Romesh Thapar

Romesh Thapar (1922–1987) was a left-wing Indian journalist and political commentator. A member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Thapar was the founder-editor of the monthly journal Seminar, published from New Delhi, India.

Thapar was born in Lahore (now in Pakistan) to a Punjabi trading family of the Khatri caste. He was the brother of Romila Thapar, the eminent historian. General Pran Nath Thapar, sometime Chief of Army Staff, was his father's brother, and the journalist Karan Thapar is his first cousin. Thapar was also related distantly to the family of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru's niece, the writer Nayantara Sahgal, was married to Gautam Sahgal, brother of Bimla Thapar, wife of Pran Nath Thapar.

Thapar's family was newly wealthy, having made their fortune in trade during World War I, as commission agents for the colonial British Indian Army. Thapar was therefore sent to England for his education.Fabian socialism, which was fashionable in the universities of England in the years between the two world wars, had a deep impact on Thapar at a young age. Starting as a fashionable socialist, Thapar developed into a Marxist ideologue over the years, and remained a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) until his death.

Thapar returned to India in the mid-1940s and took a job in Bombay as a journalist with The Times of India, while Frank Moraes was its editor. After a couple of years, Thapar used some of his family wealth to start an English language magazine of his own, named Cross Roads. The magazine, which was published monthly, offered views rather than news, and combined high-brow intellectualism with communist ideology. It never gained much circulation, but this did not bother Thapar, who regarded it as an interesting occupation and not as a source of livelihood.

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