The sense of a curious mind delighting in the sights and sounds of the world also comes across in the travel essays of Ruskin Bond for Frontline.
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Dear Reader,
The Frontline team closed 2024 with a special issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of the magazine. To put it together, we trawled the archives, which took us back in time. In an earlier newsletter, I said that I had found a home in the archives. It was indeed so: once I began to go through the old Frontline issues, featuring younger versions of well-known faces in politics and culture, it felt like entering a time warp that I was loath to leave. While I am still in that haze, let me present you with a few more gems from the back issues besides the ones that have already been featured in our superbly conceptualised anniversary edition.
To begin with, I was startled to discover the close association Frontline had with the great R. K. Narayan, who wrote a regular column, Table Talk, alongside the odd article and short stories, most of which came with illustrations by his brother, the amazing R.K. Laxman.
In all this, Narayan speaks with a warm, self-effacing ease, which belies his status as one of the legends of Indian English writing. He might be writing about strolling in Manhattan, Mysore or Malgudi: everywhere, he sounds like a curious traveller sharing his experience with his friends, the readers, rather than as a famous author pontificating from a high perch. In a Table Talk article, he says, “I love to be left alone and not noticed whatever reception my writing might have” (“R.K. Narayan on R.K. Narayan”, November 28, 1986). I wondered what Narayan would have made of the current times, when authors preen, pose, and pout with their books at glitzy launches.
Narayan writes about everything, big and small, making the ordinary extraordinary with his magic touch. For instance, his Table Talk column in the issue from February 22, 1985, is about a cat that sat meditating on the platform of the Madras Music Academy during the annual music festival. “He sat so still that one could mistake him for a decorative piece. Sometimes he sat with his head half turned towards the auditorium, quietly watching the public in their seats, but looking at no one in particular, very much in the style of a VIP chairman. At some point he would tuck in his limbs and tail and shut his eyes in total relaxation, displaying a model behaviour in a music hall,” Narayan writes. The cat’s quiet, thoughtful demeanour is contrasted with that of certain members of the audience, who would not stop chatting even in the middle of a concert.
The sense of a curious mind delighting in the sights and sounds of the world also comes across in the travel essays of Ruskin Bond for Frontline. An article about his trek to Tungnath (“Tungnath—the highest of them all”, February 2, 1988), sparkles with the clear, blue light of the Himalaya as he talks about trekking through fields of buttercups, anemones, and wild strawberries.
Something else that struck me were the advertisements, which revived my childhood in the 1980s and 1990s. I found ads of Onida TV, with the horned, green demon; of Wills Navy Cut cigarette with the “Made for Each Other” catchline; of Digjam and Gwalior suiting; of Apco fabrics, with a younger Sangeeta Bijlani posing coyly in a sari. Since most of these products are passé today, the ads added to the feeling of entering a lost time.
While going through the fascinating array of stories and images, I felt grateful, above all, for the existence of archives, which can take us on ticketless journeys across the universe and through time zones. As if in acknowledgment of this fact, Frontline had a series in the mid-1990s on libraries, archives, and shops specialising in rare and antique books. There are enchanting essays on Mumbai’s New and Second Hand Bookshop, Kolkata’s National Library, Kochi’s Idiom bookshop, and Chennai’s Raja Muthiah Research Library as part of this series.
It is snippets like these from the Frontline archives that are documented in the section, “Library of Legends”, in the anniversary edition. Do read it, and pick up the magazine too. It is a collector’s item, not to be missed!
Here’s wishing you all a very happy, literature enriched new year. May it be filled with the heady smell of old and new books.
I will be back again in a jiffy. Bye till then,
Anusua Mukherjee
Deputy Editor, Frontline
