Anil Dharker ( 1947 —2021): Mumbai’s Mind

Anil Dharker was the consummate man of letters. He died on the morning of 26^th March 2021, following a heart ailment. He was the nerve centre of Mumbai’s literary and cultural scene, especially having helmed the literary festival, Tata Literature Live. The festival, over the years, had come to be known for its high-quality programming for which Dharker was very much responsible. A true liberal, he was a believer in the freedom of expression and could discuss books with as much elan as sports.

A quintessential SoBo person, he was spotted at all major art shows and cultural events in the city. As a journalist and editor, he had worked for a range of publications such as Debonair, Mid-day, The Independent, the Illustrated Weekly of India and Times of India. He was the author of numerous books, including Goa A-Z (Odyssey Guides) (1997), The Romance of Salt (2005) and Icons (2008). Over five decades, he had been a columnist, a writer, and an architect. The actor Shashi Kapoor used to call him “MR FFC!” because at one time he used to head the Film Finance Corporation (which later became NFDC, National Film Development Corporation).

Dharker had a degree in Mathematics from India and a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of London. He was also a sportsman and had captained table tennis teams, while studying at London. He had represented Bombay Gymkhana in tennis.

Since March 2015, he had written a fortnightly column for Open called, unsurprisingly, Mumbai Notebook. His first column for Open was a tribute to Vinod Mehta, under whose editorship at the Sunday Observer, he wrote a TV column. Mehta would go on to publish a column that would become one of Dharker’s best known TV reviews. At that time the only TV on offer was Doordarshan, which was so Rajiv Gandhi obsessed that Dharker had started to call it PMdarshan. One day he handed over a column to Mehta which repeated the words Rajiv Gandhi 300 times. In two words Dharker had delivered a scathing critique of state television. His most recent column (19 March) for Open celebrated the return of Mumbai’s iconic bookstore Kitab Khana, ‘the wonderful bookstore at Flora Fountain’ which reopened, ‘rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the devastating fire that engulfed it last year.’

Dharker’s columns are a good measure of the man. His writing looked at Mumbai with the steely gaze of a critic and the compassion of a parent. He loved the city, but was not oblivious to its faults. He did not romanticise the chawls, or the ‘potholes so large they are full of little cars’. What he celebrated was the Opera House and Kala Ghoda. His deepest hope was not for a city like Shanghai, but as he writes, ‘The monuments we need are affordable and well-equipped hospitals, whose primary objective is to treat patients, and not fleece them. Only then will we qualify as a just society.’ Dharker was ultimately a man who revelled in the arts and literature, but who knew that without justice, a society was no society at all.

Anil DharkerKala Ghoda festivalMumbai notebookobituaryTata Literature Live