‘She was never one to sit on the fence’: Scholar Chandan Gowda remembers his friend Gauri Lankesh

I first met Gauri Lankesh at a party in Vivek Shanbag’s apartment in Bangalore sometime in 1995. The late DR Nagaraj, the Kannada critic and a dear friend to all of us, asked that she and her sister, Kavitha, sing a folk song. They picked one that had become popular, in a tacky orchestra form, through audio tapes. “What is this?” Nagaraj joked. “The Lingayat girls can’t sing an authentic folk song!”

Gauri and I lived in the same neighbourhood in Bangalore. During my fieldwork years (2001-04), when I had returned to Bangalore from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I was doing my PhD, we often met and talked just about every evening. She had taken over as editor of her writer father P Lankesh’s weekly Lankesh Patrike in 2000. Since she had her dinner past midnight, a long day at work didn’t mean an early end to the evening. From local gossip to the goings-on at large, we would go on talking, at her house or mine, by ourselves or with friends. Khoday’s rum with dark cola was her drink (She dropped the cola after it was found to contain pesticide). “How about some haalu moolu (worthless things)?” was her offer to put fried snacks on the table.

Meeting her journalist friends from Delhi was slightly exotic for me. The “national perspective” came so readily to them. And the inside stories of power machinations in the capital, all told with an enviable grasp of facts, were absolute fun.

Gauri was a terrific host. There was an unmistakable warmth and style to the get-togethers at her home. The guests felt at ease in no time. A life-affirming presence, her generosity, courage and moral earnestness could win over anyone. She had a way with children. She always sought to enter their world on their terms.

I never saw clutter in Gauri’s house. The book shelves, the living room furniture, the kitchen – tidiness was everywhere. The front garden meant a lot to her. Two weeks ago, I noticed the bushy plants in it had been cleared. Her mother had got them removed for fear of snakes. The snake threat was always known, but Gauri didn’t seem to mind. She was now planning to grow vegetables in the newly cleared space.

Even as Gauri settled in nicely as editor of a Kannada weekly, a slight longing for the world of English journalism in Delhi remained in her (She worked for The Times of India, Sunday and was bureau chief of ETV at the time of her return to Bangalore in 2000). When she started a weekly column for Bangalore Mirror in mid-2015, her suppressed English journalist persona shone forth. She asked, “Someone said that I write better in English. Is it true?”

In 2002, we drove to the Kannada writer Purnachandra Tejasvi’s estate home in Mudigere. She wanted to patch up a relation that had gone sour with her father. Since Tejasvi steadfastly avoided visitors, spending a day with him and Rajeshwari, his wife, felt special. The conversations ranged from why he felt it was alright for his father, Kuvempu, to write highly Sanskritised Kannada to how India had been bold in granting universal adult franchise. The day went by fast. We later visited a couple of my relatives who lived nearby. Gauri was struck by the large, comfortable houses in ostensibly rural areas: “I didn’t know Vokkaligas live like this!” She was struck, too, that they could have meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Ramachandra Gandhi, who did a brief stint as visiting professor of philosophy at Bangalore University in 2007, had become close to me. Gauri and I met him several times. She asked that I interview him for her weekly. (Carried in The Hindu posthumously in 2007, it was one of the few interviews he had ever done). At her invitation, he agreed to write a weekly column for her paper titled Sanmathi, but did not do it in the end. He returned to Delhi soon after.

The course of Gauri’s career as editor coincided with the mobilisation of the Hindu Right in Karnataka. Taking on that phenomenon came to take priority among her political concerns. In dissenting against anti-democratic forces, she felt she was continuing her father’s legacy of free-spirited, critical journalism, and keeping his fighting spirit alive. Aware that her father had cultivated literary sensibilities in a political weekly, which a journalist like her wouldn’t be able to do, she felt comforted that she, like him, was uncompromising in the frank expression of views and in the embrace of democratic values. It didn’t trouble her that the weekly leaned towards political discussions more than before. “As my father used to say,” she recalled, “the paper has to keep changing, like a snake sloughs off its old skin.”

Gauri could think clearly and quickly on political issues that I felt needed mulling over. But I knew she would get things moving while I took my time. She was never one to sit on the fence.

While Gauri felt puzzled that her father hadn’t been involved in his children’s education (“He wouldn’t know what grade I was in! My mother was the one who took care of us.”), she remembered the ways in which he had cared for them: “I love my Appa.” At times, tears would come while remembering him, but her rational self would quickly take over: “Can you believe they were giving him a Lingayat burial? I said, ‘No way!’ I made them take off the linga they had tied around his waist. He had never been a religious man.”

Calling out the bad deeds of the powerful – right-wing groups, politicians, heads of mathas and businessmen – invited the basest responses. Gauri’s ready support to the struggles of the vulnerable caste and religious communities in the state also came to matter here. Rattled at first, she became inured to the threat letters and phone calls soon enough. Seeking security from the government was easy, but that would have meant being indebted to it, and a compromise in freedom. More than anything else, she was a fearless soul.

In recent years, running her weekly had become a tough financial proposition, especially with its guiding policy of not hosting advertisements or accepting donations. Gauri tried to cross-subsidise the costs through the profits from book sales. Alongside her father’s works, she published several works in translation (Faiz Ahmed Faiz, K Balagopal, Perumal Murugan, among others). She herself wrote a slim biography of Benazir Bhutto and translated Idries Shah’s Tales of the Dervishes and Kappu Mallige (Black Jasmine), an anthology of select short stories of Francoise Sagan, Khushwant Singh, Ismat Chughtai, Guy de Maupaussant, O’Henry and Kate Chopin. During a short stay in the United States, several years before taking over her weekly, she finished translating Tejasvi’s novel Jugari Cross into English (We will need to look for the draft now).

Gauri’s high energy levels kept the weekly going, week after week, for 17 years, without ever being late. She had recently decided to make space in it for government ads once a year, in the Diwali special issue. It must have been a truly difficult decision. Every time I suggested she approach the not-for-profit media foundations for grants, she would say, “Okay. Let’s see.” She loathed the idea, no doubt.

Defamation cases against Gauri’s weekly were legion. She had to spend much time travelling to taluk and district courts across Karnataka. Furthermore, her work didn’t allow her a break for months. During a rare trip to Delhi last year, when she had made time to visit the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the liveliness of the campus left her enthused: “I wish I had studied there.”

The third volume of Gauri’s collected editorials, Kandahaage (As I See It), is dedicated to “Friends of the Lankesh Kin (balaga).” An icon of political idealism and the spirit that held the Lankesh kin – a precious collective of writers, artists, political figures and social activists who shaped the democratic life of contemporary Karnataka – has disappeared.

Chandan Gowda is Professor of Sociology, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.

(As told to Archana Nathan)

Corrections and clarifications: This article has been modified to include edits that were mistakenly omitted from the previous version. The headline has also been changed.