Remembering Tejeshwar Singh

BY sevanti ninan| IN Books | 24/12/2007

In 1975, when television was still a division of All India Radio and and Doordarshan had not come into existence, Tejeshwar Singh was the newsreader who announced the Emergency on Doordarshan.  And temporarily quit reading the news in protest, we are told. In complete contrast to the  anaemic anchors on that  network today, he had a voice and demeanour which made the government line on the day¿s events sound respectable. One does nor know whether it was that early involvement with India¿s state media which shaped his interest in the field of media studies, but that he was a pioneer of publishing in this genre is indisputable. Oxford University Press now publishes media titles too, but the lead came from Sage.

 It has grown into a social science publisher with a distinct line of media-related titles. The first book on India¿s media business, as indeed the definitive work to date on satellite television in the subcontinent, have been published by them. Also from Sage came the first Indian study on the impact of advertising on children, and now on community radio in India. Around ninety titles in the media field is no mean achievement. Over the years many Indian authors were nurtured. I am sure it was a comfort for many media researchers to know that even if their topic was likely to be of interest to a very limited market, there was one publisher who was likely to say yes.

Publishers in India have been a discreet rather than high profile breed, if you count out David Davidar and his much publicized mentoring of Shoba De. But the profile came naturally to the founder of Sage because he was so many things rolled into one. A big, handsome, hearty man who also dabbled in theatre, film acting, and newsreading.  That sort of thing does not normally go with the territory.   An entrepreneur to boot, and a social worker when the occasion demanded it. Together with his father he showed up to play a prominent role in the Indian Express newspaper¿s relief efforts in the aftermath of the 1984 anti Sikh riots. That is where I first met him.

As a publisher he was proactive. I just had to send a mild enquiry to the Sage marketing manager on who to contact about a manuscript, and Tejeshwar was instantly on mail asking what I had to offer. When the manuscript finally took something like a year and a half to materialize his prompting was tireless, and occasionally testy. "I note that you need the rest of the week to complete  Chapter 6.  What does that do to the schedule for Chapters 8 and 9?" And then when yet another deadline arrived, "Any news for me today?" He went to some trouble to get the best known person in the field as the external reader and cheered me up when the gentleman tore my first draft apart.

A whole year later, when the book was finally in his hands he was delighted that his persistence figured in the acknowledgements, and wrote to say as much. But it wasn¿t just deadlines, it was constant back and forth-ing on what he thought the focus should be and how it would play as a piece of contemporary research. He was equally persistent when he wanted you to be an external reader. Politely and patiently so. If you said you could do it two months later, he would be on the phone, exactly two months later.

 David Page and William Crawley who wrote Satellites over South Asia, had only good things to say about their tireless Indian publisher. With them, as with me, he was persistent, patient, involved.  What that produced over the years was a wide range of social science books with titles  ranging across media and communications, business management, development studies, gender, history, sociology, criminology, politics, the works.  Publishers make a far more enduring contribution than journalists. As TCA Srinivasaraghavan put it in his tribute to Tejeshwar, they contribute to the intellectual life of a nation.  

Sage¿s other significant achievement under him was the wide range of journals they made available in India.  When the publishing house turned 25 a couple of years ago he threw an elegant dinner at the ballroom of the Hotel Imperial and talked about its beginnings with his foreign principals present: the  team of George McCune and Sara McCune, who had sat with him on a houseboat in Srinagar in the summer of 1981 and hatched a plot to invade the Indian publishing scene with a new imprint.   

In the following quarter century  SAGE India grew into a company with three imprints – SAGE India, Response Books and Vistaar Publications, a hundred and fifty employees, over 1300 books and 28 journals in print.

Catalytic  leadership then, from a man who also  found time to declaim on stage, read the news on the box, experiment with film acting, and all the while, nudge, push and cajole recalcitrant authors. To have known him is to miss him greatly.