He pioneered general publishing in South India in the post-Independence period. He published my first book, the first title he did after moving to Madras. More importantly, he was a friend for over 40 years. A whole lot of us connected with books and the publishing business are going to miss him more than could be put into words.
I first met Paddhu, as he was to all of us who knew him or K.S. Padmanabhan to those who didn’t, in the early 1970s in Delhi where he was with Van Nostrand looking after their reprinting of American academic titles under the PL 480 programme and I was in search of printing. When he moved to Madras around 1980 I was one of the first to call on him and out of that meeting came Affiliated East West (South)’s first title, Madras Discovered , a slim pocket-size book that’s kept growing as Madras Rediscovered . Coincidentally, his last title, after Affiliated East West had become East West and then metamorphosed into Tatas-owned Westland, was my A Madras Miscellany . Shortly after that he retired to the wilds of the OMR where he could peacefully do what he loved best, read all the time. Whether it was a pedestrian manuscript from an unknown author or it was the latest he could download on Kindle, he read them all with equal pleasure. Indeed, that’s what his authors loved most about him; whether one wrote a book that might even have failed and another a fabulous bestseller like The Shiva Trilogy , a title he would have read for publication just before retirement, he became a friend of all of them and urged them to keep writing, and that included his wife Chandra who started out diffidently with a cookery column and went on to produce a bestseller with her first book, Dakshin .
Paddhu’s commitment to books led to him publishing the monthly magazine Indian Review of Books , keeping it going for several years even as it drained East West’s resources till it became totally impossible to run. He was clear about what he wanted from the journal: The reviews should be in simple, lucid language that the average reader could understand and learn something about the book — making him want to read it and keep wanting to read more books; Paddhu had little time for highbrow critics, no matter how well-known they were, writing for an intellectual elite, editorial meetings were a round-table natter, but in the gentlest possible manner Paddhu would get the board to come back to selecting the right books and matching them with the right reviewers, not critics. A revival of Indian Review of Books would be the best remembrance of Paddhu.
A remembrance that will continue will be the Madras Book Club he founded about 15 years ago and nurtured till his last days. Here too his aim was to spread the gospel of books to as many average readers as possible — and that he succeeded is attested to by the fact that membership has grown from about a dozen to well over 300 — not to mention guests and gate-crashers he’d welcome with the same enthusiasm as members. Though almost every meeting and speaker was a result of his efforts, he’d never take a front seat, standing somewhere there at the back at almost every meeting with that ever present gentle smile on his face, enjoying the interest shown by audiences. I wonder whether he ever knew how much he was missed when he did not turn up for a meeting; in his last few months, when he turned up less frequently, there were always those asking where is Paddhu or Mr. Padmanabhan. No member of the Club is going to forget him. Or what he did to make it one of the most sought after institutions in the country for the release of a new book — even if it was only with pongal and coffee or tea. There was indeed much else Paddhu contributed to the Madras publishing scene, like the Madras Booksellers’ and Publishers’ Association and the Madras Book Fair. But while all these contributions of his will be remembered by many, many of us will always remember him for his friendship, kindness and gentility. It is customary to end remembrances like this one with the words, ‘May he rest in peace’. In Paddhu’s case the words are superfluous. Paddhu was always at peace even in the hardest of times — with himself, his family and the world. May not only Madras remember him but also Indian Publishing for a significant contribution to the world of words.
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Renowned Madras experiment
It was the other day that someone casually mentioned in passing the Madras Tuberculosis Experiment and wondered whether I knew anything about the trials that had become internationally known. I’m afraid I didn’t, but naturally turned to Dr. A. Raman in New South Wales who is my source for matters concerning Madras medical history and he came up with the name of Wallace Fox. The trials Fox conducted in Madras, I discovered, were path-breaking in tuberculosis history, yet when he died in 2010 there was no obituary of him in any Indian paper that I came across at the time.
Fox, who had while he was young been ‘rested’ in a hospital for two years to help him recover from tuberculosis, was in the first decade after World War II, into research in Britain into a disease then dreaded world-wide. In India, at the time, there were far too many affected by the disease and too few sanatoria. The sanatoria themselves were proving too costly for Government or too expensive for patients if they were privately run. It was during international discussions on this common problem in all developing countries, that the World Health Organisation agreed to study it. With the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) offering to host the study and the British Medical Research Council willing to send out a team of specialists, WHO launched the project. The Madras Government, which had a long history of anti-tuberculosis work, agreed to have the study conducted in the State. And in 1956 it welcomed the team led by Wallace Fox.
Over the next five years, supervising strictly controlled trials and carefully monitoring statistics, Fox and his team came up with an answer that changed the way tuberculosis was to be treated worldwide, but particularly in the developing countries. Fox found the tuberculosis patients treated with a strictly supervised medication regime (which included a cocktail of drugs), even in the overcrowded homes of the poor where diets were not nutritious, did as well as patients in well-run sanatoria that provided good food and comfortable facilities for rest. The research team also found that in the case of home treatment, the disease was not communicated to any one in the house.
The report of Fox’s team was not only to make world headlines — which again I don’t remember — but it also saw the number of sanatoria decreasing and the cost to Government and patients coming down. Interacting with Fox during the five-year trials in Madras were many well-known Madras medical names, like P.V. Benjamin, described as ‘The Father of the Anti-Tuberculosis Movement’ and who was the ICMR’s advisor with the project, K.S. Sanjivi, K.V. Thiruvengadam and P.R. J. Gangadharam, a medical microbiologist whose Ph.D. was on the use of chemotherapy in the treatment of tuberculosis.
The success of the project reflected something rare in India, teamwork. A writer commenting on the project some years later stated that the teaming of WHO, BMRC, ICMR and the State Government authorities was something remarkable and worthy of a management case study. Out of this teamwork there was born an Indian institution whose work is recognised worldwide, the Tuberculosis Research Centre on Spur Tank Road in Chetput, now known as the National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis. Its neighbour is the State’s Tuberculosis Research Centre.
Both are memorials to Dr. Wallace Fox, who, after he left Madras, contributed much more to ways and means of tackling tuberculosis. While in Madras, he married Gaye Akker, an artist. He himself had a wide world of interests beyond medicine: art, music, history, geology etc. But though he might have relaxed with them, at work he expected his team to be as driven as he was, as well as being perfectionists.
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Pioneering science writing in Tamil
My reference to P.N. (PéNaa) Appuswami Iyer as a science writer (Miscellany, July 15) has a couple of readers wanting to know more about him.
A prolific writer on science and other cerebral subjects in both Tamil and English, Appuswami came to the attention of the public in 1917 when, as a 26-year-old, he translated Einstein’s Theory of Relativity into Tamil, attempting to make it understandable to the average Tamil reader. A Chemistry and Law graduate, Appuswami thereafter began to concentrate on what was best done with what he in time began to be called, ‘PéNaa’. Starting with science textbooks for high schools and colleges, between 1925 and 1935 he moved on to writing popular books on science for children and the lay reader in Tamil and English. Among his titles, most of them brought out by Higginbotham’s during its publishing heydays were books explaining electricity, the radio, the atom, and X-rays and what could be achieved with these marvels of science.
He was clear in his mind about what he wanted to achieve by focussing on such writing. He once said, “I want to impart the message of Science and Scientific spirit to the people of Tamil Nadu in their own mother tongue. This is my life’s passion and mission. In order to pursue and achieve this objective, I want to impart lessons in elementary science following the traditional pedagogic method of serving bitter pills of scientific knowledge suitably dressed as sugar-coated pills.” Recognition of his efforts came in the form of awards from the University of Madras, the Central Government and UNESCO, recognising not only academic excellence but effective mass communication.
In the last two decades of his life, Appuswami undertook two major translation projects. One was under the American PL-480 programme when Higginbotham’s published a series of titles on serious subjects translated into Tamil. Appuswami’s translations included books on the nuclear future, the literature of the United States and a biography of Lyndon Johnson. For the Sangam translations into English when he was in his early 90s, Appuswami kept in touch with V. Sundaram, I.A.S., who at the time was Chairman, Tuticorin Port Trust. He told Sundaram that “Sangam literature … (was) the one serious and enduring achievement of the Tamil race…” and sought “careful scrutiny and helpful criticism.”
His original work and translations on a variety of subjects drew to him experts in several fields and these interactions led to lifelong friendships. His role in Kalaimagal (Miscellany, July 15) drew many others to him. The result was a weekly gathering of a host of intellectuals, every Saturday at 4 p.m., in his house in Mylapore. These gatherings, from nearly a quarter century before Independence, were occasions for scholarly discussions on a plethora of subjects by those who came to be called ‘The Bloomsbury Group of Mylapore’.
But that was not the only discussion group Appuswami founded. He founded two informal ‘clubs’, ‘Vignana Peravai’ and ‘Vignana Medai’ that organised popular lectures on science and welcomed public participation. Indeed, spreading knowledge among the Tamil people was the focus of PéNaa Appuswami’s life. No wonder V. Sundaram calls him ‘The Apostle of Scientific Writing in Tamil’.
Published - July 28, 2013 04:57 pm IST
