Sham Lal and his legendary column, “Life and Letters”, were intimately, inextricably related to each other. Sham Lal lived his life through letters—the world of words, ideas and concepts, or the realm of the mind. Indeed, life for him was letters.

Sham Lal’s principal endeavour was an unremitting struggle to make sense of our increasingly complex, strife-torn and violent world. He did so by mining, refining, criticising, tempering and synthesising ideas, hypotheses and theories from varying disciplines and from a galaxy of thinkers drawn from the world over. No Indian has written a column which even remotely approaches either the staggering range of issues, or the breathtaking span of scholars, poets, novelists and playwrights whose ideas, views and insights featured in “Life and Letters” week after week. And no one in the past 60 years has dared to expand the remit of analytical journalism as much as Sham Lal did.

Sham Lal was a driven man, driven by an urge to explore, comprehend and critique social reality in all its dimensions. No major analyst of social processes and political trends, no philosopher of politics, ethics or aesthetics, no litterateur with an insight into the innermost recesses of the human mind, and no critic of the inequities and pathologies of the international order, ever evaded his attention.

“Life and Letters” introduced the lay reader to new ideas in every field of human thought, action and endeavour—with a simplicity and lucidity which can only be described as unparalleled in India. Its universe was peopled by Sartre and Camus, George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Mann, Ezra Pound and Joseph Brodsky, Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, Seamus Heaney and Samuel Beckett, Marx and Weber, Theodor Adorno and Jurgen Habermas, Ernest Bloch and Eric Hobsbawm, Carlos Fuentes and Milan Kundera, and Satyajit Ray and Agyeya.

“Life and Letters” would also treat you to a dissection of theorists as diverse as Jean Baudrillard, Leszek Kolakowski, Ernest Gellner, Georgy Lukacs, Benedict Anderson and Jacques Derrida. “Life and Letters’ would celebrate highbrow literature, analyse popular culture, and grapple with new ideas in sociology, economics and history.

Sham Lal delved into every stimulating mind that has engaged with contemporary reality. Amidst the bewildering range of ideas and issues he addressed, some of Sham Lal’s preoccupations stand out for particularly passionate and sustained treatment: the pathologies of modernity and post-modernity, the rise and fall of communism, Third World nationalism and the Western-dominated world order, and the pretentious claims of globalised, consumerist, corporate capitalism to be the solution to humanity’s material problems.

Sham Lal was deeply concerned with understanding the peculiarities of modernity, which contains its own critique, and to analyse how “the project of modernity had turned into an abomination because of the irreparable damage it had done to the very concept of reason by creating a complete breach between its instrumental and normative functions.”

Sham Lal approvingly quotes Octavio Paz while reviewing him: “we are in a terrible situation because the freedom we are living has a double face. It is first the possibility to do things that we can do, but it is not an answer to the most important problems for us. That is, the Western civilisation, the state, the economy. Philosophy does not answer, or answers in a very limited way, the basic questions of mankind. And there appear the ghosts of religion. There is a kind of emptiness inside each of us. And this emptiness can be filled with caricatures such as communism or fascism or with sects, all this flowering of superstitious selves.”

Sham Lal comments: “Paz must have added to his list after 1989 the new philosophies of marketisation and globalisation which are so much in vogue today, making more pertinent than ever before K. Ananda Coomaraswamy’s withering dismissal of a world in which we are called to work ‘not by God or by our own nature but by the salesman.’ Paz too, had nothing but contempt for a social system in which the salesman is king and where the statesman, the writer and the artist are all forced to auction themselves.”

This in large part sums up Sham Lal’s own view of the human condition in today’s world, characterised by alienation, anomie, hopelessness and “the threatened self”.

Sham Lal stood firmly within the Left segment of the political spectrum and had a lifelong engagement with communism—an engagement which was passionate, deeply empathetic and yet critical. He was greatly moved by the egalitarian appeal of the socialist project and impressed by its manifold challenges to the capitalist mode of social organisation. But he could also see the glaring flaws in “actually existing socialism” and the inevitability of the crisis of the command economies which was at its heart.

Yet, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Sham Lal did not lose his political perspective, balance or moral clarity. As he put it: “While the collapse of totalitarian regimes and the command economies they presided over are stark facts, there is something phoney about the triumphalism of political liberalism and the market theology. This is because outside the charmed circle of industrially advanced Western capitalist states, very few countries have been able to achieve high levels of prosperity or build welfare states.

“The irony is that even those at the top of the new global pecking order have failed in their endeavour to get rid of the old cycle of booms and busts or prevent some erosion of their social security systems. Indeed, as large corporations in many rich countries slash jobs every day, the old fear of a long depression has come back to haunt affluent societies once again.”

Some of Sham Lal’s most prescient and profound insights are to be found in his discussion of what he often described as “the malign side of the on-going technological revolution.” He wrote: “It is no new discovery that the desire to secure complete mastery over nature gets translated sooner or later into a wish to subject weaker nations to new forms of control and make them serve the strategic interests of the affluent. Members of the Frankfurt School have been pointing to this danger since the nineteen-thirties and to the doom that awaits a civilisation which sets no limits to its wants and is insensitive not only to the pain of others but to the very survival of the planet by its reckless exploitation of natural resources.”

Sham Lal adds: “The Soviet system crashed because it could not cope with the on-going technological revolution. The new affluent society may come to grief because of its dizzy success in adjusting to it too well and its hubris.”

Sham Lal was among the few social critics of his generation who understood the ecological limits of growth and the unsustainability of the capitalist model of development, with its horrifying class and regional disparities, its enormous wastefulness, its periodic destruction of material wealth of its own creation, and its depredations upon the globe’s limited environmental resources. Even before “global warming” became a term of daily usage, he had an instinctive understanding of climate change and its destructive potential.

Sham Lal was a trenchant critic of conventional nationalism, in particular its deeply divisive, exclusivist and anti-pluralist ethno-religious variety. He had nothing but contempt for Hindutva, which he regarded as an ideology based on rank parochialism, charlatanry and a false construction of Indian nationhood.

Sham Lal was acutely aware of the iniquities of Western hegemonism and its domination-based New World Order (which he summed up in the phrase “Pox Americana”). His own vision of the world, based on the Enlightenment values of liberty, equality and solidarity, and a humane and compassionate order, stood in sharp contrast to the dominant Western paradigm.

Sham Lal was devastating in his critique of market-led growth and consumerist capitalism. After the collapse of socialism, he refused, unlike many others, to jump on the bandwagon of “free-market” ideas. He had disdain for the World Bank-International Monetary Fund-driven “Washington Consensus”. In one of his sharper essays, Sham Lal exposed Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis for what it is : “a sales gimmick”, not serious analysis.

Sham Lal was one of the few writers, editors and commentators who spanned two eras: the last decades of the colonial period in Indian history, and the rise of Independent India as it set out to build a new nation inspired by the values of the Freedom Struggle.

This was—and remains—a historic project: of forging an open, modern, just and equal society, which would overcome hierarchy, ignorance and superstition, and which would empower millions of hitherto marginalised and disempowered people. Sham Lal was as incisive in his analysis of the setbacks and reverses suffered by this project, as in appreciating its general advancement.

Sham Lal formed a unique bridge between the intelligentsia, the academic community, the world of art, and lay people. His contribution to journalism was unmatched not just for infusing a cerebral analysis of India and the world into daily commentaries, but for setting exemplary standards of integrity and a commitment to dependability and reliability in newspaper publishing.

Sham Lal educated and inspired a whole generation of writers and journalists. He taught them the importance of words, of writing simply and yet sharply, with a non-nonsense approach. Sham Lal was a stickler for precision and logic. He did not suffer fools. And he had no patience for pretentious, bombastic, jargon-ridden writing.

Sham Lal was a consummate wordsmith, with a limpid, unobtrusive and elegant style, which seemed almost effortless. But writing for him—always in long hand, with countless corrections, and in a scrawl which only a few experienced typists could decipher—was always a difficult and painful exercise, something to be postponed till the deadline was almost upon him.

After all, the real pleasure for Sham Lal lay in discovering ideas, in creating new concepts, in struggling to understand a complex subject—much less in verbalising it and translating it into black and white. Yet, nothing would please him as much as seeing the final product in print. He retained a chid-like ability to relish the fruits of his labour, but having done so briefly, he would immediately go back to reading books and delving into yet more ideas.

Sham Lal lived with, and for, books. He had what many book-lovers regarded as probably the best personal library in India. He was the ultimate bibliophile.

However, it would be wrong to underestimate his avid interest in film, the performing arts, and in painting and sculpture. He delighted in classical music and considered himself lucky to be living in his Gulmohar Park house, next door to the Siri Fort Auditorium, where he watched many quality films. He was deeply immersed in the world of theatre.

Towards the end of his life, Sham Lal almost totally lost his eyesight. He could no longer read, or see plays and films. That did not prevent him from relating to the world through the radio and through articles read out to him by his grandchildren. He remained alert, attentive, enthusiastic and, above all, engaged with words and ideas.

Sham Lal’s passing marks the eclipse of the last remnant of a whole era. But his memory will continue to inspire many even today. He will remain an invisible participant in India’s intellectual life.