Dileep Padgaonkar (1944-2016) presents a complex figure as an individual and as editor of a major national newspaper in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There is both a connection as well as a disconnect between the two. Padgaonkar followed Girilal Jain as editor of The Times of India, and Jain in turn succeeded Sham Lal.
It is an interesting sequence of editors. Lal was the unapologetic ivory-tower intellectual, who concerned himself with intellectual currents and used it with great acuity to discuss politics and society. Jain was the essential and inveterate political commentator who had a brilliant understanding of the interplay of political forces. Padgaonkar was nearer to Sham Lal in his interest in ideas but he would not allow himself to be lost in the Olympian clouds of ideas like Lal. He was very much a man of the world, but he was not totally absorbed in politics the way Jain was.
Padgaonkar would discuss ideas but in a very general way. He would not rigorously follow them to their logical and esoteric end. He was at home in the world of ideas without being a part of it. Though he understood politics as well as anyone else in the game, he kept himself aloof from it. There was a certain intellectual disdain for the hurly-burly and the rough and tumble of the world of politics. This can be traced to his refined intellectual make-up, which can be described as aesthetic.

His aesthetic sensibility, or to use the French terms sensibilité or mentalité, had implications for his journalistic interventions in the public sphere. There was moral ambiguity in his stance. He argued for Indian secularism in terms of the idea of the republic as espoused by the French, a civic nationalism. At the same time, he was not hostile to the idea of religion as French secularists and their Indian counterparts were. He appreciated the complexities of higher Hindu religious thought. He read up the 11th century Kashmiri Saivite text, Yoga Vasishta, with much curiosity and appreciated the fact that there was an affirmation of multiplicity of objects and desires. So, he would oppose the coarse Hindutva discourse of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayasevak Sangh (RSS). But he would appreciate the literary felicity of Vinay Damodar Savarkar.

He was able to grasp the inherent contradictions and complexities of situations and individuals. So, he would not resort to crude partisan arguments of the leftists and secularists on the one hand, and the right-wingers on the other. He remained suspect in the eyes of both the sides. He remained an ideological outsider on all sides.

It is perhaps owing to his aesthetic worldview that he was an optimist, and he embraced the ideas of economic reforms and the globalisation it implied without much reservation. This did not mean that he was a strident anti-socialist or anti-communist. He would debate with the Marxists and the Savarkarites in a bemused manner, without ferocity or rancour. And it appeared to many of his critics, among whom were his friends, that Padgaonkar avoided taking a stand and he did not fight for his core beliefs.

But his core belief was aesthetic and it did not allow for gladiatorial battles and the spilling of blood. He had an aesthetic aversion for brawls as such. He loved civilised debate and he wanted issues to rest there. This also meant that he was not in the power game, of gaining domination and he did not play the Delhi theatrics of nudging his way into power circles. But he did move among the famous and the powerful, and as described in Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘If’, he kept his virtue while talking to the crowds and did not lose “the common touch” while walking with the kings.

There is one problematic aspect of Padgaonkar the editor, which I think flows from this aesthetic sense of his. There is criticism among journalists, including some of his colleagues and friends from The Times of India, that he devalued the position of the editor by playing along with the paper’s owner, Samir Jain. And that he was responsible for the death of the editor as readers from the 1950s through the 1980s knew in India.

Padgaonkar remained the voice of The Times of India when he was editor but it became a faint and distant voice. One of the curious developments was the launch of the Times Book Review by Padgaonkar in 1990 that carried his signature as it were. But there was no second issue. Samir Jain did not seem to have taken kindly to the idea of a publication devoted to books. Though he did longish page-length interviews with the likes of VS Naipaul for the newspaper, the intellectual input seemed out of the place in The Times of India of the 1990s. He did not pick up cudgels against Samir Jain, which was what was expected of him. So, in a way he was seen as the man who let down the side.
There is need to debate this issue at greater length and with greater candour in the Indian journalist circles. There are unverified versions of how the dethroning of the editor of The Times of India unfolded. My view would be that he sensed that the old era of the authoritative — not authoritarian — editor was at an end and that in a free market era, the editor cannot shape or mould opinion about what is right and wrong.

But the interesting turn is that Padgaonkar left The Times of India with a band of talented colleagues and set up the Asia Pacific Communication Associates (APCA), which did a news show on Doordarshan 2 channel in the mid-1990s and launched Biblio: A Review of Books. Later in the early 2000s, he helped set up newspapers in Nepal and Mauritius through APCA. But his mind revelled in something else altogether. This could be found in his book Under Her Spell Roberto Rossellini in India (Viking/Penguin; 2008), which traced the life of the Italian director and his Indian muse, Sonali Dasgupta, a married woman who captivated him.

He was a Proustian who took delight in the texture of life, emotional and physical, but without Marcel Proust’s melancholy. He was not an intellectual ascetic, nor a political gladiator. It is good that Padgaonkar was what he was, an aesthetic man.