize for the best book on the freedom struggle in the state. The book easily won that prize, with the state government honouring Father at a function attended by the chief minister and other distinguished leaders. The second edition of the book came out in 1988, and the third in 1998. The academy also published a paperback version of the book in 1998. The book continues to generate a small amount in royalty every year. I received the latest instalment of my share in it while writing this biography.
Father’s next book was in English, titled State Politics in India, and was published in 1988. It was an account of political developments in the state of Rajasthan, beginning with its formation in 1948–49. It also dealt with Centre-state relations and offered a discussion of electoral reforms. Once again, this was among the early book-length accounts of political developments in Rajasthan since Independence and, at the time, the only up-to-date history of Rajasthan state politics. Unsurprisingly, it quickly acquired a wide readership. Many master’s programmes in political science still recommend the book for their courses. Along with Rajasthan Ka Itihas, it is widely used by aspirants of various state services, including the Rajasthan Administrative Services.
During the 1990s, Father wrote four other books: on the socio-cultural and economic history of Rajasthan; on the polity and economy in Rajasthan; on the history of Kashmir; and on the Indian economy. Among these books, the one on Kashmir, titled Kashmir: Paradise in Turmoil, published in 1994, was most successful. Its first edition got sold out at a book fair in Delhi soon after publication. He later published a revised second edition of the book. In 1996, he also brought out a thoroughly revised second edition of his first book, Rajasthan ka Itihas.
Father completed his autobiography titled My Little World in 1999. In its preface, he makes the interesting observation that after authoring seven other books on history and economics in both Hindi and English, he had discovered that writing one’s autobiography was the most difficult task. It took him three years to pen the book. And yet he must have not been fully satisfied with it, since he chose not to publish it. Instead, he got his sister’s son, who ran a printing press in Bhilwara, to print about a hundred copies of it for circulation within the family. It is thanks to this gem that I have now been able to write the present biography.
After the autobiography, Father wrote one last book but it remained unpublished while he lived. The book comprehensively covered all chief ministers of Rajasthan and was completed in early 2001. It is likely that Father was not fully satisfied with the manuscript. Ravi recently got it published by a local publisher posthumously.
While writing these books, Father also continued to write articles for both local and, at a lesser frequency, national newspapers, such as the Hindustan Times, Times of India and Economic Times. His articles on the state’s economy and budgets attracted the attention of the local elite and the electronic media. The result was that he became a permanent fixture on the local lecture circuit, which included Rotary and Lions Clubs, Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), Rajasthan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and University of Rajasthan. He became associated with the Rajasthan Economic Association and served for several years on FICCI’s taxation committee. Around budget time, he offered his commentary on local radio and television.
