[Book Review] A Festschrift in Honour of Nani A. Palkhivala

(Essays and Reminiscences: A Festschrift in Honour of Nani A. Palkhivala edited by Arvind P. Datar, published by LexisNexis, Gurgaon, 2020; pp: xlii + 532. Price: Rs 795)This year marks the centenary of the birth of Nani Palkhivala. By any standard, the contribution that this remarkable human being made during his 82-year-long life to various aspects of public weal in India was as striking as it was substantial. Quite deservedly, he was, during his lifetime, feted with a variety of tributes, awards and decorations, and few will disagree with C. Rajagopalachari's pithy observation that Palkhivala was "God's own gift to India." It is hardly surprising, then, that a book of essays in his honour has been published to mark the centenary. The volume is sponsored by the Nani A. Palkhivala Memorial Trust and edited by Arvind Datar, a Madras-based Supreme Court lawyer who has also been involved in perpetuating the late polymath's reputation in other ways, including by bringing out the latest edition of Palkhivala's monumental commentary on the law and practice of income tax. Linguistic purists may query the sub-title of this book, A Festschrift in Honour of Nani A. Palkhivala, on the grounds that festschrifts are usually prepared as an offering to a living person to mark a milestone event in their life; this volume should therefore, they would argue, have been more appropriately called A Gedenkschrift in Memory of Nani A. Palkhivala, but that is a minor quibble. (A festschrift for Palkhivala was, incidentally, published – by Butterworths – and presented to him in 2000; it is probably out of print now.) There are four parts to this book consisting, respectively, of: 19 stand-alone essays on a range of topics spanning the law, taxation, economics and governance; 29 pieces of reminiscences; 18 articles authored by a young Palkhivala; and 23 items of correspondence and other documents (the last part offers further scope for a protest from pedants: the index heading talks of "correspondences" — a term which, experts have argued, does not exist, because "correspondence," like evidence, is compendious enough to include the plural). Very roughly, the stand-alone essays account for half the bulk of the book, with the other material collectively comprising the other half. Remarkably, the volume has a back index but any elation that this discovery may engender in the reader will soon be dissipated by the realisation that it is the product of extreme amateurishness. What about the essays then? As can be expected, they vary in quality. Some of them are conspicuously good, with a contribution from Sudhish Pai, a practising lawyer from Bangalore, leading the pack. He offers a superbly argued critique of public interest litigation which, he says, has led to "a distortion of constitutional government" as a result of the unprincipled and indiscriminate manner in which this genre of litigation has been encouraged by the Supreme Court of India. Pai's essay is as noteworthy for the rigor of his reasoning as it is for the lucidity of his articulation. Other articles which are characterised by substantive solidity are those by the sociologist Dipankar Gupta (on the dynamics between rights and duties), Gautam Bhatia (on the Basic Structure theory in constitutional law), Ajay Vohra and R. V. Easwar (both of whom deal, in slightly different styles, with the imprint left by Palkhivala in the area of taxation), and Vinay Sitapati (on the parallels between Palkhivala and the former Indian Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao, as economic reformers). There is another category of articles which offer much food for thought but which many readers may find hard going because of either an overly-academic approach which does not sit well in a book such as this (e.g. Rahul Unnikrishnan on the differences between retroactive and retrospective legislation), or an unappealing presentational style (e.g. N. S. Nappinai on social media). Some of the contributions also read as if they are a bunch of disjointed themes stuck together without any thought being given to internal coherence or easy flow (e.g. Porus Kaka on the changing world of international taxation — this essay suffers from the further blemish of combining personal reminiscences which occupy over a third of the already skimpy text). Arguably, the most unsatisfactory part of the book is the one dealing with reminiscences. There are many criticisms that can be made of this section. For a start, some contributions are so short that they would raise eyebrows if they had been included in a souvenir brought out for a humdrum cultural event (e.g. by Minoo Shroff). What makes such items even less justifiable is that some of them are from people who have worked closely with Palkhivala (e.g. Shirin Bharucha, Ratan Tata) and who would therefore have had something more substantial to say. Sadly, this criticism...

[Book Review] A Festschrift in Honour of Nani A. Palkhivala

Dr Venkat Iyer