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Unforgettable S.Sadanand

Dr. M. V. Kamath

The Telephone kept ringing. I knew Swaminath Sadanand, my boss at the Free Press group of newspapers, was calling me. But I didn’t want to speak to him. That morning, Sadanand had chewed me out over some trivial matter and although he’d often done it before, this time something in me had snapped. Leaving his room in a daze, I had typed out a resignation letter and fled from the office, vowing never to return.
“Go on, answer it,” my sister-in-law urged me. I picked up the receiver. It was, as I’d guessed Sadanand, though his normally grating voice now was choked and tearful. Why was I so upset? He asked. Wasn’t I like a second son to him? Couldn’t fathers scold their sons? He was sending his son to fetch me.
How could I resist? I returned to the office and was enveloped in a bear hug that unnerved me as much as the morning explosion. But that was Sadanand for you. He raged and loved, he laughed and he cried, with all the abandon and innocence of a child. And like a child, he generally got his way-at least with me and most of the people I knew.
Today, as I recall that 40-year-old incident I can think of many ways to describe Sadanand. He was a champion of a free press. He was a patriot who refused to yield to the British despite the most crushing pressures. He was a visionary who started an Indian news agency when all news in our country was distributed by foreign organizations.
Always Exciting. But it was really his extraordinarily forceful personality, the passion with which he threw himself into everything he did, that made him the most unforgettable character I’ve ever known. It wasn’t easy working on the Free Press, at times it was downright awful, but, by god, it was always exciting!
Sadanand did everything differently. Unlike most Indians, he cared little for age or formal education and was always ready to gamble on young people. When I approached him for a job in 1946, I was 25, a science graduate who’d worked for a few years as a chemist. “This is not a factory”, he told me curtly, then added “You’re hired. Rs 100 a month, three months’ trial.”
The trial began right away. I was given important assignments – the Municipal Corporation, Congress politics, speeches of top national leaders. I worked hard and even managed exclusive interviews with Jawaharlal Nehru and former US President Herbert Hoover. Sadanand didn’t say anything to me, but I sensed that he was pleased: I’d vindicated his belief that if a person was enthusiastic and industrious, he could do well at almost anything.
Under Sadanand, the Free Press became one of Indian journalism’s most important nurseries. Some of the biggest names in the profession today-cartoonist R.K. Laxman, T.J.S. George, former editor of Asiaweek, sports commentator and columnist A.F.S. Talyarkhan-worked for Sadanand. Though most of the staff were, like me, from humble backgrounds, Sadanand, also attracted a number of affluent young men, including Raja Hutheesingh (Nehru’s brother-in-law), Sharokh Sabavala (who became a Tata director) and Homi Taleyarkhan (later governor of Sikkim and our envoy to Libya and Italy).
Restless Spirit. The man who presided over us all was a school dropout. Born in Madras in 1900, Sadanand left home before completing high school because his stepmother ill-treated him. His father published a Tamil Magazine, and Sadanand was always determined to be a journalist.
Little is known of Sadanand’s early struggles. He worked briefly for the Associated Press in Bombay, the Independent of Allahabad and the Rangoon Times. When he returned to Bombay in 1923, he got a job looking after Congress Party publications and helping propagate Khadi.
But Sadanad was restless and yearned for full-time journalism. At the time, Reuters and Associated Press were the only news agencies in the country and, naturally enough, projected the British point of view while reporting on the freedom movement. Sadanand decided to challenge them with a nationalist news agency.
With money from industrialists sympathetic to the Congress, Sadanand launched his Free Press News Agency in 1927. Run on a shoestring, the agency at first had only two staffers –Sadanand and K.Srinivasan, a childhood friend.
The agency picked up a few subscribers, but with the launching of Gandhiji’s salt Satyagraha in March 1930, the British Government imposed severe restrictions on the press. Free Press agency telegrams were censored; its directors were pressurized to resign. Soon, the agency’s subscribers began withdrawing.
His Great Obsession. Sadanand, though, wouldn’t give in. If others wouldn’t carry his agency’s news, why, he’d start his own paper. For a while he was only able to bring out a cyclostyled sheet called Free Press News Bulletin, but he finally managed to buy a cheap secondhand press, and on June 13, 1930, the first issue of The Free Press Journal rolled out.
Throughout the 1930s and 40s, Free Press, with its news and comments on the freedom struggle, was aggressively anti-British. Sadanand bitterly opposed papers which reported objectively on the freedom struggle-the issue, he felt, was too important to permit anyone to sit on the fence. And to project his views in his papers, he even rewrote reports filed by his correspondents. In 1946, the British Cabinet Mission under Lord Pethick-Lawrence arrived in Delhi to negotiate the transfer of power. Sadanand was opposed to the Cabinet Mission and, ignoring the dispatches of his correspondent Sharokh Sabavala, published instead his own bitter denunciations of the delegation’s proposals.
However, once Independence-his great obsession-had been achieved, Sadanand insisted on objective reporting. One day, detecting a bias towards the socialists in my writing, he questioned me closely. I admitted that I had joined a newly formed socialist party. “Kamath,” Sadanand said, “you’ve got to make up your mind. You can either be a politician or a reporter. Not both.” I resigned from the party soon after.
Reading Sadanand’s Free Press during the freedom struggle was an act of patriotism, like wearing khadi or spinning the charkha. The British twice jailed him on sedition charges and also forced him to deposit huge sums of money as security. Over the years Sadanand was fined more than Rs 70,000. That was an enormous sum for the time, but it never cowed him.
Fiery Temper. Just about the only thing predictable about Sadanand was his daily routine. Around ten every morning, a chauffeur-driven Oldsmobile would halt in front of the paper’s office at 21, Dalal Street. Out would step a stocky figure clad in immaculate white jibba and dhoti, black hair slicked down. Sadanand suffered form filariasis and one of his swollen legs was often painful. Normally, he climbed the two floors to his office, but on bad days, three workers carried him up on a chair. Before beginning work, he spent several minutes performing puja to the gods whose pictures covered the walls of his room.
After reading the morning’s Free Press he would start firing instructions. If he was pleased with a report, he’d compliment the reporter personally. But more often, it was an ominous, “Ask him to see me later,” a sure indication of a trouble.
Life at Free Press was not for the faint-hearted. If something was not to his liking, Sadanand would go into a rage and sack people indiscriminately. But once he cooled down, he took them back. News Editor Hariharan was sacked thrice and thrice reinstated, each time with a raise.
His temper apart, Sadanand could be extremely considerate. M.R. Bhandarkar, who became his secretary when he was only 19, was at first slow, and made many mistakes. But Sadanand patiently corrected his grammar and spelling and constantly encouraged him to do better. Within a few years, Bhandarakar had improved so much that he was able to get a job at the Bombay High Court, where he worked successfully for a number of judges including martinets like the late Justice M.C. Chagla.
Sadanand could be gracious even to those who criticized him. B.G. Horniman, editor of the Bombay Sentinel, often lampooned Sadanand, calling him the “Dancing Dervish of Dalal Street. “Yet, when Horniman left the Sentinel and couldn’t get a job, Sadanand published excerpts from his autobiography for a handsome fee.
Main concern. Like trouble, good fortune at Free Press came without warning. One afternoon, I got a hurried summons from the Boss. Wondering what I’d done wrong, I entered his room. “Here, read this,” he said, brusquely thrusting his evening paper into my hands. I looked at it thunderstruck. It was the Free Press Bulletin’s new imprint line with the magic words, EDITOR: M.V.KAMATH. Sadanand had given me no indication that he was promoting me.
The Boss had no hobbies; sports, music and parties bored him. His papers and his family-in that order-were his only interests. In the office, even small matters rarely escaped his attention. When a reporter called Sethuraman regularly began coming to work unshaven and shabby, Sadanand started giving him one rupee everyday for a shave. Sethu, though, used the money to bet on horses. Sadanand found out, then ordered the barber to shave Sethu daily in the office!
Sadanand’s main concern was for his readers. Once I concluded a report with “And peace arrives not with a bang, but with a whimper,” based on a line by the poet T.S.Eliot. Sadanand asked me what the line meant. “It’s from T.S. Eliot,” I replied. “How many of our readers have read Eliot?” he asked, deleting the line. “Remember you are writing for the common man, not literature graduates.” That advice I’ve never forgotten.
The Boss toed no one’s line. His respect for Gandhiji did not prevent him from asking the Mahatma for not reviving the Quit India movement which had fizzed out by 1944. He further antagonized Gandhiji by publishing accounts of the confidential Gandhi-Jinnah partition talks of 1946.
He also stood by his men. Once, Srinivas Mallya, a Congress Bigwig, asked me to project his views in my reports, hinting that he could get Sadanand to sack me if I didn’t oblige. I refused. “You know Mallya, don’t you?” Sadanand asked me one day. I nodded. “Why is he after me to sack you?” Then, before I could reply, he changed the subject.
A Bitter Blow. Sadanand never bent to pressure, whether applied by Englishmen or Indians. In 1947, when the Indian Navy blockaded Junagadh because its Muslim ruler had opted for Pakistan, the Free Press published the name of ships and units taking part in the blockade. Sardar Patel, then home minister, was furious. The Sardar’s anger was to cost Sadanand dearly. At the time, Sadanand had nearly finished setting up an international news agency with bureaus in London and Washington. He’d spent Rs 7 lakh on the venture and all that was needed was the government’s go ahead to start.
But because he had antagonized Sardar Patel, the permission never came and Sadanand had to give up his dream of an Indian-controlled international news agency. It was a bitter blow, but there was worse to come. In 1951, the government passed a law restricting press freedom. Sadanand was one of its leading opponents and persuaded the All India Newspaper Editors’ Conference to adopt a resolution that all papers should carry a protest message above their editorials. Although most papers ignored the resolution, the Free Press faithfully ran the line: “Freedom of Expression is our birthright and we shall not rest until it is fully guaranteed by the Constitution,” until sadanand’s death.
The great years of the Free Press were from 1945 to 1950, Sadanand made it a distinctive paper with an attractive layout and several innovations-daily cartoons, numerous columns, special supplements and a full page devoted to sports. “He was the first Indian editor to realize that sports can sell,” recalls A.F.S. Talyarkhan, then the paper’s sports editor. Circulation and revenue boomed during this period.
Sadanand, unfortunately was a poor financial manager. A great deal of money was squandered on the stillborn international news agency and on a temple complex and a mansion in Madras. By 1951, Sadanand’s debts were mounting. Often there was no money to buy newsprint. Racked by tension, Sadanand’s health deteriorated. He suffered from diabetes, high blood-pressure and fever caused by the filariasis. After a heart attack in 1952, he realized that his end was near. In October 1953, he sold his papers, sadly telling us, “Even Sadanand is not indispensable”
I shall never forget my last encounter with Sadanand. We met half-way up the stairs of The Free Press. I was going to the office, he was coming down. He looked haggard and his eyes avoided mine. I knew he was leaving the office for the last time and started to follow him. “For God’s sake,” he cried, “don’t”. Within a few days he was dead.
The Indian press has made great advances since Sadanand’s time. There are more newspapers and magazines and they look a lot better, thanks to new technology. Moreover, reporting today is, by and large, better than it used to be. But the press is still under pressure. We could do with another Swaminath Sadanand.