When Kamal Chenoy was ten or eleven, he went with his mother, Shanta, to Connaught Place to help her choose a sari for her second wedding. She was drawn to one but thought it too bright and expensive, and turned to something plainer. “Come on, Mom,” he said. “Take the one you liked. After all, you only get married once.” The wit, the timing, the impudence and the tenderness were already in place. The boy in Connaught Place and the man I knew for fifty years were one and the same.
We met in 1976 and became close four years later, oddly enough, when we competed for the same post at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Most people, myself included, expected Kamal to get it. Instead, it went to me, an unknown outsider who had not even studied at JNU. Rivalries of this kind usually leave a residue: resentment, a sense of injustice, a chill toward the winner. Kamal showed none of it. He warmly congratulated me and made me feel that it was I who truly deserved the post. That was the first thing he taught me: the art of losing with grace and dignity.
From then on, our regard for each other kept growing. Together, Kamal, Anu, Tani and I discovered that friendship, too, is an ethical accomplishment, sustained by generosity, candour, and joys and sorrows held in common.
We were very different personalities. I hate confrontation; he loved it. If someone attacked my friends or family, I imagine myself paralysed into inaction, offering passive defiance at best. Kamal, by contrast, would come out all guns blazing to teach the offender the lesson of his life. I often thought that together we covered the whole range of strategies, from passive resistance to active violence. It was always good to have him around: a shield, a protector, the one-man rescue team for our two families.
Children and dogs warmed to him instantly. They are the surest judges of character because they cannot be talked round or impressed by rank. They sensed in him what the rest of us learnt over time: frankness, an absence of cunning, a heart that kept no accounts.
Kamal was a communist, but he never turned it into a creed. He was a thoroughgoing democrat, a tireless champion of civil liberties, deeply secular and consistently anti-imperialist. He saw no need to fuse these commitments into a sealed doctrine. Each leaned on the others, but none ruled over the rest. He held his beliefs dear, yet never clutched them so tightly that they stopped breathing.
The same openness made him non-sectarian. In a way, he belonged to every strand of the communist movement, and to an imagined party of the entire progressive Left that has never existed. His loyalty was to causes, not cliques; his reflex was solidarity. He never abandoned one commitment to make room for another. Instead, he enlarged, extended and embraced. He was a firm defender of the Palestinian cause, and stood equally with democrats in Russia and those yearning for freedom in China.
And he did all this with style. He wore his politics lightly, free of the solemnity the Left once confused with depth. A formidable debater, he could lampoon the powerful without mercy and, minutes later, be genuinely friendly with the people he had just slaughtered. He managed both because his humour carried no spite and his politics no sanctimony. The student in him survived into his teaching, just as the student leader survived into his years as president of the JNU Teachers’ Association and his party work. He had flair without vanity, dignity without stiffness, nonchalance without immaturity, and compassion without pity. He never placed himself above anyone, not even as first among equals.
I saw that youthful spirit unsettled only once, after a fifty-one-day march across the country with dedicated civil-society activists. He returned quieter and graver, and threw himself even more deeply into social movements.
There was one part of himself that he kept more private. Through Shanta and his grandmother, Hannah, he was a Baghdadi Jew. He carried this inheritance with quiet pride. But it was his mother’s inheritance, and therefore his. That is how he held it: not as doctrine or political claim, but as love, as a bond with her. There was little outward expression of Jewishness in his life; besides, he was an ardent atheist and firmly anti-Zionist. What he inherited politically from them was Gandhi and Nehru, whose photographs with the family lined his walls.
Kamal would not have wanted to leave any conversation heavy-hearted. He would have wanted us to argue a bit and laugh a great deal. We shared a million funny moments; let me recount just one. In the early 1980s, most young professionals could afford only rum. On one occasion, however, we were lucky enough to find half a bottle of Ballantine’s. I had only recently returned from my studies in England, where I had been fortunate enough to watch Rudolph Nureyev dance. Somehow, in our drunken state, Nureyev got mixed up with the famous Hollywood actor Rudolph Valentino. Seeing Nureyev dancing in the whisky bottle, just as Dev Anand saw Nutan dance in a glass of wine in the film *Tere Ghar Ke Samne*, I lusted after more whisky. “More Valentino!” I shouted. Kamal promptly joined in, repeating the call as if it were a major political demand voiced by an earnest trade unionist.
To fetch more whisky, we decided to drive to another friend’s house. As I reversed the car, swaying, reeling and careening from side to side, I uprooted the fence around the garden of the tenant in Kamal’s house. “Well done!” Kamal shouted. “Just deserts for an illegal occupant.” Yet the next moment, we were filled with guilt. Kamal gathered up the martyred fence, asked me to open the boot of my Fiat, and shoved it inside—as if, having murdered a man, we were carrying away his body, Hindi-film style, to be disposed of in the nearest ganda naala!
We have lost a comrade, a teacher, a devoted family man and a friend. The only way to remember him appropriately is to keep alive his politics of solidarity rather than sectarianism, of conviction rather than dogma, and bring some of his flair, humour and generosity into our own lives.
Rajeev Bhargava is a political theorist and the Director of the Institute of Indian Thought, CSDS, Delhi