Pritish Nandy obit: The ‘nowhere’ man who donned many hats with singular grace

Born in Bhagalpur (Bihar) into a Bengali family, Nandy’s early life bore the seeds of the questioning mind he carried throughout his life. His mother, a teacher and the first Indian vice-principal of La Martiniere Calcutta, instilled in him a deep love for language. His father, Satish Chandra Nandy, and his siblings Ashis and Manish Nandy, formed a family whose collective intellectual legacy has influenced Indian thought in profound ways.

Agnostic by inclination, avant-garde by choice, Nandy’s life read like the fragmented poetry he so often championed — layered, meditative. A polymath in the truest sense, he authored and edited over 40 books of poetry, translated classical Indian texts, helmed iconic publications as an editor, and pioneered television and digital content long before it became fashionable.

The poet who dared

Pritish Nandy’s poetic debut, Of Gods and Olives (1967), marked the arrival of a voice both audacious and tender. Over the next two decades, he wrote 18 more volumes, each breaking conventions, as he explored themes of exile, love, and urban alienation. One of his best-known, widely anthologised poems, ‘Calcutta If You Must Exile Me’, captured the chaotic beauty, relentless, heartbreaking pull and restless energy of a city he loved but left behind.

In the later years, his poetry grew reflective, as seen in works like Again (2010) and Stuck on 1/Forty (2012), which contains poems written in iambic pentameter to cater to the Twitter generation looking to express itself in 140 characters. Across 40 books of poetry in English, Nandy lent his voice to the quiet, untranslatable silences of existence. His translations of poetry from Bengali, Urdu, and Punjabi created a bridge between cultures. His version of the Isha Upanishad (2014) reveals a spiritual dimension rarely associated with his urbane persona.

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For Nandy, poetry was not a rarefied art form but a means of connecting people across barriers. His editorship of Dialogue, a poetry magazine that showcased India’s multilingual literary talents in the 1970s, was a testament to his belief. Dialogue became a home for contemporary Indian poetry that resisted conformity and celebrated linguistic plurality. The World Academy of Arts and Culture nominated him as a Poet Laureate in 1981. Words, to Nandy, were the closest we came to divinity, to the act of creation itself.

strangertime: An Anthology of Indian Poetry in English (1977), edited by Nandy, came at a time when poetry in English was still carving out its identity in India. Nandy’s editorial touch is evident in the selection. For many poets in this volume, this was their first brush with recognition, their words bound together in an anthology that reads as much like an archive as it does a manifesto. Poems from Arun Kolatkar’s freshly-minted Jejuri find space here. Agha Shahid Ali’s early work, charged with the latent brilliance that would later bloom in his exile-themed collections, makes a haunting appearance. There’s Adil Jussawalla, whose Missing Person had just shattered conventions with its elegance. And while the absence of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is palpable, the volume feels complete in its depiction of the poetic ferment of the time.

‘The Nowhere Man’

In his own poem in the anthology, ‘The Nowhere Man’, Nandy explores themes of longing, fleeting connections, and the inescapable solitude of the human condition. The opening lines, “Come, let us pretend this is a ritual. This hand / in your hair, your tongue seeking mine: this / cataclysmic despair,” unfold with aching intimacy. Here, love is not a comforting certainty but an ephemeral act, a shared moment that dissolves with the dawn, leaving behind an empty room and a ‘tattered skyline.’ Nandy’s language is visceral, bursting with physicality and emotion. His imagery, unrelenting in its starkness, draws the reader into a world where passion and pain are inseparable companions.

In the 1980s, Nandy’s stewardship of The Illustrated Weekly of India turned the staid publication into a forum for dissent, discussion, and discovery. As Publishing Director of The Times of India Group, he simultaneously helmed The Independent and Filmfare during their most exciting years. As an editor, he was a curator of the zeitgeist, capturing the contradictions of a nation torn between tradition and modernity.

Leaving behind the institutional comforts of the Times group, he launched Pritish Nandy Communications (PNC) in 1993. What began as a bold entrepreneurial venture evolved into a pioneering content company, reshaping Indian cinema with films like Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi and shows like Four More Shots Please!, which brought complex, flawed women to the forefront of storytelling.

PNC’s contribution to the evolution of Indian content cannot be overstated. Two of its productions, Modern Love Mumbai and Unpaused, for instance, explored the vulnerabilities of urban life, offering viewers stories that were both deeply personal and universally resonant. It produced films that broke the mould: Kaante and Chameli, for instance. Nandy’s chat shows, beginning with The Pritish Nandy Show, brought wit, irreverence, and intellectual depth to a formulaic medium.

The reluctant politician

When Nandy entered the Rajya Sabha in 1998 as a Shiv Sena nominee, the irony was not lost on anyone familiar with his eclectic, liberal ethos. But Nandy brought to politics the same incisive intellect that defined his journalism and poetry. He served on multiple parliamentary committees, from defence and foreign affairs to communications, lending his sharp, unorthodox perspective. His tenure (1998-2004) was marked by a pragmatism that belied his bohemian image. Nandy’s ability to bridge seemingly irreconcilable divides — be it between art and commerce or activism and governance — was perhaps his most underrated gift.

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Deep within, Pritish Nandy was a humanist. He co-founded People for Animals, India’s largest animal rights organisation, alongside Maneka Gandhi. Their activism extended to systemic changes in policy and public perception. His vision culminated in the founding of World Compassion Day in 2012, with His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself delivering the inaugural address. In these pursuits, Nandy’s chamipining of MK Gandhi’s philosophy of ahimsa (nonviolence) resonated deeply. His humanitarian work was not an addendum to his career but an essential strand of his identity.

His agnosticism was existential; it meant a refusal to accept easy answers in art, life, or politics. His works were steeped in contradiction, yet that is where their strength lay. He celebrated urban chaos but mourned its discontents. He championed modernity but stayed rooted in classical traditions. He took to power but never seemed entirely at home in its corridors. For those who knew him, Pritish Nandy was both an enigma and an open book. His conversations, much like his poetry, meandered through ideas, memories, and provocations. He was a raconteur who could hold court on anything from Rilke to cybercafés.

Nandy’s relationship with Calcutta, his childhood city, remained central to his identity. Even as he built his life in Mumbai, Calcutta’s tumultuous, tragic beauty echoed in his art, a haunting refrain he never quite abandoned. As Nandy’s collected poems prepare for posthumous release, one is reminded of his lifelong belief: that art must be dynamic, disruptive, and deeply human. In Pritish Nandy’s universe, there were no walls between the personal and the political, the sacred and the profane. His life, much like his poetry, was an unfinished conversation — a dialogue between past and future, tradition and rebellion, art and activism.

Nandy’s passing leaves a void, but it also leaves a trail: of words and images that will continue to inspire, challenge, and provoke. His funeral was attended by only a handful of people who stumbled upon the secret of his passing. True to his nature, he had orchestrated his final exit as a private affair, leaving even those closest to him unaware of the moment he slipped away. It feels as though he has folded himself into the shadows, choosing to vanish as quietly as a poem ending mid-line, leaving behind the ache of incomplete sentences and unspoken goodbyes. Rest in poetry, Pritish Nandy.