Pran Sabharwal was an institution for many people, especially foreigners who lived temporarily in India. There was virtually no one in positions of power or handling critical parts of the whole infrastructure of New Delhi and India he didn’t know or couldn’t reach. If something came up, problems with living in a far less sophisticated Indian capital of the 1960s [when I first came to live there], Pran had a solution. Much more importantly, he was a fund of knowledge about the country and what was going on in politics or in the social issues at any time.
But he was far more than a “fixer” or a “databank” for me; he was an intimate friend, so close that we often communicated in bits and pieces that no one else would have understood. That included our own private jokes: after I moved away from Delhi in the mid-60s but came back often for reporting, we would discuss the recent foreign correspondents posted to India. And we had a joke about what phase of their inevitable discovery of India would take. All I had to do was ask Pran what “stage” our colleague was in, and he would say, “cow dung,” meaning that was the piece the correspondent had just written on the inevitable litany of their reporting before they left India for other assignments, or at least in one case, the highest ranks of one of the major American newspapers.
Pran’s knowledge and knack for “pushing the right buttons” often went unacknowledged. Or, better still, it often meant for him to supply a valuable bit of information that opened doors or understanding with no acknowledgement. For he had a good heart and was always ready, even before he was asked, to help someone through a difficult situation. That happened several times during crises for fellow correspondents, for example, always anonymously done, and sometimes not even apparent to those involved.
It wasn’t that Pran wasn’t aware of his own abilities. We once discussed in some related conversation why he had never thought of immigrating, as so many of his and my Indian friends had done during those early independence years when opportunities were so limited at home. He told me, matter of factly, where on earth would he have the kind of access and ability to influence events as he did in New Delhi.
I loved it that he appreciated that I had tried very hard to accumulate knowledge about that impossibly complex subject that is “India”. I remember a compliment he gave me once, when I suggested something about a particular situation that might not normally be known to a foreigner. [I still remember every word of that conversation.] He tossed me a line that I “knew too damned much about this country” – not true in any way, of course, but he knew it would be terribly meaningful and pleasant for me to hear.
I miss him. Needless to say, on my rare visits back to New Delhi, it doesn’t seem the same place without Pran. Nor is it just when I have gone there that I feel his absence. The thought often crosses my mind when I am writing, not only about India but about other subjects about which he had an interest and knowledge.
I hope we will be able to perpetuate his memory here, and, perhaps, to even make a contribution to all those many subjects he cared so much about and knew so intimately.
— Sol Sanders, Gloucester, Virginia, USA, July 2015