On Monday morning, in Delhi, came the news, quietly and yet like thunder: 'Sankarshan Thakur is gone'.
We have lost one of our most empathetic chroniclers. The newsroom, already a fragile space in these times, has fallen into a deeper hush. Sankarshan Thakur was 63. The body gave way; the words will not.
He was born in 1962 in Patna, a city cradled in contradictions. His early years at St. Xavier's in Patna and Delhi, and later at the Hindu College, Delhi University, where he studied Political Science, were less an apprenticeship than an initiation. By the time he graduated in 1983, the map of India—its tumults, its parables of caste and power—was already etched in his imagination.
His father, Janardan Thakur, a journalist of repute, kept words and truth as household companions. The family carried the weight of Mithila's scholarship. Books were not ornaments here; they were breath.
Journalism claimed him early.
He began at the Sunday magazine in 1984, when reporters still walked dusty roads and knocked on doors instead of scrolling timelines. What followed was a restless pilgrimage: Associate Editor at The Indian Express and The Telegraph, Executive Editor of Tehelka, and then a long, defining return to The Telegraph, where he went on to become the Editor.
But then he was never the kind of editor who sat cocooned. He called himself a "roving" one, because the story, not the desk, was his altar.
Cartographer of conflict
Thakur's canvas was vast but never abstract. He wrote of Kashmir's smouldering valleys, of Bihar's gritty political theatre, of the wars at Kargil, of Pakistan across the fault lines of history amd of caste's cruelties in Uttar Pradesh. He reported with empathy but also with unsparing clarity. He did not flinch. He did not look away.
His craft earned him the Prem Bhatia Award in 2001, for excellence in political journalism, and the Appan Menon Fellowship in 2003, which took him back to Kashmir, a land he chronicled with both tenderness and pain. Even as late as October 2024, he was in Yale as a Poynter Fellow in Journalism, reflecting on authoritarianism, populism, and the brittle truths of our democracies.
Books as testimonies
He did not merely report; he wrote books that became landmarks in India’s contemporary political literature.
The Making of Laloo Yadav, The Unmaking of Bihar, later retitled Subaltern Saheb: Bihar and the Making of Laloo Yadav, examined the rise of one of India's most enigmatic leaders.
Single Man: The Life and Times of Nitish Kumar of Bihar traced the evolution of another figure who shaped the state's destiny, while The Brothers Bihari offered an acclaimed dual biography of Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar.
Yet these works were never only about politicians; they were about the soil that produced them, the people who endured them, and the state that bore their weight like an exhausted ox.
Beyond Bihar, Thakur also wrote monographs on the Kargil War, on Pakistan, and on honour killings in Uttar Pradesh—slender volumes that carried within them the density of entire histories.
The painter's hand
What many outside his circle did not know was his love for painting. In quiet hours, away from deadlines, he turned to canvas and brush. His strokes were heavy, deliberate, landscapes, abstractions, fragments of memory. To those who saw them, the connection was unmistakable: the same hand that traced Bihar's fractured destiny in words could also render a dusk sky in strokes of blue and rust. His writing was painting; his painting was writing. Both were acts of witness.
The man himself
To colleagues, he was warm, sardonic, generous with his wisdom but impatient with posturing. To younger journalists, he was mentor, critic, sometimes tormentor, because truth mattered, and to betray it was the one unforgivable sin.
For a long time, his colleague and noted political journalist and writer Rashid Kidwai would say that Sankarshan Thakur was as full of warmth as he was of discipline. He had no patience for pretence or hypocrisy. With young journalists, his expectations were always high. His criticism could sometimes feel sharp, but within it was always the clarity of truth and the unmistakable intent to guide.
He was never just a senior who taught; he was also one who listened. Whether it was the village square or the Parliament building, his attention and concentration never wavered. It often seemed as though he was hearing each person's story for the very first time, taking it in with sensitivity and seriousness, letting it settle deep within him.
Speaking with emotion, Rashid Kidwai recalls: "He was a deeply sensitive human being, someone who understood every story, every person, every event, and entered into it. The sensitivity, truth, and humanity that marked his work will remain alive in our memories and our tributes."
The man I knew
I first met Sankarshan Thakur about twelve years ago.
It was after a small press gathering; we had drifted into a nearby café. By chance, I found myself in the chair beside him. What I remember most vividly from that encounter is not the conversation itself, but the act of listening, his listening.
Even my hesitant, almost naïve questions were received with the same attention he would have given to the most complex inquiry. In his eyes there was both an unyielding vitality and a deep compassion, as though every story he heard was being carefully carried into the quiet chambers of his own being.
I asked him about Bihar, about politics. He answered with an ease that felt almost familial—without performance, without disguise. Sometimes a flash of humor would lighten the air around us, and at other times his gravity would suddenly fall like silence, leaving the table hushed.
We shared a common language 'Maithili' and that, too, braided our exchanges with intimacy. His village, Singhwara in Darbhanga, Bihar, was not just a place on the map; it was a living presence he carried with him everywhere, in the cadence of his speech, in the scents and stories that followed him.
We met often— in Delhi, Patna, Mithila—and in each meeting, I felt the same thing: his sensitivity, his simplicity, the quiet grace of a man who had learned how to live with truth as his only ornament.
A journalist of rare empathy
Now he is gone, and the absence is unbearable.
Bihar has lost its most intimate cartographer. Kashmir has lost a witness who carried its wounds into national consciousness. Indian journalism has lost a voice of patience, of integrity, of fearlessness.
But the loss is not merely professional.
A human being of rare empathy has departed. Someone who could sit in a village courtyard in Begusarai or at a café in Connaught Place and listen, really listen. His presence was itself an editorial against the noise and hubris of our times.
What remains
What remains is the work. The books, which will be read as long as Bihar struggles with its contradictions. The reports, which will remind us that truth was once written with such care. The paintings, those quiet canvases, which his family will now guard like relics of his private self.
And what remains is also an instruction: that journalism must not reduce itself to slogans and speed, that it must return to the soil, to the smell of monsoon fields and the ache of unlit homes. That, as Thakur showed us, the reporter is not a stenographer of power but a chronicler of its consequences.
A farewell
This obituary is not an ending. It is a bridge between his voice and our silence. His words will continue to flicker in the dark, like a lamp against forgetting. In the cracks of our republic, in the tired landscapes of Bihar, in the disputed skies of Kashmir, his sentences will echo.
Today we mourn. Tomorrow, we will read him again, and the mourning will turn into memory. And memory, if tended with the tenderness he showed, can become resistance.
Rest well, Sankarshan Thakur. You told us what needed telling. You leave behind light.
(Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a Bangalore based columnist and management professional.)
