Goodbye to Ian Jack

IT WAS with great sadness that I learnt of the death at the age of 77 of the journalist, Ian Jack (right).

Of his generation of newspaper reporters, he was, to my mind, one of the best writers on India, perhaps even the best.

In the years after independence, that accolade had belonged to James Cameron, whose autobiography, Point of Departure, is a classic I recommend to all journalists.

I have been trying to buy a copy of Ian’s 2013 book, Mofussil Junction, an anthology of his Indian writing, but in vain.

I joined the Sunday Times after Ian left, and worked under Andrew Neil. Ian worked for the paper in its heyday when the legendary Harold Evans was the editor. It was Evans who sent Ian to India on his first trip in 1976, but asked him to stay on to cover the elections in 1977 after Mrs Indira Gandhi’s two-year period of emergency.

Ian loved travelling on Indian trains and had a special affection for Calcutta’s [now Kolkata] trams. He considered Geoffrey Moorhouse’s Calcutta to be the best book on the

city (as I do). Ian’s first wife, Aparna Bagchi, to whom he was married from 1979 to 1992, was Bengali.

Ian edited the Independent on Sunday from 1991 to 1995, and the literary journal, Granta, from 1995 to 2007. He edited two issues of Granta devoted to India and Indian writing in English.

“As a correspondent in India, I was lucky and unlucky,” Ian once said. “Lucky that I worked for a Sunday newspaper and had the time to go places and meet people; unlucky because India then didn’t command the space and importance in the western media that it does now.”

He added: “For Indian reporters in the UK and British reporters in India, my advice would be the same – get out more, read more, discover more. I also think western reporters in India should learn a language – Hindi, probably.”