The news from Oz

BY ashok malik| IN Media Practice | 22/10/2005

            Reprinted from the Indian Express, October 21, 2005

Like family furniture that has, seemingly, always been around, Indians tend to take their free press for granted. They read their papers, of course, occasionally purring at them, complaining about — or celebrating — the rapid conquest of news space by page 3, and then tossing away the crumpled sheets.

Perhaps this is only a fraction of the picture. Perhaps there are millions of Indians out there, beyond Malabar Hill and Mehrauli, for whom the newspaper is still a deeply meaningful, almost mystical morning ritual. 

Perhaps it takes an outsider to best appreciate this relationship. Robin Jeffrey, Canadian-born Australian social scientist and an Indophile ever since he can remember, did just this with his biography of India’s regional press: India’s Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian Language Press (2000).

The book came at the end of the 1990s, a decade that, give or take a few years, saw regional-language newspapers come into their own in India. Jeffrey’s passion for newspapers is almost infectious. His eyes light up when he talks of ‘‘the magic of print’’, of newspapers arriving in a household of first or second generation literates.

In the 1990s, this happened in India faster than it had ever before. As Jeffrey told his audience in Chennai — where he participated in a seminar hosted by the Australian High Commission and the Media Development Foundation this past weekend — Rajasthan, proverbially ‘‘beautiful but backward’’ provides as good an example as any.

Between 1991-2001, the state’s population grew by 29 per cent, to 57 million. In the period, literacy grew by 56 per cent, from 39 per cent of the people to 60 per cent. Yet, in this time, the daily circulation of newspapers shot up by 300 per cent — from 860,000 copies to 3.4 million.

What was true of Rajasthan was as true of Assam or Andhra Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh. ‘‘India is having its own age of Hearsts and Pulitzers,’’ Jeffrey says, ‘‘we probably need an Indian Citizen Kane.’’ It’s likely, he’ll speak Gujarati or Telugu.

It wasn’t always this rosy. When Jeffrey came to Chandigarh in 1967 — as a volunteer teacher at a government school — Indians got their news on Nepa paper: ‘‘the colour of a banana skin and the texture of blotting paper’’. The new arrival began by reading The Indian Express — ‘‘It was always a lively paper, with something the others didn’t have’’— and The Tribune.

Jeffrey recalls the Tribune editor writing long, turgid articles on Vietnam or the politics of Bihar. Today, the subjects would be deemed too alien for ‘‘local readership’’, but that was a different India: ‘‘Newspapers were still an elite phenomenon. And Chandigarh was full of retired army officers. You could expect edit page articles on canal irrigation in Bundelkhand, probably written by a retired IAS officer who knew the editor!’’

Even the journalists were a little, er, quaint. Jeffrey recalls a joke about one of them: ‘‘It was said he had Chandigarh’s biggest library of unread books.’’

In 1968, Jeffrey travelled to Kerala, to a society he was to spend decades studying — producing scholarly work on legacies of matriliny, on Nair society, on the temple-entry movement in princely Travancore. His first tool of sociological observation was, however, the newspaper.

It was an unusually vibrant media environment. ‘‘In 1967,’’ Jeffrey remembers, ‘‘Kerala had 10 Audit Bureau of Circulation members. Today the number is, I think, three.’’ He saw sights that moved him: ‘‘The copy of Matrabhumi would arrive in the village, and people would crowd under a tree as it was read out aloud. And then the copy of Deshabhimani would arrive and other people would crowd under a tree at the other end of the village.’’ The first was the centrist paper, the second the party paper.

In 2005, Indian newspaperdom wears another look, literally: ‘‘Even regional papers look more like global papers.’’ Consolidation in the tastes, with the many voices giving way to the few strong ones has been a mixed blessing. It’s made regional media barons powerful figures; Jeffrey calls it the ‘‘re-feudalisation’’ of India, only half-jokingly.

He wonders at the strange paradox of the ‘‘mass media’’ — as opposed to the dowdy, old-fashioned press — which loses influence and declines as a tool of mobilisation as it chalks up more and more numbers.

Representing Australia’s growing interest in India, Jeffrey has just moved from Melbourne’s La Trobe University to the top job at the Canberra-based Australian National University’s Institute for Asia and the Pacific. His charter is to steer scholarship beyond Japan and China, into South Asia.

That would mean postponing his dream project — a book on the history of modern India that tells the story by looking at specific years. ‘‘I’ve chosen the years of the Kumbh Mela,’’ explains Jeffrey, ‘‘1942, 1954, 1966, 1977, 1989 and 2001.’’ For a history buff each year represents a landmark in India’s evolution — Quit India, the high point of Nehruvian socialism, the death of Shastri in a turbulent society ... Jeffrey’s book will, one trusts, be done by the 2013 Kumbh!