Seminar, a landmark monthly magazine founded by Romesh Thapar and his wife Raj, still comes out of the bustling Malhotra building in Connaught Place. The magazine, which is celebrating 50 years in print, has the credit of never having missed a ‘posting date’.

There is plenty to remember Romesh Thapar by—a comrade who experienced a slow disenchantment and later moved to the centre; a tsar of the cultural and ideas world of his time; director of the India International Centre, the National Books Development Board and ITDC; the baritone that came on as the ‘voice’ on the Indian newsreel on every first Monday in cinema halls, well before TV came along; the ‘Beni Master’ in Zia Sarhadi’s Footpath and also an actor in Householder. Some say he was close to Indira Gandhi, but then moved away and stopped publication as the Emergency gnawed at the freedom of the press.

Raj Thapar, who was vice-chairperson of the National Bal Bhavan between 1967 and 1974, played a crucial role in the development of the journal as co-planner, meticulous copy editor and manager. Romesh and Raj died in 1986, within months of each other.

The Seminar office was a place where poets, trade unionists, bureaucrats, politicians and artists stopped by for tea and conversation. When Romesh’s Bombay-based, left-leaning weekly, Cross Roads, was banned in Madras on the grounds that it was critical of Nehruvian policy, Romesh took the matter to court, and the legendary Romesh Thapar vs the State of Madras followed. The court ruled in favour of Romesh and forced a livid Nehru to consider amending the Constitution for the first time, in 1951, to qualify Article 19, laying down that the freedom of speech came with a caveat—that it should not disrupt ‘public order’.

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