If journalism, as has been said, is literature in a hurry, then Sham Lal was amongst the most accomplished practitioners of literature anywhere. He was without doubt one of the greatest scholar-editors and literacy critics the media world has ever produced—and not just in India.

Yet, it is not easy to describe or define Sham Lal. He was of course “the editor’s editor”, someone who set exemplary standards of quality in analytical writing and of reliability and solidity in newspaper publishing. Few editors matched his professional integrity.

Sham Lal will be remembered as one of the greatest wordsmiths the media has ever produced. If he lived his life through words, then words too came alive through the prodigious lucidity of his writing.

But Sham Lal was more than a journalist, more than a critic with a razor-sharp mind. He was an integral part of Independent India’s intellectual life for over six decades. Sham Lal had an intimate, organic relationship with thinkers, novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, theatre-people, cineastes, sculptors, art historians, archaeologists, and scholars from diverse disciplines such as history, sociology, economics and political science. He also interacted closely with people from different walks of life, including diplomats, civil servants and political leaders with a serious, scholarly bent of mind.

Not a single idea which has inspired individual creativity, social movements or political processes in contemporary India ever escaped Sham Lal’s scrutiny and analysis. But he didn’t engage with “Indian ideas” alone. His universe encompassed the entire world.

He was as much at home with Sartre, TS Eliot, Gunter Grass or Milan Kundera as with Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida or Eric Hobsbawm. He could write with equal facility on Carlos Fuentes and Jean Genet as on Satyajit Ray, Nirmal Verma or Agyeya.

Sham Lal’s intellectual sweep and range of interests was staggering. No idea was alien to him. Equally breath-taking was his grasp of the connections between thought, ideas and action—between the concerns of poets and philosophers, and the aspirations of ordinary people; between the national characteristics of cultures, and global processes of social change; between forces unleashed by modernisation, and the great agenda of human emancipation.

Sham Lal embodied the very best values of the Enlightenment: respect for reason and critical inquiry, a passionate commitment to freedom, equality and collective solidarity, and total contempt for hierarchy and authoritarianism.

Few people know that Sham Lal dropped his caste-connoting surname. This wasn’t mere symbolism. He believed in social reform and eradicating casteism. He was among the first Indian editors to recognise the immense power and value of Dalit literature—which savarna writers would dismiss with patrician arrogance.

Sham Lal’s ideological persuasion is best described as falling somewhere between the Nehruvian socialism and an enlightened, refined, sophisticated Marxism which is firmly anti-authoritarian and intolerant of the suppression of individual freedom.

Indeed, his personal life and friendships were never detached from Communist leaders or Left-leaning cultural movements like the Indian People’s Theatre Association. But Sham Lal was no hack: he never followed the orthodox party line or surrendered his intellectual independence and right to criticise the Left. When the horrors of Stalinism and Maoism were revealed, Sham Lal didn’t lose faith in the socialist project—unlike many for whom “the God had failed”.

To his last day, Sham Lal remained a passionate critic of capitalism and the bourgeois mode of social organisation, with its enormous inequalities, its excessive individualism—coupled with alienation, hopelessness and anomie—, its gross wastefulness, its depredations upon nature, and its propensity for periodic crises and large-scale destruction of resources.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Sham Lal didn’t jump on the bandwagon of those who declared that there’s no alternative to “free-market” policies or World Bank-International Monetary Fund-driven “Washington Consensus”. In one of his sharper essays, Sham Lal exposed Fukyama’s “end of history” thesis for what it is : “a sales gimmick”, not serious analysis.

Sham Lal enjoyed nothing better than exposing sophistry, questioning certainties, debunking bombastic assertions and pompous predictions, demystifying complex and high-sounding ideas, attacking philistinism, and demolishing the pretensions and complacencies of the powerful. He was an iconoclast and a sceptic with great courage.

Yet, Sham Lal was a shy, modest, publicly-averse person. He was always graciously affectionate towards his younger colleagues and friends. He encouraged them to seriously engage with ideas just as he taught them to craft words with care. But he didn’t spare their writing from ruthless criticism.

The standards of analytical journalism that Sham Lal set have collapsed in much of the Indian media. But Sham Lal enriched and ennobled two generations of the intelligentsia. His contribution to educating millions of lay but curious people develop critical, yet humane ways of looking at the world won’t disappear in a hurry. His legacy will remain with us for long years.