Pritish Nandy, poet, producer, magazine editor and parliamentarian, died of a cardiac arrest in Mumbai on Wednesday (January 8, 2025). He was 73.
Nandy was one of those unique bridge-builders in Indian arts and letters. If a path seemed to present itself, Nandy forged ahead, decisive and undaunted. In a dizzyingly diverse career, he offered a synthesis between poetry and prose, between print and television, between highbrow artistic endeavour and popular taste.
Among the most fleet-footed of cultural figures, he transitioned from literature to journalism and onwards to politics and film. He had high tastes but enjoyed the high life. He loved both Edward Said and Woody Allen. Most importantly, he had a keen eye – and ear – for tiny tremors in the zeitgeist, the mark of a true newsman. Needless to say, he embodied many lively contradictions: he was both Bhadralok and VJ, a literary firebrand and a fashionista. In the patios of internet journalism, he was a ‘trend-setter’.
TV show days
Those growing up in the 1990s would remember his popular Doordarshan spot, The Pritish Nandy Show, where he interviewed the dramatis personae of that disruptive decade: Bal Thackeray, Harshad Mehta, Vikram Seth, MF Hussain. Nandy’s anchorship from the time is a model of polite perseverance; he seemed to relax Thackeray with his measured nods and smiles, while pursuing his line of enquiry about the Shiv Sena’s expanding street muscle beyond Maharashtra. His styling on the show reflected the fluidity of his technique: With a goatee and shaved head, he usually held a pen in hand, the professorial cadences in his voice offset by his dress sense, which could range from waistcoats and jackets to casual yellow pullovers.
Nandy was born in 1951 in Bhagalpur, Bihar, where his mother was on maternity leave. He grew up in Kolkata at a time of thrilling sociopolitical tumult. The Naxalite movement, epicentred in the city’s learning centres, had destabilised student life, but there was refuge and inspiration in art. “Ravi Shankar was on the world stage, Satyajit Ray was the star of cinema, Badal Sarkar had discovered the street play, Bade Ghulam Ali was composing music for the movies,” Nandy had said of the heady atmosphere the time.
He wrote his first volume of poetry, Of Gods and Olives, at the age of 17. It was published by Purushottama Lal’s Writers’ Workshop, an important haven and incubator for budding Indian poets writing in English. For the next decade, Nandy would busy himself with translations and publish over 40 volumes of poetry, exploring themes of love, urban isolation and desire “Come, let us pretend this is a ritual // This hand in your hair, your tongue seeking mine: this cataclysmic despair,” begins the title poem of The Nowhere Man, published in 1976). One of Nandy’s contemporaries was Kamala Das, whose confessional style and thematic preoccupations he seemed to share. He was conferred the Padmi Shri at the unbelievable age of 27.
Nandy’s transition to the glamourous world of English journalism was spurred by happenstance. A chance encounter on a flight landed him a publishing director’s post in Times of India Group. He also edited The Illustrated Weekly of India, a long-running news magazine, and is credited for reinvigorating its reportage in the 1980s.
Cinema, however, was always on the horizon. Nandi, through his editorship of Filmfare, had forged strong bonds with stalwarts of the Hindi film industry. He was close to Yash Chopra, Amitabh Bachchan, Mahesh Bhatt and, as Anupam Kher tweeted on Wednesday, put the actor on a cover of Filmfare during his struggling days. He also advocated for the parallel cinema movement and would inveigh against censorship in his editorials and columns. When the release of Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996), centred on a lesbian relationship in a conservative Hindu family, drew violent protests, Nandy is said to have defended the film. The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) and its moral prudishness was one of Nandy’s favourite targets, and he decried their role as of a ‘nanny’ to Indian society.
The economic reforms of the 1990s changed mass media in India, and Nandy, ever alert, changed with it. Having touched and transformed print and electronic media — while also launching India’s first cyber cafe in 1996 — Nandy was well-placed to predict Hindi cinema’s boom in the new millennium.
Film-making knack
His banner, Pritish Nandy Communications, initially produced shows for Doordarshan, but ventured into feature filmmaking at the turn of the century. These were diverse projects, but they betrayed Nandy’s knack for urban narratives and challenging societal conventions. There were the quirky comedies (Kuch Khatti Kuch Meethi, Mumbai Matinee, Pyaar Ke Side Effects) but also left-of-field hard-hitters like Chameli and Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi.
In a post on X, director Hansal Mehta recalled how Nandy was inclined to produce his film Omerta, a grim character study of terrorist Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh — not the kind of project that would interest a conventional film studio at the time.
“Let’s make it, he said. When nobody had belief in me or my ideas Mr Pritish Nandy gave me the strength to dare, to dream and to tell stories that mattered to me – no matter what. He did not end up producing Omertà eventually but I owe the film and a lot of my journey beginning from Shahid to him,” Mehta wrote.
Nandy’s film enthusiasm was youthful and all-encompassing; he talked Hitchcock with Kishore Kumar, and could indulge in a comparative analysis of Guy Ritchie’s The Gentleman and Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro.
Politics was another romance. The La Martiniere don who grew up reading Che and Camus was elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1998, representing Maharashtra on a (then-undivided) Shiv Sena ticket. In a humorous column on becoming a parliamentarian, Nandy wrote of how he was barraged with fashion and lifestyle advice.
“The first thing people told me I must do, to be taken seriously, was to change my looks. Stop wearing jeans. Go to Fab India and get yourself some khadi kurta pyjamas or, better still, wear a dhoti.” Elsewhere, he said he wanted to return a “certain credibility” to Indian politics. “If I find I am not capable of doing it, I can reconsider my decision later on.” On the seeming ideological incongruity between him and the Sena, he had said: “You cannot whitewash a party. The Sena will get its image for the performance it deserves. However, if somebody asks me for assistance in the area of media relations, I will provide them.”
Animal lover
In 2020, Nandy, a vegetarian, led an online petition for banning the sale of dog meat in Nagaland. A lifelong animal lover, he was one of the founding members, alongside Maneka Gandhi, of People for Animals, one of India’s largest animal welfare NGOs. In a tribute, PETA India VP Sachin Bangera wrote, “A dedicated supporter of PETA India, Pritish Nandy was instrumental in promoting the adoption of community dogs. He appeared in a campaign urging the public to adopt dogs in need, emphasizing the importance of giving them loving homes.” Nandy himself had eloquently expressed this love: “Every time a dog or a cat passes away it is like a member of the family dying,” he had tweeted. “It takes you years to finally get over it. In fact, I never do. I keep their pictures on the wall. My wall is sadly full.”
Published – January 09, 2025 02:59 pm IST
