Pritish Nandy (1951-2025), the everywhere man

Pritish Nandy (1951-2025), the everywhere man

Pritish Nandy, poet, producer, magazine editor and parliamentarian, died of a cardiac arrest in Mumbai on Wednesday (January 8, 2025). He was 73.

Nandy was one of those unique bridge-builders in Indian arts and letters. If a path seemed to present itself, Nandy forged ahead, decisive and undaunted. In a dizzyingly diverse career, he offered a synthesis between poetry and prose, between print and television, between highbrow artistic endeavour and popular taste.

Among the most fleet-footed of cultural figures, he transitioned from literature to journalism and onwards to politics and film. He had high tastes but enjoyed the high life. He loved both Edward Said and Woody Allen. Most importantly, he had a keen eye - and ear - for tiny tremors in the zeitgeist, the mark of a true newsman. Needless to say, he embodied many lively contradictions: he was both Bhadralok and VJ, a literary firebrand and a fashionista. In the patios of internet journalism, he was a ‘trend-setter’.

Those growing up in the 1990s would remember his popular Doordarshan spot, The Pritish Nandy Show, where he interviewed the dramatis personae of that disruptive decade: Bal Thackeray, Harshad Mehta, Vikram Seth, MF Hussain. Nandy’s anchorship from the time is a model of polite perseverance; he seemed to relax Thackeray with his measured nods and smiles, while pursuing his line of enquiry about the Shiv Sena’s expanding street muscle beyond Maharashtra. His styling on the show reflected the fluidity of his technique: With a goatee and shaved head, he usually held a pen in hand, the professorial cadences in his voice offset by his dress sense, which could range from waistcoats and jackets to casual yellow pullovers.

Nandy was born in 1951 in Bhagalpur, Bihar, where his mother was on maternity leave. He grew up in Kolkata at a time of thrilling sociopolitical tumult. The Naxalite movement, epicentred in the city’s learning centres, had destabilised student life, but there was refuge and inspiration in art. “Ravi Shankar was on the world stage, Satyajit Ray was the star of cinema, Badal Sarkar had discovered the street play, Bade Ghulam Ali was composing music for the movies,” Nandy had said of the heady atmosphere the time.

He wrote his first volume of poetry, Of Gods and Olives, at the age of 17. It was published by Purushottama Lal’s Writers’ Workshop, an important haven and incubator for budding Indian poets writing in English. For the next decade, Nandy would busy himself with translations and publish over 40 volumes of poetry, exploring themes of love, urban isolation and desire “Come, let us pretend this is a ritual // This hand in your hair, your tongue seeking mine: this cataclysmic despair,” begins the title poem of The Nowhere Man, published in 1976). One of Nandy’s contemporaries was Kamala Das, whose confessional style and thematic preoccupations he seemed to share. He was conferred the Padmi Shri at the unbelievable age of 27.

Nandy’s transition to the glamourous world of English journalism was spurred by happenstance. A chance encounter on a flight landed him a publishing director’s post in Times of India Group. He also edited The Illustrated Weekly of India, a long-running news magazine, and is credited for reinvigorating its reportage in the 1980s.