Intellectual addabaazi has sustained Seminar and its mentors for 50 years.
As the high priestess of irreverence more likely to draw blood with her scathing comments, Malvika “Mala” Singh in tears was an unusual sight, not her jolly, offensive self but mushy because a few newspapers — this one included — had taken note of the 50 years of Seminar, the thinking Indians’ journal that had been started, in 1959, by her parents Raj and Romesh Thapar and now run by her and husband Tejbir “Jugnu” Singh. The shy and retiring Jugnu belonged to New Delhi’s most pre-eminent family, the clan that had built the new capital when it shifted here from Kolkata, but in spite of that inheritance, Jugnu preferred spending his time poring over intellectual debates on the very table from where his father-in-law had once run New Delhi’s most popular salon for thinkers, writers, political light- and heavy-weights, and which Mala had turned into an adda, complete with raucous laughter and libelous gossip, writes Kishore Singh.
Sometimes referred to, not politely, as a female Suhel Seth, the equally loud-talking advertising professional and media favourite on television talk shows, Mala, dabbing at her eyes, had said, “I feel I can mourn my parents’ loss now.” Her parents had died in 1987, within months of each other, and Mala and Jugnu found themselves taking on the burden of the next issue of Seminar, and the next, and the next...but that wasn’t the only thing that kept them in the news and her on the receiving end of vituperative comments. Delhi can be an unkind place when you’re down and out, and many saw Mala’s failure at BiTV as her comeuppance. “I had two options then,” she says now, as we sit out in the open at Olive in Chanakayapuri on what appears to be a slow day for the iconic restaurant, tearing into freshly baked bread, “I could hide my head in a razai or start over again.”
No prizes for guessing what she chose, but that’s getting ahead of our story. I’ve known the couple for decades, written for Mala when she was a force to reckon with in the Business India empire, seen Jugnu literally hovering in the background to her basking celebrity, but yet been an outsider to their story. I want to know how they met, when they married, why they decided to work together. Alumni of Modern School, which Mala joined when her parents shifted to the capital from Bombay, Jugnu was a year senior to her “and would watch me”, Mala teases him. “We had many interest in common,” Jugnu could be blushing under his beard, “I was a sportsperson and she had some interest in sport, we enjoyed reading, exchanged books, even attended the American Embassy book discussion club.”
But this was the sixties when kids rebelled for the sake of it, and Mala, who had joined Miranda House, was expelled from college in the first year because of low attendance. “She was always a non-conformist,” Jugnu says. “My father wanted me to go to Oxford,” she chimes in, “but when I saw the books for A-level, I realised it wasn’t my cup of tea.” Instead, she signed up for the three-year course at the National School of Drama, even though she did not make a career from it. Jugnu, meanwhile, was studying in the US. “It was either a choice of falling in love with every lead actor,” she guffaws now, “or getting married to Jugnu.”
The marriage, of course, was preceded by a scandal, one that had Delhi talking for years. Mala had asked the cultural doyenne Pupul Jayakar for a job at the Handloom and Handicraft Export Council-run Sona shop at Cambridge, Boston, where Jugnu was a student. Jayakar got her the job but said she could not provide the air tickets, so she pleaded with her parents to let her go. She was 20 years old. “My mother had a mild, angrezi fit,” recalls Mala, but her naani and Padmaja Naidu and other salon regulars ganged up for her, “so my parents dealt with Delhi” while Mala, predictably, lived in with Jugnu instead of the many contacts her father had provided her.
Ordering at Olive is an ordeal, everything is so good, but the conversation distracts us from the menu, so almost unthinkingly we place our orders: a buffalo burger that Mala talks Jugnu into, the way she probably bullies him most times, a spaghetti for herself, while I settle for beer-battered fish, all of which arrive in immensely large portions. It’s over them that the two confess that having coming back to New Delhi, they found they had no choice but to get married, both of them penniless paupers in spite of being born to lives of privilege. Once again, Pupul Jayakar came to Mala’s help with a job at HHEC, designing silver jewellery, while Jugnu got on with an MPhil at JNU, working part-time at his in-laws’ Seminar office, doing photography and, later, making documentary films.
This might have been the pattern of their lives had Mala not met Ashok Advani who wanted to start a fortnightly current affairs magazine, but went on instead to publish the hugely successful Business India instead, in the wake of which the India magazine followed with 28-year-old Mala as editor. Eventually, she would end up as associate editor with Business India magazine because, everyone gossiped, New Delhi’s babus opened their doors to her clout, for which reason she was the star in Advani’s court.
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We’re fiddling with our food. Mala doesn’t shy away from the fiasco that was BiTV, the group’s disastrous foray into television journalism. The company — Mala, most likely — raised $18 million for the venture in road shows, but the trouble was tying up with a Russian satellite “in declining orbit” for the broadcast, but more obviously, mismanagement of funds. “We didn’t need millions to start up,” she says, “and Advani used the rest of the money to invest in other businesses, land, hotels...and lost all that. Then he started borrowing at huge interest rates, and so ran out of money.”
That was the start of their troubles. “People thought I had taken money. All kinds of things were said about me.” Their personal savings and inheritance, amounting to crores, were lost as part of the venture. “In 2000,” Mala says, “we had no liquid assets, I decided to get up and look for work, we had udhar at the vegetable vendor for six months, I wrote articles for Rs 2,000, sold pieces of jewellery, even my mother’s Ramkumar to buy a second-hand car.” Anonymous friends helped out with money. Where was Jugnu is all this? “He was running Seminar and that doesn’t give you money,” she responds tartly. “The world of ideas was very important to me,” Jugnu says over his burger, “Mala was unequivocal that we must keep it going, but for me it was, is, a very exciting world.” “I grew up in a house that was an adda in the truest sense of the word,” Mala laughs, “and it also became Jugnu’s sustenance. Seminar became the platform for this cross-cultural addabaazi.”
“I took on mostly writing assignments — Rs 20,000 here, Rs 25,000 there,” says Mala. “I didn’t mind that I had to drink rum instead of scotch, or drive around in a Fiat instead of a Mercedes. We never felt insecure. I always felt I could go out a do a job,” and certainly the 5,000 words she writes every week would qualify, for some, as slave labour. How does she sustain it? “I talk to people, gossip, chat, and there are ideas,” her eyes twinkle. And though Jugnu handles most of the work, “Mala has a free-wheeling approach” that might lead to an issue, for instance, on the politics of fashion. “I’m amazed at the contributions she can draw,” Jugnu frowns in exasperation, “we do serious work that no one even notices, then she does something that is talked about for months!”
It’s not true that Seminar is not noticed because “contributors realise it is a journal of record”, says Mala, “they see we are not faking it.” “Or that the owners are living off the journal,” adds Jugnu. The magazine gets enough corporate support but not interference, “allowing us to remain ideologically free”, he says. But a decision 10 years ago has done wonders for its readership — on the net: “200,000 readers now”.
Eventually, Seminar will pass on to their son. “I will let go, that much I can say,” we’ve returned most of our excellent lunch uneaten, and Mala and I are sipping espressos, “whether Jugnu will let go, I cannot say, he is a control freak.” Almost four decades of marriage later, Mala says, “Jugnu is a nawab, he has never worked under anyone or with anyone. He has no ambition, but that is what has kept our marriage together, we have no bank balance, neither of us owns property, we live in a flat as tenants and this much I can say, if anyone tries to throw us out, we’ll squat!”
As I settle the cheque, Mala talks of Jugnu’s emerging stinginess. “He tells me I can’t spend Rs 5,000 on books, and cribs about sarees that cost Rs 3,000, he threatens to cut up my credit cards,” she says, morphing into a waspish housewife. As we get up to leave, I ask why she feels this is the appropriate time to mourn her parents’ passing away. “Nearly 25 years have passed but suddenly there’s so much talk about them,” she murmurs in reflection, “when they died I blocked out everything, but now I’m savouring the memories again. We were very close, like friends, so if I’m crying now, it’s out of happiness, it’s because I can say, yes, we did what they would have wanted us to do.”
The driver brings the car around — a Toyota Corolla, I notice — and as they get in, Jugnu is having a tantrum about tears in her saree. Nothing a bit of addabaazi won’t sort out at their Seminar office.