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The writer with Mr T.J.S. George (left) in the study of the latter's Bangalore home in 2023.
- Renowned journalist and author T.J.S. George, who gave voice to a new Asia and spoke of South-east Asian centrality in Asian affairs long before it became a popular concept adopted by regional leaders, has died.
The founding editor of Asiaweek and former deputy editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review (Feer) died of age-related ailments on Oct 3 in Bangalore. He was 97.
The India-born Mr George was regarded as one of the biggest names in post-colonial Asian journalism. Pioneering a pan-Asian view of the continent, he emerged as a public intellectual who interpreted the region with empathy and insight. In his final years, he was regarded as something of a conscience-keeper.
Mr George began his writing career at Mumbai’s Free Press Journal in 1950, but it was in 1965, as editor of The Searchlight, a newspaper in Patna, capital of India’s backward Bihar state, that he acquired global fame.
The Bihar chief minister, enraged at his stinging editorials, jailed him on charges of sedition for just over two weeks – the first time that a journalist in free India had faced such a charge.
Angered that the newspaper management had overruled his instructions to run blank editorials until his release, Mr George left The Searchlight and joined the International Press Institute, before moving to Hong Kong to work with Feer.
Not a man to waste a moment of his day, which typically ended with a glass of rum and water – a deliberate choice to reflect his “working journalist” instincts – Mr George’s career flourished in his new home, both as a journalist and author. At Feer, he was appointed regional editor, before becoming deputy editor.
His career as an author started with a sympathetic biography of the late Krishna Menon – the defence minister under whose watch India suffered military defeat at China’s hands in 1962 – and a book on the revolt in Mindanao, the Philippines.
Pioneer-generation Singaporeans particularly remember Mr George as the writer of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, which portrays a nation cast in its founding father’s image. Published in 1973 by Andre Deutsch, the 215-page book is regarded as the first full-scale study of Mr Lee in action, a work that is both critical and appreciative.
Asiaweek, May 11, 2001. Asiaweek was the first regional news magazine to go all-colour. PHOTO: ASIAWEEK
Although the book contained phrases such as “people pacification” and “capitalist totalitarianism”, Singapore did not ban it, possibly because a ban would be self-defeating. Nevertheless, Mr George avoided visiting Singapore thereafter.
While the book was trenchant, a somewhat unexpected defence of the Singapore model came not from the Singapore Government, but from Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Sydney Schanberg, then South-east Asia correspondent at The New York Times.
Mr Schanberg wrote that Mr George’s insider view of Singapore would probably surprise casual visitors – “for prosperous Singapore does not look like anyone’s conventional notion of an authoritarian society”.
He went on to say that Singaporeans “do not look or sound frightened, repressed or subjugated”.
Two years after the book was published, Mr George left Feer to start Asiaweek magazine with his Feer colleague Michael O’Neill.
He introduced a non-ponderous, anecdote-heavy style at Asiaweek that combined compelling storytelling with authoritative backgrounding and analytical voices.
He wanted the news magazine to cover Asia without the colonial sneer and with the same pride that Time magazine covered America. His mission, he said, was to report accurately and fairly on all aspects of the continent – “to see the world from an Asian perspective, to be Asia’s voice in the world”.
Asiaweek, May 21, 1999. Mr George wrote Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, a work both critical and appreciative. PHOTO: ASIAWEEK
In the inaugural Dec 19, 1975, issue, his editorial statement noted that peace in Indochina had set off chain reactions. Yesterday’s enemies were becoming today’s partners.
“Asiaweek identifies itself with the interests of Asia in general and of South-east Asia in particular,” he wrote. “In this regard, we consider the concept that links the Asean countries worthy of special attention. The Asean ideal is not only noble; its steady development will be, we believe, of crucial importance to the progress and stability of South-east Asia in the last quarter of this century.”
Asean was only eight years old at the time, and even Brunei was yet to be admitted, much less the CLMV nations – Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.
Mr George and Mr O’Neill gathered a team of largely Asian writers to chronicle the region’s story, paying them salaries equivalent to those of native English speakers.
An American staff member who described something as “exotic” was firmly told that “nothing in Asia is exotic” – though perhaps the customs of native Americans in his home town of Seattle may be so described . Likewise, a staff member who lined up a picture of a sampan to illustrate some trade figures was told to use an image of a container ship instead.
All this clearly influenced global news companies covering a rising Asia, which not only started giving Asians more opportunities to tell the big stories of the day, but also began handing them positions of higher responsibility.
Mr George was disdainful of puffery, and kept spartan habits throughout his life. Travelling to New Delhi to help me, then a writer at Asiaweek, in covering the aftermath of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, he inquired why I tended to hire cabs when trishaws were available – casting a quizzical, amused look at my feeble explanation that it was easier to type on the laptop inside a car.
While dedicated to the craft of journalism, Mr George was an editor who was always conscious of the bottom line, although both he and Mr O’Neill were mindful about separating editorial and business – the so-called church and state. Today, such a distinction seems increasingly blurred in journalism.
Committed to continually becoming a better product, Asiaweek was the first regional news magazine to go all-colour, a move undertaken at tremendous expense. It eventually surpassed Feer in circulation, emerging as the dominant regional weekly.
In later years, Mr George would rue the decision he and Mr O’Neill made to sell most of their stock in Asiaweek to Reader’s Digest, which subsequently sold it to Time Inc. Asiaweek’s closure in December 2001, he said, was a “stab in my heart”. He never accepted the explanation that an advertising downturn had forced the shutdown, believing instead that Time was simply acting to protect its mother brand, Time Asia.
Mr George chose Bangalore as his retirement home, continuing to write books – on the famed Independence-era journalist Pothen Joseph, Bollywood icon Nargis Dutt, and renowned singer M.S. Subbalakshmi, among others.
His “Point of View” weekly column in the New Indian Express, penned from his Bangalore study where he would often spend the day dressed in shirt and sarong, ran for a full quarter-century before he ended it in 2022. The Asian School of Journalism was his vision, started in 1994 at The New Indian Express Bengaluru buildings. It is now based in Chennai and has been renamed Asian College of Journalism.
In 2011, the Congress Party-led government of Dr Manmohan Singh awarded him the prestigious Padma Bhushan national day award, citing his contributions to journalism and literature.
Born into the Syrian Christian faith, Mr George’s columns freely drew on Hindu scriptures, often quoting texts like the Bhagavad Gita to repudiate extreme Hindu nationalist positions. And he wanted to be cremated in the Hindu fashion, not buried.
Mr George would live to see the Asia he had imagined largely come to pass, even as his warnings that prosperity does not equal peace are more relevant than ever. In his final years, he was particularly worried about the dismantling of India’s secular structure and its institutions.
“Some of us feel that we should not criticise our own country. Some feel exactly the other way – that a big country like ours needs to be cautioned all the way about pitfalls,” he wrote in his final column in 2022.
“All arguments have their own supporters and their own critics, their own validities and their own drawbacks. But there is something not right if a country and its rulers start feeling that they should not be criticised at all – and especially by newspaper wallahs.”
As he once put it, journalism should “disturb the comfortable, and comfort the disturbed”.
Mr George is survived by his son Jeet Thayil, a poet, and his daughter Sheba. His wife died in January.
[SRC] https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/south-asia/t-j-s-george-one-of-asian-journalisms-most-recognised-stalwarts-dies-at-97
