Kumbakonam and this column have to have something between them. The Tamil temple town zoomed into my mindscape via a person, bringing London with it. Lakshmi Narasimha Rangarajan is not a name many would recognise in India today. And even within the Indian Foreign Service, of which he was a shining star from 1956 to his death in 2013, many would not know him by that full name. But ‘LN’, as Rangarajan was to friends and colleagues, was a redoubtable figure in the small world of scholar-diplomats. I have used the hyphenated expression advisedly. LN was a scholar who became a diplomat, and while moving from station to high station abroad, representing India in Greece, Sudan, Tunisia, Norway and Iceland, remained a man of books.
My family knew him well. In 1962, when LN was serving in the national capital between postings abroad, he once strode into our home in Delhi, cigarette glowing between his lips to ‘just drop by for a cup of coffee’—something no one does any more. It so happened that everyone but I was out. In order to not, I think, make me feel utterly valueless, he sat me down to talk about the two subjects I was studying in college at the time. “Have you read anything by Toynbee?” he asked. I sheepishly admitted to having not read or even heard of the great writer. “What? And you say you are doing BA Honours in English literature with history as a subsidiary? Shocking!” And with that admonition, he proceeded to recite from memory lines from Toynbee’s A Study of History, “not just because it is history, but for the language…Read the book and remember its priceless lines”. Lesson over, he bade me goodbye.
He was soon transferred out to foreign stations and we lost touch. Life’s arcs move strangely. Some four decades later, I happened to move to Oslo and to the office he had held in that Nordic capital. In my office, one day I got a hand-written letter from LN in an aerogramme, a form of postal stationery that is all but extinct now. He had retired by then, with his amazingly gifted musician wife Joyce, to the town of Rugby in Warwickshire, England but had achieved renown as the creator of a staggeringly insightful translation into English of Kautilya’s Arthashastra.
Giving me unbelievably useful tips on the work involved in being India’s ambassador to Norway, LN asked me in that letter if I had learnt to ski, a classical Norwegian pastime. He said he used to ski from the ambassador’s residence to the embassy. Like in Delhi in 1961, I once again had to say, this time in 2002, that I had not, preferring to be driven safely to work and back by the embassy chauffeur.
The reader may well ask at this point: but where are Kumbakonam and London in all this reminiscing?
Here they come, from a most delightful news item datelined London, August 14: ‘Senior UK executive Gautam Rangarajan has been appointed adviser to Prime Minister Andy Burnham on structure and process’. Gautam, said the report, has worked for BBC as group director for strategy and performance, with music as his forte. And added: he is a son of Ambassador LN Rangarajan and Joyce Rangarajan. Wow, I said to myself, wow! Here we have our own LN’s son advising the British PM, no less. The report also informed us that Gautam’s brother Vijay is chief executive of Britain’s Electoral Commission. Wow again.
Celebrating this news as I was, in came a mail from the nonagenarian Tamil and English writer ‘Indira’ Parthasarathi or E Paa, as he is known to his readers, who had also read the same report. Delighted like me by the news, he said when he was a student at the Government Arts College in Kumbakonam during 1946-49, he read English literature from a teacher called Lakshminarasimha Iyengar. This venerable figure was not only his teacher but a mentor impacting his life. And he was—E Paa added, would I believe it—none other than the grandfather of Gautam Rangarajan and the father of LN Rangarajan. Phew, I said, phew!
Kumbakonam hovers over this column like the aroma of kaapi.
There was still more of the kaapi—like a part of it held back by the dabara—to come. E Paa said Lakshminarasimha Iyengar was so ‘into’ English literature that he directed and staged Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in the college’s central hall, with parents and students attending. Antony and Cleopatra in Kumbakonam in 1948-49—goodness! Who played Antony? Lashminarasimha Iyengar himself. And who was Cleopara? “Don’t laugh,” E Paa wrote, “I was Cleopatra.”
Kumabakonam is no ordinary town. The ‘degree kaapi’ town is a pedigree town, too. It produced Lakshminarasimha Iyengar, a teacher of Shakespeare, LN Rangarajan, Kautilya translator and diplomat, and indirectly, an adviser to the British Prime Minister.
As I close, another temple town, Madurai, demands a minute. Kumbakonam has lent its name forever to kaapi, but kaapi has lent its fame to Madurai as well. Perhaps the best kaapi I have ever had was in that town of Goddess Meenakshi and of the divine Madurai Shanmukhavadivu Subbulakshmi or ‘MS’, as she is hailed. In 2014, I was attending a conference in the city with A R Venkatachalapathy, the foremost authority on Tamil studies today and author of, among many other books of stature, In Those Days There was No Coffee. There I was privileged to go, as advised, at a predawn hour, with another Tamil scholar John Bernard ‘Barney’ Bate from the US– alas, no more—for “the best kaapi that can be had at a small streetside café”. I can never forget its name, for I can never forget its fragrance: Visalam. MS’s husband T Sadasivam had once said to me, “If there is one place where you can get steaming, soft idlis and fresh, hot kaapi even at 4 in the morning, it is Madurai.” I have no doubt, with all his links to Kumbakonam, LN would have concurred.
Read all columns by Gopalkrishna Gandhi
Kaapi, Kaapi, Kaapi / Gopalkrishna Gandhi
Former Governor of West Bengal and Bihar
