Along with Hamid Dalwai, V. K. Sinha, and a few other people younger than himself, I was considered a protégé of A. B. Shah. However, that would be a simplified label for the complex relationship we had since 1964 to 1981 when he died most unexpectedly.

It was a most unlikely relationship. Shah was an academic, a Professor of Mathematics with a profound interest in the history of science and the relationship between science and culture and society. I was a primarily a poet and an artist interested in society and culture; however, my wide span of reading swept across philosophy, the history of ideas, the life sciences, the social sciences, mythology, folklore, and religion.  

Shah believed that rationalism and the scientific temper would bring about a renaissance in India; or else, Indian civilization would stagnate, disintegrate, or be pulled back by the deadweight of obscurantist beliefs and unenlightened traditions of the many communities that comprise our plural society.

Shah considered religion and dogma to be the main obstacle in the path of human progress unless it was modified in the light of scientific discoveries and rational investigation. He thought that one of the reigning non-theistic dogmas of the 20th Century, communism, was equally a political hindrance in the way of an open society. Karl Popper was one of the authors he often quoted in this context.

I believed that creative writing and art became modern by first understanding the culture in which they were created and then by criticising it, as it were, through alternative visions of human experience.
Comparative literature and the history of the arts engaged my attention. I was learning, through practice, to paint and to make films, and I was an avid listener of Indian and Western classical music, jazz, and folk music from everywhere. For me, artistic experience and its expression were among the most sublime civilized human achievements, comparable to self-discovery through knowledge and ethical self-regulation.

There was, of course, a common ground. Neither of us was happy with our given contemporary India. Yet we recognized it as our home and in doing our share in its house cleaning and housekeeping in our chosen vocations.

We had little tolerance of mediocrity in any field of human endeavour and we celebrated excellence wherever it stood above the prevailing pigmy paradigms.

Shah was a polemicist par excellence. He saw through the logical lacunae or the lack of evidence in his opponent’s views with X-ray vision. He could be mercilessly witty in his acerbic way; but was mercifully brief in rubbing salt in a discomfited antagonist’s wounds.

When Shah confronted the Shankaracharya of Puri on the issue of a ban on cow-slaughter on religious grounds, I was his assistant and, at times, his ghost writer. He would give me points to write a first draft which he personally edited, often with his stenographer in attendance.

He was a brilliant copy editor of his own as well as other people’s prose. Shah’s themes and the content of his articles reflected his concerns and his agenda, and not mine. He drew me into his loud thinking through debates instigated by him and I was often treated as a necessary devil’s advocate. It was a good-humoured relationship and also an education for me.

It was Shah who encouraged me to write a regular column for Quest and later New Quest. It was he who made V.K. Sinha and me joint editors of New Quest in 1978, a position I resigned due to other preoccupations a little before his death in 1981. New Quest hadmoved to Pune with Shah and I was in Mumbai, still struggling to make a living in my home city.

Although Shah’s prose style was spare and lean, it was sprightly, lucid, and precise. It did not have the stodginess one associates with most academic writing or the intellectual flippancy one often encounters in journalism. His articles and editorials still read fresh. They have not lost their social, cultural, and intellectual relevance. Shah’s unique method of analysis and his engagingly focussed articulation of his critical ideas still shine through most of his seemingly topical writing.

Shah was eighteen years older than me and just six years younger than my father. This was a significant generation gap. He was more than a decade older than Hamid Dalwai and V. K. Sinha. For Shah all three of us were ‘the younger generation’--whatever that implied--and in his favourite way of saying it, we ‘had longer stakes in the future’.  

What future? Whose future?

It was my belief that India was a civilization that rested on a delicately maintained cultural plurality that had proven its resilience by reasserting itself after major political upheavals. Encounters with the religious, technological, scientific, and philosophical Other had slowly but surely brought out the best in Indian civilization. It was the world’s original melting pot---much more so than modern America or Europe, the more ancient China, or the politically ambitious medieval West Asia. I was not exactly pessimistic about the future of India.

My idea of contemporariness was not science-based or rooted in rationalist ideology or philosophical dogma. The fact that I was born at a certain time, at a certain place, and in a specific society were my given situation. I had to constantly learn and adapt to survive with dignity and self-respect.
I was not a revolutionary. Neither did I see myself as a messiah among my equals. Nor did I believe in reducing human awareness of life to rational principles and tools forged out of them and spreading them among my coevals with missionary zeal. I could not accept the idea of the human being as an observing intelligence that could place itself outside the phenomena he/she was surrounded by.

I read religion as I read poetry and not as history; I saw it as I saw paintings, sculpture, and architecture that have a human touch and not divine; I heard it as I listened to music for its revelation of silences not heard before; its rites and rituals were living theatre like the performing arts for me. I would not give them up for a narrow-minded rationalism and a reductionism that grew out of positivist thinking.

For me, much of human nature, behaviour, and practice of life remained an unexplored mystery the more science advanced or made revolutionary discoveries.

Man had a richer and perhaps a far more direct and intuitive nexus with the universe than his experiments, findings, speculations and the scientist’s periodic shouts of ‘Eureka!’ allowed. I felt that Shah’s faith in science and rationality were rooted in a desire to demystify man himself and a universe that was anthropocentric, to turn it into a narrative without a narrator.

I feared that such a view of human beings led inevitably to behaviourism, positivism, and reductionism. Shah thought that rationality brought order into human affairs and dispelled anarchy; I thought that rationality could result into new forms of tyranny, closed systems, and oppression. We were both concerned about the relationship between orderliness and freedom and how they might affect ethical choices.

The line between me and Shah, at the beginning of our relationship, was drawn thus.
Shah gave me the feeling that what he was doing was far more important than what I was doing. He was at the centre of things of social relevance and I was at the periphery. Artistic creativity was not placed at the centre of his world view and in his scheme of things. He only made a concession to it because as a humanist and a democrat, he theoretically accepted human diversity as not only inevitable but necessary.

However, Shah would rather have rationality dominate and consciously rule human life and behaviour. His view was that artists were chaotic and often irrational. They were swayed by feelings, and rocked by seismic events in the unconscious. The occasional good that they did by producing work that could be shared and cherished by the rest of humanity was not the product of conscious efforts to reach predictable goals by provable methods.

When he met Hamid Dalwai, Shah was more impressed by Dalwai’s atheism, humanism, and commitment to secular democracy than by any notion of his creative literary talent. Of the two, however, Dalwai was more sensitive to facts; Shah was more sensitive to dogma. Dalwai had travelled all over the subcontinent to find out what made the Indian Muslim mindset resistant to secularism and democracy and insensitive to human rights. He had written about his findings in his mother tongue Marathi. Shah thought Hamid’s Marathi writings could be the starting point of a national debate on secularism. There is an impression that A. B. Shah and some others such as M.P. Rege influenced Hamid’s ideas. I believe it was Hamid who converted them to his viewpoint than the other way round. It was Hamid who forced Shah into reading Islamic history and theology and set him thinking about Islam as a political ideology unlike other religions. At that time, except a few Marathi readers, few people in India had even heard the name of Hamid Dalwai. Shah wrote in English, had a high stature in academic and intellectual circles in India, and he was in a position to spotlight the implications of Hamid’s irrefutable empirical findings that would draw fire from apologists of Islam.

Shah could cast Hamid in the role of a Muslim social reformist just as he could cast me in the role of a champion of civil liberties who could write articulately and forcefully in Marathi and English. He could visualize Hamid addressing a national audience rather than just a Marathi audience with his penetrating critique of the Indian Muslim mindset. He made me translate Hamid into English: that is how the book Muslim Politics in India came about.

Fiction and poetry were not important pursuits in Shah’s scheme of things. They could wait or be carried on ---on the side as it were--- if one found some leisure. He would have been happier if I became some sort of a high English journalist, an elite columnist, or an editor, rather than be a creative writer, a poet, a painter, and a filmmaker that I chose to remain.

I would not make the kind of sacrifice Hamid made devoting his life to changing the hardened mind-sets of obscurantist mullahs, populist communal politicians, husbands who treated their wives in the worst possible male chauvinist tyrannical fashion, and women suffering slavery behind a purdah they dared not lift. Hamid’s social sensitivity was finer than mine and his identification with his own community was perhaps deeper

Despite his atheism and rationalism, Hamid was deeply identified with the Muslim Indian and felt compassion for the illiterate and uneducated victims of religious dogma and tyranny. He was, in some ways, a secular jehadi. Indeed, Shah and he comprised a sort of secular humanist clergy when both the Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal and the Indian Secular Society were founded.

I remember telling V.K. Sinha once about a long essay on the mindset of Shah and Hamid that I wished to write under the title Of Luthers and Galileos: How Do Reformers Really Think. I never got to write that essay. Perhaps, its subject proved too daunting to handle.

Hamid Dalwai and I had been close personal friends since 1954, long before he gave up creative writing and started documenting the views of Indian Muslims across the subcontinent as a roving Marathi journalist of Muslim origin.

Hamid was an avowed atheist who separated this-worldly life from religious ideas, beliefs, and practices. He was culturally a liberal humanist.  However, as a creative artist, it was the inseparability of this-worldly life from religious ideas and human tribalism that inspired him to write fiction. The epic scale of the human tragedy and history’s self repetition were his basic perception as a creative writer. Science was not the dominant part of his agenda as it was Shah’s. Hamid’s abiding interest was in culture and society and their critical influence on human behaviour. He had in him the equipment that makes an excellent historiographer and a brilliant political analyst. He was sensitive to facts and he would avidly gather them to find deeper underlying patterns.

In his only novel Indhan (Fuel), Hamid has depicted community life in a small town on the Konkan coast of Maharashtra. This was his native region and the barely disguised small town is Chiplun. Hamid’s home was in Mirjoli on the outskirts of Chiplun.

The period dealt with in the novel is post-Partition India. Indhan builds up through its Hindu, Muslim, and neo-Buddhist Dalit characters and their multi-layered personal and inter-communal relationships that lead to an explosive communal riot. It is a very short novel though its canvas is immense.

Among my contemporary Marathi fiction writers, Bhau Padhye and Hamid Dalwai were the most admired by me and I was proud to count them among my close personal friends. Both of them had a Rashtra Seva Dal background and were once active members of the Lohia faction of the Prajasamajwadi Party that branched out of the pre-independence Congress Party. Both later became Marathi journalists.

Bhau Padhye soon became an independent creative writer supported by his social and political activist wife.

Hamid turned away from creative writing and threw himself fully first into a critical survey of Muslim political opinion across India as a journalist and then became a full-time activist championing social reform among Indian Muslims so that they would become citizens of India in a secular democratic sense and merge with an emerging national mainstream.

It was obvious to me that despite his professed rationalism, Shah’s growing concern was for the future of Indian society and the people of India. He would not have been happier anywhere else. Like Hamid, Shah had a deeper desire to belong to India and actively create a new order in its complex, diverse, plural, and chaotic people.

Shah was a follower of the maverick M. N. Roy. Royist Maharashtrians included Tarkateerth Lakshman Shastri Joshi, V. M. Tarkunde, and G. D. Parikh---each a distinguished intellectual in his own right. Shah was younger than them but he was the only one among Roy’s followers in India to challenge some of his theses.

Roy was more western than most of his Indian followers and his adventurous early life was spent mostly outside India. Roy founded the Communist Party of India but broke his ties with the Comintern and eventually founded his own Radical Democratic Party and developed his own philosophy of Radical Humanism that his followers broadly shared.

His relatively late return to India after his international political odyssey had created a distance between Roy and the ground realities of India in the throes of rapid political transition that no theorizing could bridge; and Roy was essentially a theorist of history and social change.
From the 19th century, modern Maharashtra was changing through praxis based on new ideas and perceptions of value. Shah had been exposed to these from his vantage point in Pune---his adopted home.

He applied a scientific method and tested proposed ideologies rather than attempting to build a grand theory of history in the German philosophical tradition of Hegel and Marx.

Shah’s own philosophical bias favoured the history of the natural sciences as a model for human intellectual development rather than the history of the social sciences that took stock of changing social structures and organization.

Mathematical logic and its application in modern physics, chemistry, and biology were domains nearer to his thinking than political economy, sociology, and anthropology. He looked at the latter from a perspective informed by the former. Verifiability and measurability were his favourite heuristic tools; at times, it seemed the tools were more important than what they investigated. In any case, those tools predetermined the outcome of the investigation.

As a Puneite and a naturalized Maharashtrian, Shah had inherited a certain zeal for education and social reform, and the protestant spirit of dissent that characterizes intellectual leadership in the region that threw up---from the 19th century on----figures such as Jotirao Phule, Lokahitavadi, M. G. Ranade, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Vitthal Ramji Shinde, Bhimrao Ambedkar et al. Sometimes, this legacy roused an almost missionary zeal in Shah, whose agenda was almost always altruistic. There was a social revolutionary streak in him that resulted in a sort of aggressive philanthropy as it did also in the case of Hamid Dalwai. They were a formidable duo, despite being an odd couple.

Shah was born in Gujarat in the minority Digambar Jain community. He came to Pune for his college education and he remained in Maharashtra for the rest of his life. Once he had chosen his habitat and social identity, he became a Pune Maharashtrian. It was in Maharashtra’s traditions of social militancy that he found a convivial cultural space and the kind of intellectual freedom that he looked forward to.

He struck roots in Pune and that is a profound biological metaphor. It involves much more than rational, conscious, and deliberate identification. After two decades in the more cosmopolitan Mumbai, he chose to return to Pune. If this was purely a rational choice of a home, I can think of better options the world over and Shah could think of such choices too and even had them.

Once you choose your society, you cannot be a half-hearted participant in it. Shah was both an Indian and a Maharashtrian by choice, and the last two decades of his life were passionately devoted to social activism that had a characteristically militant Maharashtrian flavour.

He was a dissenter pitted against a populist culture that never questioned its traditions from a rational, scientific point of view. He believed that enlightenment alone could rescue mass victims of obscurantism and lead them to an open society. 

True to the Pune tradition of Agarkar, he first saw his own role as that of an educator. It was only after he met Hamid Dalwai that Shah turned to the other Pune tradition, the tradition of Mahatma Jotirao Phule who emphasized women’s education and equality as the weapon of choice in a fight for equality and justice, bravely targeting Manu’s social laws and the caste hierarchy that gave the Hindu elite its vicious hold over the masses.

The Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (I.C.C.F.) came into being during the Cold War. Among its founders were Minoo Masani and Jayaprakash Narayan, who were members of the socialist group in the Indian National Congress Party during the last phase of India’s struggle for liberation. Masani was an outstanding organizer and parliamentarian. But it was Jayaprakash Narayan who had a charisma and popular recognition as a moral leader.

The I.C.C.F. brought together a diversity of people who were convinced that communist states were the next threat to the ideals of democracy after the defeat of fascism. U. S. State policy funded and backed such anti-Soviet organizations as cold war strategy. This was done through surreptitious conduits, unknown to most of the members of organizations such as the I.C.C.F. Unknown to its members, the Congress for Cultural Freedom that funded the I.C.C.F in India was itself funded covertly by the C.I.A.

Some former Royists being anti-communist to the core were naturally attracted to the I.C.C.F. and Shah was among the most prominent of them.

Both Masani and J. P. had been Marxist in their younger days but were progressively disillusioned by communism and its Soviet avatar as a state. Both were attracted to Mahatma Gandhi but were kept at a distance by Jawaharlal Nehru, their contemporary, and in some ways one who shared their intellectual background. Masani later moved closer to C. Rajagopalachari and founded the liberal Swatantra Party with him.

The precursor of New Quest, Quest was launched in the mid-1950s. In some ways it then resembled Encounter published from London and was financed by the same organization---the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Among its early editors were the poet Nissim Ezekiel, the economist Amlan Datta, and the Bangla litterateur Abu Syed Ayyub.

In the 1960s, Shah moved with his family to Mumbai where he became the first Principal of a new college launched by the South Indian Education Society. Shah had joined the college on his own terms and he was initially allowed a free hand in building a faculty and providing facilities that were a new model. However, old-fashioned and conservative members of the trust that funded the college found Shah’s dynamism unpalatable. Shah resigned and became the full-time paid Executive Secretary of the I.C.C.F.

Shah infused new life into the activities of the I.C.C.F. and added many dimensions to its cultural presence among Indian intellectuals. Shah’s primary policy thrust was towards improving the quality of education in India. He built an India-wide intellectual network bringing together some of the finest academic minds to brainstorm at seminars, symposia, and conferences.
Shah roped me in at a time critical for the I.C.C.F. The nexus between the CIA and the CCF had just been exposed. The British poet Stephen Spender had resigned from his editorship of Encounter ----the finest international intellectual and literary magazine in the English-speaking world at that time. Encounter was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Spender was embarrassed by the scandalous implications of being a recipient of C.I.A. funds.

The communist press in India pounced on this scandal, maligning people like Jayaprakash Narayan as ‘CIA agents’ and ‘stooges of the imperialists’. Some of its former sympathizers and members scurried out of the apparently sinking ship of the I.C.C.F. like scared rats.
I joined the national executive of the I.C.C.F. and immediately earned the sobriquet ‘CIA agent’ among left-leaning writers, journalists and intellectuals. I was not much perturbed to find myself in the midst of all that mud-slinging. I was in no way pro-American and the actual work I was doing was transparently in the public interest in the Indian context. It was ridiculous to suggest that it was part of a global cold war strategy.

Along with V.K. Sinha, I was dubbed as ‘A. B. Shah’s hatchet man’. It seems hilarious in a historic perspective, but it was hardly amusing then. Though I did enjoy pugilistic polemic then as sometimes I do even now, I had kept my distance from ideological ‘commitment’, dogma, and party politics. My rising reputation as a poet and writer was sought to be maligned in certain circles where a creative writer is supposed to be only as good as the ideology he or she professes.
My official association with the I.C.C.F and the I. A. C. F. (of which Shah was the Director of Programmes in India) lasted till 1969 when I voluntarily resigned. However, I wrote a regular column for Quest, was a founder member of the Indian Secular Society, and I contributed regularly to The Secularist as well.

I was associated with Shah in most of his activities. I re-wrote in English Hamid Dalwai’s Muslim Politics in India on the basis of his published Marathi writings, sitting with Hamid and a stenographer in the office of the Indian Association of Cultural Freedom. The book was based on some of Hamid’s earlier Marathi articles but he wanted to revise them in the light of his subsequent encounters with Muslim political leaders and the clergy as well as Muslim journalists and scholars.

Shah was now fully immersed in studying the history of Islam and Hamid and he continued to educate each other, and they launched their movement to reform Indian Muslims through rational persuasion. Hamid started receiving threats to his own person and to his family from fundamentalist fanatics.

From 1970 to 1975, I had started freelancing again, and then changed jobs in succession to land in the Indian Express Group of Newspapers in Mumbai. Jayaprakash Narayan had taken ill but inspired and led a mass protest movement in Bihar and Gujarat against Indira Gandhi’s increasing autocratic rule.
J.P., as all of us knew him launched Everyman’s Weekly and as its possible editors two names were suggested to him. One of the names was Shah’s and the other mine. My name was suggested by two of J.P.’s former colleagues and close friends----Achyut Patwardhan and Minoo Masani.

Ram Nath Goenka, whose newspaper empire I served then in Mumbai, had never heard of A.B.Shah and Dilip Chitre until then. He took us both from Mumbai to Delhi and from there to Patna where J.P. lay ill with kidneys that had begun to fail. Soon, the much younger Hamid Dalwai suffered from kidney failure, too.

On June 26, 1975 Mrs. Gandhi proclaimed a national Emergency in India, suspending civil liberties. On September 1, 1975 I left India to join the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program.
Shah urged me to take this opportunity ‘to enjoy being briefly exiled into prosperity and freedom’ as he put it. We all felt shocked and outraged by Mrs. Gandhi’s proclamation of national Emergency and the simultaneous arrest of leaders of her opposition including the ailing and ageing J.P.
While I was in the U.S. both Hamid and Shah visited me, though separately.

Hamid’s transplanted kidneys had begun to fail, too; and the week he spent with us in Iowa City was the last we spent together. Soon after he returned to India, he was hospitalized again. Shah made regular long-distance calls from India to keep me updated about Hamid’s worsening condition. I recall how his otherwise businesslike voice choked with emotion to tell me of Hamid’s death on May 3, 1977.
I returned to India at the beginning of 1978. Lifting the Emergency and seeking re-election, Mrs. Gandhi had suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of the electorate.

Shah made V.K. Sinha and me editors of New Quest founded by him during the emergency as  Masani insisted on suspending the publication of Quest as a protest against pre-censorship to which all publications were subjected. Shah opted for civil disobedience.

New Quest was now published from Shah’s house in Pune where he had returned from Mumbai. His sudden death in 1981 ended for me a phase of my life begun in the mid-1960s that was full of momentous upheavals. The events shaped my evolving world-view and uniquely contoured my inner life.

Shah’s death also deprived me of one of my older friends whom I valued, and in whose death I realized that a part of me was destroyed, leaving only a rich trail of remembrances and reflections.