ok these r the online notes we had in our 5th sem bmm journo.. so best of luck and hope it helps
Index
Introduction
Vernacular Press 1800-1901
Vernacular Press 1901-2007
The Bengali Press
The Hindi Press
The Marathi Press
The Malyalam Press
The Telegu Press
The Urdu Press
The turning point
Conclusion
Introduction
It is impossible to ascertain many things about the regional language newspapers in India. For example, is the newspaper Industry young or old? There is no way to say... the history of Indian Newspapers reaches far back into the past, to the time of Moghuls before the Company came to Indian shores, who introduced news carriers to India. However, even today, new ideas and editorial policies continue to show up, ensuring that the industry is very much blooming even after many newspapers have been around for over a hundred and fifty years. Is the industry thriving or on the way out? People are undoubtedly reading smaller and smaller fractions of newspapers, and yet, newspapers are printing and distributing increasing amounts of matter. It is vital to get a sense of why the Indian press is different from those in other countries.
Unique features of the Indian press
# Newspapers compete only with newspapers of the same language, there are many newspapers in many Indian languages, that all started in the pre-independance era. An industry with such a diversity in its beggenings will have a rapid growth. Newspapers in India are overproduced.
# The most important feature of the Indian newspaper industry is, simply put - unity in diversity. Indian regional language newspapers work together, focus on the same issues, and still maintain a sense of unity sixty years after they helped us gain our freedom.
# The Indian press has grown rapidly, but has not grown enough. Many areas remain backward, and in terms of say technology, or professionalism, the Indian Press still has a lot of scope for growth.
# Despite having the most circulated newspapers in the world, according to UNESCO figures, the circulation per head of population in India is among the lowest for any country in the world. Which means there is scope for tremendous growth.
# From the historical point of view, a lot of newspapers have seen the country to changes in the poilitical and economic systems, survived from the beginning to the end of the Independance struggle... this indicates the stability of the press, it is not possible for the Indian press not to grow.
# Most importantly, it is still relatively easy to start a newspaper. New newspapers continue to hit the stands at a steady rate. Most Indian newspapers are owned and run by Individuals. The next largest number by societies and associations.
1800-1901
"In the early portion of its career, the Indian press had been left to follow its own courses and no other check than that which the law of libel imposed. The character of the papers of early days sufficiently shows that the indulgence was abused, and that, while they were useless as vehicles of information of any value, they were filled with indecorous attacks upon private life and ignorant censures of public measures"
-James Mill
# Imagine, in the early nineteenth century, the Indian Press was not even two decades old, the newspapers were shoddy and just plain bad, and yet, the exchange of news between Calcutta and Bombay was something that scared the company. The Governor General himself had to step in during the second Maratha war asking newspapers like the India Gazette and the Bengal Harakuru asking them not to publish naval info or ongoings in the government. Soon, however, the government would have to depend upon the newspapers because they brought together the news better than any government agency.
# Adam's Press ordinance, held the press responsible for much the same things as the letter from the Governor General. It basically allowed for "intelligence solely of a commercial nature." The commercialization of news is considered to be a big problem now days, but back then, it was very important to unify the country economically. The poverty, the illiteracy and the standard of living was outright inhuman. Trade was promoted through advertising in these early newspapers, and this, as a whole, lead to economic unification of India, something vital for the Independence struggle.
# This was India before freedom, before even home rule was an idea. Raja Ram Mohun Roy's Mirat-ul-Akhbar tried to "communicate to the rulers a knowledge of the real situation of their subjects ad make the subjects acquainted with the established laws and customs of their rulers; that the rulers may more readily find an opportunity of granting relief to the people, and the people may be put in posession of the means of obtaining protection and redress of their rulers". This clearly shows that back then, the British rule paled as a problem in front of all the other social atrocities.
# The freedom of the Press itself, had to be achieved before freedom for the country could be achieved. Whether or not the press should be given freedom was discussed at length in the British Parliament. They were afraid that anti-Raj sentiments would spread across the country if newspapers were allowed to run amock. However, the newspapers of those times were concenterating on other, more pressing issues. Issues like widow re-marriage, girl child education, the practice of sati, nad the supression of thuggee, a practice of ritual murder by dacoits.
# For a short span of time, the British government and the Indian press worked together to heavily reform the Indian society. The foundations for the reforms were laid by the publications of Raja Ram Mohun Roy, where social issues were discussed at length. Lord Bentinck, saw the scope for social reform through the agency of newspapers, and relaxed regulations on the press. Lord Bentinck took the step of abolishing Sati, and openly acknowledged Raja Ram Mohun Roy's contribution.
# Lord Bentinck's liberal regime spawned many new newspapers. In 1820, sixteen Indian language newspapers were published.
Dailies: Prabhakar, Chandroday, Mahajan Darpan
Tri-weekly: Bhaskar
Bi-Weekly: Chandrika, Rasaraj
Weekly: Gyanddarpan, Bangdut, Sadhurajan, Gyan Sancharini, Rasasaguev, Rangpur Bartabahu, Rashmudgar
Monthly: Tatwa Bodhini
# In 1832, Bombay darpan, an Anglo-Marathi weekly asked the government for subscriptions and support. This showed a certain amount of trust in the government, and Sir Charles Metcalfe, who had an illustrious career, introduced heavy social reforms. He was against the unnecessary censure of the press, despite the growing dissatisfaction with the regime. He can be said to have freed the press of India, however he made English the official language. He said "I take it as universally granted that the press ought to be free, subject, of course to the laws, provided it be not dangerous to the stability of out Indian Empire"
# Some papers, like the Chandrika, were damaging to India in the liberal phase of the early press, by supporting acts such as Sati. Between 1800 and 1850, the press experienced a state of steady growth, helped by the liberal administration, that saw more good than harm coming out of the press.
# This progress was halted by the rebellion of 1857. Although the contribution of the press to bringing about the rebellion itself was very little, the press was blamed heavily for it. Things changed after that, the Persian and Urdu press were outspoken in their support for the rebellion, the English newspapers spoke strongly against it, there were many Indians in high places all in for the Raj, and the newspapers in the north west provinces maintained a moderate tone.
# The British government reacted strongly. They thought the press had "sown sedition" in "the natives" and therefore promulgated what is known as the "gagging act" of Lord Canning. Many cases were filed against the press for incitement of the rebellion. In retrospect, it is impossible to imagine the feelings of those behind the newspapers who actually believed that they were cause for the revolution without knowing it!
# "A free press and the domination of strangers are things which are quite incompatible and which cannot long exist together" -Sir Thomas Monroe
# The Gagging Act was imposed mostly in Bengal. Many Urdu Newspapers died out. Bombay newspapers defended India from the attacks of the English press. All this, must be seen as normal everyday competition we see in the papers today... in terms of news angles and approaches. It is sudden and immediate only in retrospect, in the time period, the going was really slow.
# The Amrita Bazaar Patrika, at this time, focused on uplifting the masses from slave-like existance. "They are more dead than alive, and need to be roused from their slumber. Our language has, therefore, to be loud and penetrating."
# By 1870, the press was growing rapidly.
Indian language newspapers in Bombay: 62
North West privinces, Oudh and Central Provinces: 60
Benga: 28
Madras: 19
# The sudden growth of the Indian Press scared the British because there was so much in it that they could not understand. Condensing their feelings in a few words is difficult, but imagine ruling a country where your subjects speak in twenty different native languages and circulate newspapers in these languages, and exchange ideas and opinions in these languages, and all you know is English, and many of the said natives do not know your language. It is understandable that the Indian press had a reputation for passing about motifs and symbols right under the noses of the Raj. It is surprising that the Raj survived for such a long time under such circumstances, they wouldn't have, if it were not for the extensive restrictions they placed on the press.
# 1879 Sir Ashley Eden, passed the Vernacular Press act, at a conference attended by one Indian Maharaja, Jotindra Mohan Tagore, who supported it. The act treated English Newspapers differently from regional language papers, and allowed for excessive censorship and control over the papers. It was recieved with heavy criticism by the Press. Somehow, this act seems to be very important, because it changed forever the tone of the regional press, and was the turning point in the history of India.
# One year later, by 1880, Buckland, who was the Press Comissioner under the Vernacular Press act wrote "although some improvement had taken place in the style and language of Vernacular papers since the introduction of the Vernacular press act, their general tone was one of opposition to Government and government measures.
# During this period, newspapers spread to all regions, and newspapers were published in many languages, including Persian and Oriya. This information is vital, because newspapers all across the country would in the coming decades focus on the growing sense of nationalism brought out forst regionally, and then on a larger scale. Socially, politically, morally, and economically, India took a large growth spurt in the following fifty years, through the agency of the press.
# Vishnu Krishna chiplonkar started the Kesari and this was later taken over by Bal Ganghadhar Tilak. Newspapers at this time were compared to nightwatchmen, the government was in constant fear of the public opinion, and the newspapers were nurturing the public opinion.
# The focus, was not on the backwardness of the Indian society itself, but on various laws and procedures of the British administration. The ryotwari system of land tenure, the destriction of municipal and judicial institutions, the grinding taxation, the costly machinary of the government, the extripation of the local industry, and of native aristocracy, these were the issues tackled by the press.
# The newspapers, themselves, were not at all careful in how they accumalated and presented matter, and the Mahratta was involved in a defamation suit. Tilak and Agarker were imprisoned for four months, but this only brought about public sympathy.
# The Deccan Education Society was started by Tilak, Namjoshi, Apte and Agarkar. Tilak moved away from the society, and focused on political freedom instead of social reform. Inspired by the Amrita Bazaar Patrika, he started a campaign against the age of consent bill.
# Within the press, for the first time ever, there were parallel and alternate views, sometimes even contradictory, Tilak and Gokhle, for example, went off in two seperate directions. The relations between the Congress and the Social Conference was sour. Things changed in the new century, after Ranade's death.
1901-2007
# The Kesari reflected Tilak's aggressive Nationalism. The Dnyan Prakash became a daily newspaper and was known for its constructive criticism of news and views. Gokhle edited the Sudharak, an Anglo-Marathi newspaper from Poona.
# Gokhle supported the freedom of the press, and in 1903, he opposed the amendment of the Official Secrets Act of 1889. Civil matters would be placed at par with military operations by the act, and this would affect heavily the governance reporting of the news papers. In 1907, Gokhle again opposed the seditious meeting bull. all these were proposed to curb the growing agitation.
# Tilak died on August 1, 1920, after giving many electrifying speeches on Home Rule, and one day later, Gandhi launched his non-cooperation movement.
# One English paper, must be mentioned here, the Young India, published by Gandhi... Mahatma Gandhi was a journalist, few people know of this act. He edited the greatest weeklies the world has ever known. He published no advertisements, and at the same time, did not allow the newspapers to run at a loss. No paper has till then, or since, been published like this. He published the Indian Opinion in Enlgihs, Tamil and Gujrathi, sometimes, manually running the printing press himself. In Young India of July 2, 1925, he wrote "I have taken up journalism not for its sake but merely as an aid to what I have concieved as my mission in life."
# It was a state of turmoil and agitation from then on. The regional newspapers survived two world wars, and internal resistance against eh government and many phases of the freedom movemet. Malhanlal Chaturvedi must be mentioned here as a forceful journalist amongst editors of Hindi newspapers in the central provinces. The Sandesh from Nagpur and from Bombay flourished under AB Kolhatkar's editorship. The Maharashtrian was started in Nagpur by GA Ogale. The Milap popped up in Lahore and later moved to Delhi. How much the press contributed to the freedom struggle is anybodies guess, but it was vital, because its very nature had changed. It called for such radical action, and the standards of journalism were stretched so much to meet the need for the hour, that the press took a detour for a span of thrity years, and was no longer the press, but isntead an agency to spread the struggle.
# The long and persistant prosecution of the press came to an end with the achievement of Independace. What came next was really the golden age of the Indian Press. It already had a long history, strong foundations, and the Nation was young, and the future, bright.
# The press had been growing, in spite of limitations (all the machinary was imported and costly, distribution channels not well established, readership shifting and unsteady). The growth was uneven. The rate of growth of the newspapers, however, corresponded to the growth of literacy, economy and communications technology.
# Major efforts were taken post Independance to help the press grow, the Press Commission (1952-54) published a report which recomended the developement of the Indian Press on the basis of diffused ownership, as this would in a sense serve the needs of the Indian democracy.
# The government did nothing to interfere with the freedom of the press, and it is like that till date.
# Post Independace, Neheru playerd a large part in Shaping all thinking about the press, as Gandhi had done before the Independance. He was opposed by powerful sections of the press, but he had mass appeal as he was a product of adult suffrage. He stood for tolerence, asked for an agressive, critical press, and expected the press to have dignity, knowledge and high standards.
# The hang-over of the Raj, a spirit of defiance and of constant railing of the authorities continues till date because of the Press.
# Many times, the authorities of Indpendant India have tried to underrate the importance of the freedom of the press, and to impose restraints in the name of law and order, but this has never been done to a great extent.
# The press in India continues to flourish as the most vibrant amongst all nations, and is the chief source of shaping of public opinion.
Bengali Press
# Driven by its commitment to preserve the highest standards in Bengali language and culture, Anandabazar Patrika devised a way to use the complete set of Bengali characters in the word processing software, a decade before Unicode.
# The Anandabazar Patrika, is rightly called the "Voice of Bengal."
# In 1954, the Press Commission report declared Anandabazar Patrika to be the largest circulated newspaper in the country, published from one location.
# Over the years, Anandabazar Patrika has achieved many milestones along the way — it was the first in the east and one of the first in the country to use offset printing.
# Filling up of Niche audiences is seen in new regional language newspapers. Ganashakti is the mouthpiece for the communist Party's Bengal state unit, but has the claim to the best science and technology reporting around.
# Seven years after its launch, figures show an impressive circulation of 2,58,117 copies, making Sangbad Pratidin the third largest Bengali Daily, after ABP and Bartaman. One primary reason for its growth in popularity could be attributed to its strictly unbiased news coverage. It is the only Bengali daily that has a supplement everyday of the week, providing variety and diversity as well as entertainment to its readers.
# Sangbad Pratidin is targetted at the young, upcoming Bengali, who are looking beyond tradition and heritage, in their quest to keep page with the changing times.
Constant efforts are made to improve the quality and content of the news coverage and articles, to provide the ultimate reading satisfaction and maintain contemporarity. The supplements of this paper are very vibrant and popular.
# The Aajkaal is a Bengali newspaper started in 1981, and currently edited by Mr. Ashok Dasgupta. It is a leftist newspaper, but is better known for its excellent standards of sport reporting.
# The Bartaman Patrika has the second largest circulation after ABP in Bengal, and is an anti-establishment paper. The Uttar Banga Sambad is another Bengali paper of importance that has a considerable hold over northern Bengal.
Hindi Press
# The Bhaskar group is the largest read newspaper group of India with a total readership of Rs 2.67 crores, as per NRS 2006.
# The Dainkik Bhaskar is as technically advanced as the Sakal. It uses state of the art machinary, and is published all across northern India. Bhopal, Indore, Gwalior, Raipur, Bilaspur, Ajmer, Bikaner, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kota, Sekhawati, Udaipur, Hisar, Panipat, Amritsar, Jalandhar, and Chandigarh.
# Dainik Bhaskar is a part of the 3D syndication, which is a virtual feed from three leading newspapers in India. The other two papers are Divya Bhaskar and DNA.
# Sanmarg, is a Hindi newspaper published from Kolkatta.
# The hindi press as a whole has the largest readership. More newsprint exists today in Hindi than any other language in the world.
# The "Dainik Jagran" has 31 editions and the only daily to print over 200 sub-editions, each one customized in content to the needs of the readers in different geographical areas.
# According to NRS-2005 DAINIK JAGRAN,is the highest read National Daily across all languages (including English) in India with a phenomenal readership of 21.24 Million Readers .
# The 1st Indian publication to cross the 20 million readership mark, is the Dainik Jagran. An ABC certified Net paid Sales of over 2.4 million copies (Source : ABC Jan-Jun 05).
# Rajasthan Patrika is the initiator in the development of 'Journalism in Rajasthan'. It is committed to provide reliable, authentic, and apolitical news, to educate the masses and give voice to issues that concern their lives.
Marathi Press
# Samna tried to campaign socially for some causes now, but it does not garner much support now. It started the sons-of-the-soil campaign.
# Shivram Maharaj Atre, and Paranjpe, were principal marathi satirical writers. There have been no significant marathi satirist since them. Bal Thackeray was a satirical cartoonist, but not for a regional newspaper.
# Most Marathi newspapers are socially committed.
! While most newspapers have websites, the Sakal has a blog, and a very interesting one at that. The address is sakalblog.blogspot. The Sakal is in fact, much more tech savvy than even English Language newspapers. It embraces technology like Smartflow and SAP, which both enable to streamline business processes and network a lot of people together.
# The Events Division of the Sakaal Group organizes special events with mass appeal like exhibitions, conferences and seminars. And, to top it all, the Sakaal Group of Publications works for social causes through its instruments like the Sakaal Relief Fund, which is aimed at providing immediate aid to victims of natural disasters, and Madhurangan, which is an exclusive forum for women, to name just two.
# The Sakal was founded by Nanasaheb B Parulekar in 1932. Parulekar was a student who went to the United States, got a doctrate in sociology, married a foreigner, came back to Pune and indulged in social reform activities. He modelled the "Sakal" after leading newspapers in the US.
# Sakal's attitude was so different that it was an innovation in Marathi Press. The paper was taken over by the Sharad Pawar family. Changes were brought about in the layout and design of the paper, and seperate editions were launched in Solapur, Nasik and Mumbai. It is still considered the best Marathi paper.
# Every tier-2 city in Maharashtra has a favorite home newspaper, The Gomantak in Panaji, The Pudhari and Sanchar in Kolhapur, The Sarwamat in Shrirampur, The Tarun Bharat in Belgaum, the Lokmat and daily Deshdhooth in Jalgaon.
Malyalam Press
# The Malyalam Manorama has a National Identity similiar to that of the Anand Bazaar Patrika.
# Although Malyalam Manorama has been plagued with controversy, and has spurious relations with illegit firms, it has a solid foundation because of its social outreach programmes. The Manorama has sponsored villages where it had no subscribers. It organises cultural programs twice every year to reach out to its readers in Mumbai.
# The Chandrika is a Muslim League newspaper run from Khazaikode.
# The Deshabhimani describes itself like this : "It continues to champion the cause of the common folks - the factory worker, the office goer, the farm labourer, the small businessman, the self-employed. These are, in fact the people who constitute the largest chunk of the consumer market in the state. That's why it wields so much influence with large masses of Kerala's population. To them, Deshabhimani has become a unbreakable habit, a daily ritual, as much as the Malayalee's well-known penchant for a daily morning bath or brushing the teeth."
# The Deshabhimani is a paper known for its Marxists views
# Malabar, Cochin and Travelcore till date have a unique identity, although they were merged together to form the state of Kerla. Each area has its local newspapers, which is a unique feature in Malayalam journalism.
# The Mangalam, the Matrabhumi and the Kerla Kaumudi are other important Kerla Dailies.
Telegu Press
# The origin of Telegu Journalism is different from all other language groups.
# Till 1946, Telegu people had no home land, unlike other languages. The core of the telegu clan was Hyderabad, and it was ruled by a Nizam, whose court language was Urdu.
# Some border areas between Maharashtra and Karnataka spoke in Telegu.
# This was the picture till 1956, when the demand for a Telegu speaking state came about with great vigour, Potti Sriramalla started a fast unto death demanding a Telgu speaking state... and died. It was the congress that started dividing responsibilities across the countries by linguistically dividing its chapters. People had a linguistic "national" identity because of this, and wanted a linguistic state. Till that point of time, the government had more pressing problems, like agriculture and poverty. There was a general outcry in the Telegu speaking areas, and riots broke out.
# In the 1920s, the Andhra Prabha and the Andhra Patrika came about.
# The Andhra Prabha belonged to the Indian Express group. The Andhra Patrika was run by a small industrial group (which produced and sold the amrutanjan balm). The offices of both papers, were located in Madras, Chennai.
# When the state of Andhra Pradesh came into existence, Ramoji Rao (a young journalist stationed in Delhi representing the Andhra Prabha and met people deeply studying the working of newspapers) launched Eenadu in Telegu. This is because it came into existance on the newly formed homeland of Andhra Pradesh after the linguistic re-organisation of states. In many ways, the press continued the freedom struggle after India won its Independance.
# The Eenadu had an initial print order of 4000 copies. There was a drive to increase its circulation in the eighteen districts of Andhra Pradesh. Each district headquaters had a correspondant who filed an extensive report.
# Within the first five years, the Eenadu had covered all the Talukas with local tabloid inserts.
# MR. Ramamoorthy Rao appointed 2500 ad solicitors, the job of these 2500 people was to go door to door and educate the rural people about advertising and newspapers. The concept of advertising was alien to the largely illiterate agricultural society of Andra Pradesh. Eenadu carried important Birthday parties, aniversaries, ceremonies and festivals. There was an increase in the social prominance of the people who advertised. All the local editions became self sufficient, and increased local circulation.
# The Eenadu today has 18 editions in AP, and 6 editions outside AP.
# The Eenadu's coverage of the women disgracing drunk men in a villiage by parading them on donkeys lead to the government abolishing country liquor in the state. In 1992, the Eenadu started a full woman's page, which became a popular series.
# The Eenadu wiped out its competition, the Andhra Prabha and the Andhra Patrika. The Eenadu dominated the Telegu journalism scene within twenty five years.
! The Eenadu, in Telegu, means "Today" or "Our Land" according to different translators.
# The Eenadu has a strong influence over its readership, and because of its open criticisms of the government, it is considered to be the de-facto opposition party.
# The Vaartha was a hyperactive hi-tech infotech attempt, initiated in 1996 where editors waited for news to pour in as late as four in the morning. Initially, it was very popular, then all the fuss died down within a year.
Urdu Press
# By the beginning of the twentieth century, there were about 70 Urdu journals, unlike the nineteenth century when the Urdu press had numerical superiority over the Hindi press.
# Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad started his weekly, the Al Hilal, on June 1, 1912. The Al Hilal made its influence felt within four weeks of its birth. Within six months, its circulation had reached the figure of 11000. It became so famous, that study circles were formed where the Al Hilal was read out loudly to a group of people.
# Maulana defended the right of cow slaughter for Muslims in the Al hilal, and the influence of the journal was as far reaching as to effect Eruopeans.
# The Madina of Bijnor, started in 1912, achieved considerable influence over Muslim opinion, so did the Urdu paper of Humdum started in Lucknow.
# In 1945, two years before the Independance, the Qaumi Awaz was started in Lucknow, as a sister publication of the National Herald by Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders.
# The Urdu papers suffered greatly from the Partition. Several of them lost their base at Lahore and had to rehabilitate themselves in fresh fields.
# The Munsif and the Siasat from Hyderabad, the Hind Samachar from Jalhandar and the Urdu Times from Mumbai are the principle Urdu newspapers currently in circulation.
The turning point
# Considering the size of the population and the readership in many languages, the press has a long was to go and has a bright future.
# There has been no planning for the press, either for its growth or for its developement, this will help the regional press grow.
# Indian regional newspapers have a great potential for growth.
# The country is still growing, and although newspapers in India have the highest readerships anywhere in the world, they still fall far below the UNESCO standards per head because of the large amount of illeterate population. However, for a country that is growing so aggressively, and coming out particularly in those regions untouched by urbanisation, there is no question that regional journalism is about to have large growth spurts.
# Almost every taluka and district all over India has at least one newspaper that is not registered with the audit bureau of circulation. There are many newspapers that circulate exteremely local news, and carry advertisements of local merchants. There is no count of how many such papers exist, but there are many.
! There are 41 countries without a single newspaper. Even today.
# Newspaper economics will undergo evolution in future growth. Investment, cost and availibility of machinary and newsprint, literacy and spread of telecommunication technology will all play a part.
# A co-operative press has a much better prospects of growth than a competetive one.
# Sucessive National readership surveys show the following trends:
- Increase in the reach of the press in terms of dailies, weeklies and periodicals
- The population, is however, growing at a much faster rate than the press, so the press is constantly catching up to its readership
- (From NRS 2006) Dailies have driven this growth in the press medium, their reach rising as a proportion of all individuals aged 12 years and above – which is the universe defined for NRS – from 24% to 25%. Magazines have declined in reach from 9% to 8% over the last one year. (This is the Trend opposite to developed Nations, where newspapers are losing out to Magazines)
- Collectively, there is a lot of Niche journalism going on that is yet to be studied. Many residential areas all over urban India have a small newspaper of their own.
- More scope for growth in Rural areas than in Urban areas
# The Indian press has scope for growth overseas
Conclusion
The power of the Indian press is not seen in it playing a part in the freedom struggle, not in the eradication of a multitude of social evils, and not even in true spiritual and psychological upliftment of its readership. The power of the Indian press is with the farmer who mourned the death of his bull in a full page obit.
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Bengali Journalism : 'Professional, Somewhat Conservative' and Calcuttan By Robin Jeffrey
In spite of technological possibilities and the apparently increasing wealth and political influence of rural West Bengal, newspaper proprietors have not followed the road taken by their counterparts in much of the rest of India: not one major newspaper has even a printing centre outside Calcutta resulting in a lack of penetration of the newspapers into the countryside. [Spreading across India after the end of the 'Emergency' in 1977, technological change in the form of the personal computer and offset press revolutionised the newspaper industry. The circulation of daily newspapers in all languages trebled between 1976 and 1992 - from 9.3 million to 28.1 million and the dailies-per-thousand people ratio doubled - from 15 daily newspapers per 1,000 people to 32 per 1,000. Regular reading of something called 'news' both indicates and causes change. Expansion of competing newspapers clearly signals the vitality and growth of capitalism: newspapers have owners and owners must have advertisers. The changes of the past 20 years are obvious yet largely unstudied. The essays in this series on the press in the major Indian languages are part of a larger project to map, analyse and try to understand the transformation of the Indian language newspaper industry. [It is a truism that Bengal once provided the intellectual leadership of India - "pioneering in Indian journalism as well as . . . giving the lead in socio-religious and political controversies"] It is a truism also that from the 1950s Bengal slid into division, disarray and political sterility. Calcutta, once the second city of a British empire, became a synonym for urban disaster, and East Bengal, today's Bangladesh, became Henry Kissinger's notorious 'international basketcase'. The Bengali press in some ways reflects thre modern political history of the Indian state of West Bengal. Bengali was the language in which the ideological struggle against foreign rule genuinely began. Bengali was the first Indian script to have international companies invest in it. The Linotype Company delivered a hot-lead mechanical casting machine for Bengali in 1935, a technology produced for the Roman alphabet in the 1880s. Such equipment was not produced for the Devanagari and other lndian scripts until after the second world war. Calcutta was once India's commercial capital. But from the outbreak of the Second World War, Bengal became a region traumatised. The famine of 1942-44 was by far the most devastating in South Asia in the 20th century. And the partition of 1947, the creation of millions of refugees and the obvious shift of commercial activity to Bombay, and political activity to New Delhi, left the new state of West Bengal contracted, contracting and self-absorbed.
Calcutta and Bengal had produced India's first newspaper- James Hicky's Bengal Gazette or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser [sic] which was published from 1780 until the confiscation of his press by the East India Company's government in 1782. The enterprise quickly produced competitors, all of them concerned with advertising and, according to one later critic, "scurrility and servility..., the only two notes known to Calcutta journalism." By 1830, the vast province of Bengal produced 50 newspapers, most of them in English, with a total circulation of about 2, 200. Rapid expansion of the Bengali press came after the revolt of 1857. In Britain itself, the 1850s marked a decade of press expansion as a result of the abolition of the paper tax, innovations in printing and the excitement generated by the Crimean War and the 'Indian mutiny'. In India, by 1870 the number of Bengali newspapers approached 90, and their criticism of British rule troubled the rulers, who responded with the Vernacular Press Act of 1878. Subjecting Indian language newspapers to controls from which English language newspapers were exempt, it shaped the activities of one of the great Bengali newspaper families. It embedded a tradition of privilege that the English language still enjoyed in the 1990s, according to some proprietors and journalists. A fondly told story of the Vernacular Press Act holds that it was directed particularly against Amrita Bazar Patrika, a forebear of today's Ananda Bazar Patrika and itself still publishing, barely, in the 1990s. The story reveals ideas about the power of Indian language newspapers yet their paradoxical vulnerability; it includes too the ambiguous place of English-the language of unjustified privilege yet little genuine influence among 'the people', a category to be both exalted and feared.
Amrita Bazar Patrika was started in Bengali in the village of Amrita Bazar in Jessore district of eastern Bengal in 1868 by a family of kayasths led by Sisir Kumar Ghosh. The paper was soon involved in a libel case, began publishing in English as well as Bengali and moved to Calcutta in 1871. Its own triumphal accounts of these years emphasise Sisir Kumar's reply to an Indian official who warned that, "your writings . . . may . . . spread discontent and disaffection." The people, said Sisir Kumar,"are now more dead than alive and need to be roused from their slumber. Our language has, therefore, to be loud and penetrating." The language appears to have penetrated the Lieutenant- Governor of Bengal. According to the story, the Lieutenant- Governor, Sir Ashley Eden, tried to win over the newspaper by offering government patronage in return for having the newspaper's copy vetted by officials. Sisir Kumar rejected the proposal, made an enemy of Eden, and the Vernacular Press Act was the result. But Amrita Bazar [Patrika] had the last laugh: it converted itself from a bilingual paper into a purely English language newspaper just in time to avoid the provisions of the Act, which exempted English language newspapers.
The story became legendary, and Sisir Kumar's great-grandson was still telling it substantially the same way to fellow train-travellers in 1994. In his version, however, Eden offered Rs 1,00,000 to import the latest printing equipment - a reflection perhaps of the preoccupations of Indian language newspaper proprietors in the 1990s. The Vernacular Press Act was repealed by the Liberal-appointed viceroy, Lord Ripon, in 1881, but its enactment constituted a landmark in the developing racism of the British in India in the late 19th century. The rationale for the Act was that material written in English could not inflame the masses and therefore the English press need not be subject to such tight restrictions as the uncontrolled, immature Indian language press. In fact, British officials knew they would outrage British newspaper owners if they tried to bring their newspapers under tighter control. At the same time, officials found the Indian language press hard to monitor, understand and, under the available law, sue or prosecute. One of the surviving outcomes of the Vernacular Press Act were the Reports on Native Newspapers, prepared weekly or fortnightly by government translators in every province. Continuing until the 1930s, these have provided the substance for scores of MA and PhD theses since independence in 1947. Most of the original newspapers disappeared or disintegrated long ago. A daily from 1891, Amrita Bazar Patrika by the beginning of the 20th century was recognised as a pillar of the national movement, the inspiration even for B.G.Tilak and his Marathi language Kesari in Pune. In 1922, generational change within the Ghosh family led to division. A branch split off and started a Bengali daily Ananda Bazar Patrika, from which grew today's powerful media group. The two newspapers became keen rivals, and in the intensity of Bengal's politics and the struggle against the British, they intruded on each other's circulation base. In 1937, Ananda Bazar started an English daily, the Hindustan Standard (which staggered on till 1974 in Calcutta), and Amrita Bazar retaliated with a Bengali daily, Jugantar. After independence, Ananda Bazar adapted more successfully to the need for management and advertising. Under A K Sarkar (1912-83), a chartered accountant and science graduate, Ananda Bazar Patrika in the 1960s became India's largest circulating daily published from a single centre and the base for one of India's major media groups. Amrita Bazar Patrika and Jugantar declined, stopped publishing in 1990, and though revived, apparently with political help, in 1993, faced an uncertain future. The fate of Amrita Bazar underlined the commercial requirements of the newspaper industry after independence. No matter how highly old elites might have regarded its service in the nationalist struggles, a newspaper in the 1980s was only as secure as its latest circulation figures and advertising rates.
Ten years after independence, the Registrar of Newspapers recorded only five daily newspapers in Bengali (combined circulation: 1,84,000). This put Bengali seventh in daily circulation among India's major languages, though Bengali is, after Hindi, the most widely spoken language in south Asia. To be sure, the majority of those speakers now lay in a foreign and hostile country-East Pakistan-but even within India, Bengali ranked after Hindi as the second largest spoken language. Why weren't Bengalis reading newspapers? The answers relate to education, class and economics. Though the high caste elite - the so-called 'bhadralok' - of Calcutta had been intellectual leaders for more than a hundred years, they were far from constituting a majority of Bengalis. Indeed, the gap between the reading elite and the largely illiterate masses was as gaping as the gulf between Calcutta and the countryside. The great city was a sponge, sucking resources and talents from the rural areas and giving little in return. Other language regions had various centres - Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur for Marathi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Vadodara for Gujarati, etc-but for Bengal, there was only Calcutta. Even in the 1990s, the only audited Bengali publications to originate from anywhere except Calcutta are two magazines from Allahabad in the heart of the Hindi belt. They publish there to cater to a dispersed Bengali clerical class that staffs offices throughout north India. All three of the major Bengali dailies sell half of their copies in the city itself, even though Calcutta accounts for only 16% of West Bengal's population and a quarter of the state's literates. These details illustrate the class divisions of Bengal. Though Bengal had a powerful communist movement from the 1930s and the state of West Bengal has had governments led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI M) since 1977, hierarchy, distance and intellectual snobbery prevail. Ganasakti, the CPI(M)'s daily founded in 1967, was until the 1990s uncompromising in its attempts to 'improve' its readers rather than entertain them. Aveek Sarkar, editor-in-chief and part-owner of Ananda Bazar Patrika, the largest Bengali daily, captured this sense of Bengali newspapers catering to a cultivated citizenry: The other Indian language newspapers are very shoddy editorial products, and I don't think there is a very strong commitment to editorial excellence. There are only about three developed languages in Asia - Chinese, Japanese and Bengali.... People have attempted to mak it [Bengali] as good as the English language at all levels. . . . No educated Malayali reads Malayala Manorama; no educated Tamil reads any Tamil paper...[but in Bengal people from an] educated professional background . . . would all read a Bengal newspaper . . .
I have never seen a Gujarati or Tamil paper in my life. We have always compared ourselves with the best.... our idea has been essentially moulded by the quality of English newspapers . . . [and other Bengali newspapers basically copy us. It's a social heritage . . . . Each and every Bengali civil servant will read my paper. Claims to having an influential readership contribute to the creation of a profitable newspaper. Advertisers since the 1980s have accepted Ananda Bazar Patrika's claims to a high-quality (i e, wealthier) readership particularly since the group started the successful English language daily, The Telegraph, in 1982. In 1995, Ananda Bazar Patrika's circulation of 4,75,000 made it the largest selling daily in India published from a single centre. This combination of high advertisement rates and circulation leadership have discouraged Ananda Bazar Patrika from trying to push its sales in the countryside and small towns of West Bengal - where 85% of Bengalis live. Ananda Bazar's rival lacked the finances to do so - and the confidence that the advertisers will accept that rural readers in West Bengal have purchasing power worth cultivating. Newspaper struggles were therefore largely waged in Calcutta itself This was reflected in the surprisingly low ratio of dailies per thousand-people (see Table). This hovered just under 20:1,000 in the 1980s, lower even than the ratio for Hindi (about 25:1,000) The gulf between Calcutta and the provinces and between educated classes and the rest seemed vast. Though one might scoff at the Gujarati and Tamil press, both languages had larger proportions of their people reading daily newspapers. Calcutta's elites appeared to feel a disdain for the 'lower orders' which made rural West Bengal seem an unlikely place to find readers or consumers. Such a feeling seemed symptomatic of Bengal 's difficulty with capitalism. The elities looked more to the nation and the world than to the backyard. The Ananda Bazar group, though based on a Bengali daily, looked to a national - even an international - audience and market. As well as The Telegraph, the group ran the English weekly Sunday, the English business weekly, BusinessWorld and the daily, Business Standard. The ability to operate successfully nationally and in English lessened the compulsions to discover a larger Bengali market. Neither could rival capitalists see clear returns in the countryside. Circulation was only useful if it brought influence and advertisers, and Bengali proprietors were not convinced that rural West Bengal would bring either. Poor telephone and road communication and heavy capital costs to establish new production centres added to the discouragement of any attempt to do in West Bengal what was being done in Andhra Pradesh, Kerala or elsewhere.
The most notable attempt to change this pattern came in the 1990's from capitalists in the chit fund industry - from which Eenadu had risen in Andhra Pradesh 20 years before. Overland was founded by the Overland Investment Company, a chit fund organization, in1993. It aimed at the districts of West Bengal, was hailed as, "a marketing masterstroke" and claimed a circulation of 1,20,000 within a few months. It focused on local news, emphasized education and exam preparation and was priced at Rs 1.50 well below the cost for a 12-page paper with few advertisements. Overland quickly produced an imitator - Pratibedan, also owned and run by a chit fund tycoon. Within a year, however, both proprietors were in jail, charged with defrauding chit fund investors. The newspapers stopped publishing. The evidence of these brief experiments was contradictory. To be sure, a market appeared to exist: no one denied that Overland was popular as non-Calcutta newspapers had seldom been. But Overland lost money. Would small town and rural readers pay an economic price for newspapers and would advertisers decide that real purchasing power existed in rural West Bengal? Consumer surveys suggested that the answer to both questions might be yes. One found that households with middle-range incomes in rural West Bengal doubled between 1990 and 1993-from about one million to 2.2 million. But the experiment of a sustained attempt to garner rural readers on large scale was yet to be made. The Calcutta-centred nature of Bengali newspapers and perhaps too, of life in Bengal itself-appeared to result in a static, or even declining, ratio of daily newspapers to people. The figure was 19 per 1,000 in the early 1980s and even using the most favorable figures, stood at about the same (or even slightly lower) in the early 1990s. As well as Ananda Bazar Patrika, the Bengali dailies that survived and prospered in the 1980s and 1990s - Aajkal (1,66,000: July-December 1993), the CPI (M)'s Ganasakti (1,02,000: July-December 1991) and Bartaman (2,34,000: January-June 1995) - exhibited similar characteristics. Each was well laid out by the standards of the international English language newspapers, and each moved increasingly to expand its readership by catering for the widest possible audience in and around Calcutta. Sports and finance became prominent news topics. Ganasakti provided the ultimate example of this homogenisation of newspaper style. Once the sombre- ponderous, some people may have said - organ of a revolutionary party, Ganasakti was remade in the early 1990s to compete with other newspapers: Defending the charge that Ganasakti was losing its class character, the editor, Mr. Anil Biswas, pointed out that listing stock market quotations, writing about companies and having a matrimonial column did not mean a sellout.
Ganasakti's marriage advertisements were open only to those people who were not seeking dowry, and the stock-market quotations provided readers with a service that they had said they required. The newspaper now aimed to sell 30% of its space as advertising each day. Yet Ganasakti, too printed only one edition, heavily targeted at readers in Calcutta. Aajkal and Bartaman both arose from the transformation of the newspapers industry in the 1980s. The success of Aajkal, started by a wealthy import-exporter in 1981, foreshadowed the founding of Bartaman again by a wealthy capitalist family, in 1984, introducing phototypesetting and offset printing. Aajkal attempted to produce a broadly based, wide-appeal newspaper. It followed a well known formula but with greater verve and application than elsewhere: it recruited a young staff, emphasized local news and developed an unusually comprehensive sports page. The successful Bartaman approach included prominent sustained attacks on the long-running CPI(M) government, which came to power in West Bengal in 1977 and survived into the mid-1990s. Bartaman, according to an admiring rival, has taken a distinct line against the CPM and Mr. Jyoti Basu [ chief minister of West Bengal]. He [the proprietor of Bartaman] runs a tirade regularly and that has given him an increasing circulation from 1,25,000 to nearly 2,00,000. Both Aajkal and Bartaman, journalists agreed, were Calcutta focused, "very professional and somewhat conservative in their display". The example of the Bengali press makes it tempting to generalize about the way in which newspapers reflect the preferences and cultures of their readers. But such propositions could be misleading and notably untrue. The process is two-way: proprietors and their friends make newspapers; consumers accept or reject them. In West Bengal, Calcutta's intellectual and economic dominance-or the certainty of Calcutta people that this dominance exists-has paralysed the Bengali newspaper industry. In spite of technological possibilities and the apparently increasing wealth and political influence of rural West Bengal, newspaper proprietors have not followed the road taken by their counterparts in much of the rest of India. No major newspaper has even a print centre outside Calcutta. "The ones [newspapers] that are in the districts are no newspapers at all"-poor measly sheets selling no more than one or two thousand copies.24 The result of the lack of penetration of the countryside, where 73 % of the population lives, has been that West Bengal has fallen well behind other parts of India in its consumption of newspapers. This raises two interesting questions that I shall try to deal with in later essays: Do newspapers indicate levels of political participation and involvement? If so, what is the connection between the relatively low penetration of newspapers and the 20-year reign of the CPI(M) government? And what is the role of purchasing power in the expansion of newspapers?
If we judge by economic surveys in the 1990s and the apartment success of the short-lived Overland, rural West Bengal has a market that has not been tapped. Is it only the myopia of the Calcutta elites - and the newspaper proprietors who serve them and are part of them - that has precluded a notable expansion of newspapers in the West Bengal countryside?
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Malayalam 'The Day-to-Day Social Life of the People...' By Robin Jeffrey Spreading across India after the end of the 'emergency' in 1977, technological change in the form of the personal computer and offset press revolutionised the newspaper industry. The circulation of daily newspapers in all languages trebled between 1976 and 1992- from 9.3 million to 28.1 million and the dailies-per-thousand people ratio doubled-from 15 daily newspapers per 1,000 people to 32 per 1,000. Regular reading of something called 'news' both indicates and causes change. Expansion of competing newspapers clearly signals the vitality and growth of capitalism: newspapers have owners and owners must have advertisers. The changes of the past 20 years are obvious yet largely unstudied. The essays in this series on the press in the major Indian languages are part of a larger project to map, analyse and try to understand the transformation of the Indian language newspaper industry. It would be foolhardy to argue that Malayalam newspapers, because they have long led India on most statistical measures, provide models of the future for other parts of the country. However, the Malayalam experience does illustrate the force of capitalist practices and international technology and the necessity of adapting these forces constantly and skilfully to local conditions. The second largest Malay-alam daily newspaper has impeccable nationalist origins and distinctive regional and social associations; but what makes it particularly instructive for our purposes is its structure of ownership. Based in the northern Kerala town of Kozhikode (Calicut), Mathrubhumi (circulation 1995: 5,35,000) was founded in 1923 in the aftermath of Gandhi's non-cooperation movement as a public limited company. This status makes it rare among newspapers, which tend to be closely held private companies owned by a single family. Mathrubhumi's ownership has proved controversial, and the struggles to control it illustrate the extent to which language and newspapers affect the emotions and politics of large numbers of people. The newspaper's founders were members of the Indian National Congress led by K.P. Kesava Menon (1886- 1978); its shareholders included about 350 men and women of Kerala. Though Mathrubhumi lost money regularly in its early years, that did not matter, its historian noted in 1973, because its goals were not those of business but of social service. It battled gallantly with British authorities before independence and bitterly with Kerala's Communists from the late 1930s. By the 1940s, as Kerala's literate and politicised character forced itself to the attention of officials, the British acknowledged that Mathrubhumi,
reaches every village in the district [of Malabar] and... [a] mischievous attack of the Police [in Mathrubhumi] is likely to do, a great deal of harm among the mass of the people who are able to read but not able to think for themselves. Mathrubhumi came to be known as a Congress newspaper, closely associated with Malabar district and with Nayars, the upper caste group that had largely made up both the gentry and intelligentsia of Kerala. To refer to 'Kerala', however, is premature. Under the British, the Malayalam-speaking region was divided among three political entities. The Malayalam language and shared social characteristics gave Kerala a cultural unity which the British had frozen into political division about 1,800. In the North Malabar district, the home of Mathrubhumi, was one of two dozen districts in the sprawling Madras Presidency, directly ruled by the British. The southern part of today's Kerala was divided between two 'princely states' ruled by Indian princes-Cochin [now Kochy], small and central, and Travancore, much larger, to the south. From 1920 when Gandhi reorganised the provincial units of Indian National Congress on linguistic lines, modest pressures had grown for common Malayali institutions, including a single state of Kerala. In the 1940s, Mathrubhumi supported such demands, which were met in two stages, first, with the unification of Travancore and Cochin in 1949 and then with the formation of Kerala state, under the far-reaching reorganisation of India's states, in 1956. From the beginning of the 20th century, Kerala was notorious for its passion for newspapers. The first reports of the Registrar of Newspapers for India in the 1950s showed Malayalam dailies selling 4,30,000 copies a day, only 84,000 fewer than Hindi, the national language. And Mathrubhumi was Kerala's leading daily with an estimated circulation of 19,000 at independence in 1947, which rose quickly to 26,000 by 1952.5 Once the struggle against the British ended, Mathrubhumi faced similar choices to those of other nationalist newspapers in Indian languages. What now was their role? For Mathrubhumi, this was perhaps easier than for newspapers elsewhere. The bitter struggle between the Congress and the Communists in Kerala gave a Congress newspaper not only a reason for existence but a steady supply of electrifying stories for eager readers. The conduct of the newspaper remained with the old nationalists who had founded it and who comprised most of the shareholders, most of whom, it was said, had little idea where they had put their ancient share certificates. Commercial competition became noticeable after the formation of Kerala state in 1957. Mathrubhumi had been slow to join the Audit Bureau of Circulations, as its certificate No. 143 suggests. The other long established Malayalam daily, Malayala Manorama, published
from Kottayam in the old Travancore state, held ABC certificate No 19, an indication of the newspaper's origins in 1888 as a venture of a prospering Syrian Christian family. By 1960, Malayala Manorama had become the largest-selling Malayalam daily with 91,000 copies to Mathrubhumi's 78, 000. In 1962, Mathrubhumi started a second edition in Cochin and recaptured the circulation lead for the next five years. Malayala Manorama countered by setting up an edition in Kozhikode itself in 1966, and by 1971 had established a lead in circulation that it has never surrendered. The 1960s was a decade of striking circulation rises. From 1960 to 1971, both dailies more than trebled: Malayala Manorama, from 91,000 copies to 3,09,000; Mathrubhumi, from 78,000 to 2,50, 000. Of particular interest, however, is the contrast in the managements of the two organisations and the timing of crucial changes. Though both newspapers are public limited companies, Malayala Manorama is closely held as a family operation; it is hard to imagine its share being traded in the market. Similar assumption governed Mathrubhumi as long as the old nationalists lived. They, too, were rather like a family, and a clutch of stalwarts ran the newspaper. All this began slowly to unravel at the end, of Indira Gandhi's 'emergency'. As new technology became inevitable, the need for capital grew, as did the pressures to change the way a slow-moving, old-style, probably overstaffed newspaper worked. A prolonged strike followed. The old nationalists began to retire or die in the 1970s. A new edition launched from Trivandrum in 1980, did not close the gap with Malayala Manorama. A struggle began among the shareholders for control of the company. The 5,000 shares at Rs 5 each, which had floated the newspaper in 1923, acquired undreamt- of value. By the 1990s, with control of the newspaper contested, they traded at thousands of rupees each. The struggle to control Mathrubhumi eventually reached the Supreme Court of India and illustrated the value of a newspaper and the way in which languages and local honour provide at least a hindrance to the acquisition of newspapers by 'outside' capitalists. In 1993, Mathrubhumi's general manager - finance described the financial structure and compulsions of the company. When the newspaper was floated in the 1920s, 3,479 of the 5,000 shares were purchased at a nominal fee of Rs 5 each by 352 different shareholders, 203 of whom bought only one share each. Even in the 1990s, no single person owned more than 225 shares. Mathrubhumi was a "public limited company in the true sense". Shareholders elect nine directors for two-year terms, one-third being elected each year. The late 1970s brought two important changes. First, the old nationalists, who had run the newspaper as a kind of public trust, began to disappear. Second, the economic climate in India and in Kerala began to become more unapologetically capitalist. Mathrubhumi, which under its old regime was a Kerala institution
and also an effectively run business, came to be seen as a valuable asset. Its control could provide wealth - and certainly provided influence and prestige. Shares in Mathrubhumi began to be traded in a way that was inconceivable 10 years earlier. Indeed, when the share book was tidied up in the mid-1980s, it was found that there were dozens of partly paid-up shares whose owners were long dead or unknown. Such shares were forfeited, making the remaining valid shares even more valuable. A keen contest to control the company began, in which M.P. Veerendra Kumar, a wealthy planter and political aspirant, who held about 3% of the shares, emerged as the dominant shareholder and became managing director. In the course of this struggle, M.D. Nalapat, another shareholder and editor from 1984-87, whose mother, the writer Kamala Das, also held shares, was forced off the board of directors. Nalapat then broke the rules as they had existed uptill that time: he sold his shares (at Rs l2,500 each) not merely outside of Kerala but to India's wealthiest newspaper chain, Bennett, Coleman & Co., owners of The Times of India in Bombay. Nalapat and his supporters sold close to 20% of the shares in Mathrubhumi. Though this was scarcely a controlling interest, others saw the sale as the beginning of a Times of India takeover of a Kerala institution, and, according to Nalapat, an "innate sense of paranoia surfaced". The dominant shareholders appealed against the sale to the Kerala High Court which ruled that because The Times of India was a competitor of Mathrubhumi, the sale was invalid. Some saw the court's decision more as a response to Kerala sentiment than to the requirements of the law. The Times of India appealed to the Supreme Court of India where the case was still pending in the mid-1990s. The rival, Malayala Manorama, extended its circulation lead in Kerala to more than 2,50,000 copies in 1995. The struggle for Mathrubhumi highlights processes that went on throughout India from the late 1970s. People connected with Indian-language newspapers discovered that such newspapers had enormous potential for profit and power, yet the same circumstances rendered them more susceptible to destruction than ever before. It was no longer enough to rely on the old methods, the old advertisers, the old subscribers and the old labour practices. Kerala by the late 1970s appeared increasingly unusual in India. Its falling birth rate and high levels of literacy generated the label 'Kerala model' to describe its puzzling economic and social development. Its heavy migration of workers to the Gulf brought foreign exchange that made Kerala people eager purchasers of low-cost consumer goods. Advertisers grew interested. A classic conundrum presented itself. To attract advertising, a newspaper needs to show high circulations. To attract new readers, it has either to get the paper into new areas or win readers from other newspapers. By the late 1970s, technology was
becoming available to allow newspapers to reach ever more remote areas in reasonable lengths of time. But such technology required investment, and only a growing newspaper could persuade bankers to back it. And if a newspaper chose to stand still, rivals would woo the readers and take the advertisers. Kerala in 1990 had 120 daily newspapers registered with its government public relations department, more dailies than any comparable region of India. The processes of capitalist expansion and technical change thus worked themselves out more noticeably and dramatically and not merely between Mathrubhumi and Malayala Manorama. Two of the state's most important institutions are the Catholic Church and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the CPI(M). Each long ago started a newspaper to speak to, and for the faithful. Indeed, Deepika (the light) is the oldest still-publishing newspaper in Kerala, founded in Kottayam by Carmelite priests in 1887. The CPl(M)'s Deshabhimani, founded in 1942, had a rocky history of conflict with both British and post-independence governments. By the 1980s, however, as Mathrubhumi and Malayala Manorama both strove to become broad-based, appeal-to- everyone newspapers, both the Catholic and the Communist newspapers were forced to change their approach. Deshabhimani passed Deepika in circulation in 1983, and by 1987, had established a marked advantage (74,000 to 54,000). But both lay far in the wake of the major dailies (here we must add the Trivandrum-based Kerala Kaumudi - circulation 1995: 1,32,000). As the costs of newsprint, equipment and even news gathering rose, the need for advertising became inescapable, but major advertisers wanted readers, not simply devotees. Both newspapers set out to broaden their appeal. The resident editor of Deshabhimani's Trivandrum edition caught the sense of what was happening as he explained why his newspaper now covered the major festivals of all religions. The religiously inclined, he said, could read the newspaper and, if they wished, pray for Nayanar, the CPI(M) leader, to be elected. From 1988, the CPI(M) agonised, debated and slowly moved towards advertising agents, sports pages, marriage advertisements and coverage of religious festivals. By 1993, it was claimed that advertising took up a quarter to a third of any edition. The claim was now made with pride; once it might have been stated with a cynical guffaw. Deepika also had to change its style. In 1989, priests withdrew from the conduct of the newspaper, and it was made a public limited company with about half the shares held by the Catholic Church. In 1992, it brought in as managing director and managing editor, a former marketing manager from a fertiliser company. The emphasis on managing and marketing shows the trend: the transition from
fertilisers to newspapers was not judged to be difficult for a good marketing man. Deepika started new publications: an evening daily in the nearby city of Cochin, a financial weekly and specialist magazines for job-seekers and farmers. It hired young journalists who eagerly investigated local stories, set out to rock boats and dismissed Malayala Manorama and Mathrubhumi as, "the monopoly press". This homogenisation-or broadening-of daily newspapers' coverage to appeal to as wide an audience as possible had gone on in Malayala Manorama from the 1960s. Kerala newspapers tended to cater for particular social groups and interests. Malayala Manorama therefore was held to be a Syrian Christian paper for central Kerala; Mathrubhumi, a nayar paper for the northern half of the state; Deshabhimani, for the CPM; Deepika, for Catholics of all kinds; Kerala Kaumudi, for ezhavas (lower-caste Hindus) of southern Kerala. However, when Malayala Manorama started its Kozhikode edition in 1966, it became "a big supporter of the Muslim community", Muslims accounting for more than 30% of the population of northern Kerala. To create inroads into Mathrubhumi's circulation and to attract new readers, the newspaper changed its focus. When Mathrubhumi opened in Trivandrum, 15 years later, it did the same thing. It had once a convention that its reporter in Kottayam, hometown of Malayala Manorama, was always a Hindu. Nalapat, the young editor, appointed Christians and told them to look for stories about Christians-how else would Christians, whose money was as good as anyone else's, come to read the newspaper? "We were the ones", said Malayala Manorama's news editor in Kozhikode (a Muslim), "who [put] ... local stories on the front pages ... [and] people were very much crazy because their name appears [or] their photo appears. We identified with the masses". To make a newspaper "identify with the masses"-to localise it-to get close to the readers-is in some ways a geographical task: distance and isolation have to be overcome. Newspapers must have pages in which people see their own and their neighbours' pictures and stories. They must also see these things at the right time: if it is a daily newspaper, usually this means in the morning, usually in India by seven in the morning. Computer technology and offset presses have allowed printing centres, bringing out easier-to-read newspapers, to come closer to widening circles of Indians. This is especially true in Kerala, which, in any case, is often described as a vast 'urban village'-continuous semi-urban, semi-rural settlement running from north to south. But to move a newspaper closer to local readers means the whole locality must be the focus of the local pages. In the past, Deepika might have been the paper for Catholics, Deshabhimani for Marxists, but now to maximise readership, every newspaper must aim to cover every social group-to try to report the whole scene of its operations, not merely the bits of it that its publishers might specifically regard as worthy or their own. In theory, this might mean
that individuals come to know more about the practices of their neighbours than ever before and that the newspaper habit creates-or reinforces-a sense of shared geography and related customs. Kerala suggests that to expand circulation, it is necessary to localise a newspaper's geographical coverage and broaden its social coverage. Three other aspects must be considered in a discussion of the Malayalam press: the place of periodicals, the question of cost and the effects of television. Malayalam weekly magazines indicate the importance to readers of familiar things close to hand. The largest circulating periodical in India in the mid-1990s, and for many years before, has been one of two Malayalam weeklies: Manorama Weekly or Mangalam. In 1995, Manorama Weekly sold 1.2 million copies a week; Mangalam, more than 9,00,000. Priced at Rs 1.80 for Manorama Weekly and Rs 2 for Mangalam, together the two magazines were purchased each week by one in every 10 adults living in Kerala. The price equalled that of a cup of tea or coffee. A full rice meal in a basic restaurant cost Rs 6. What did readers get for this small investment? Most of all, stories. A 40-page issue of Manorama Weekly might contain 23 pages of stories - one or two short stories and six or seven serialised novels, all of them about Kerala people and most of them set in the present. On the front cover, always the face - never the torso - of a pretty and very proper girl. In the issue of April 17, 1993, for example, she also happened to be the daughter of two nayar teachers at Nair Service Society College, Changanacherry. There had to be no mistake that the magazine was for all Malayalis. Manorama publications long ago began working hard to overcome any suspicion that they published "only for Christians". The magazines usually carried an interview, a health column, recipes, readers' letters and advice-to-readers. In Mangalam, the latter is called 'For Women Only'. Though very puritanical about sex (its owner banned advertisements for brassieres), Mangalam often carries a lurid news feature - 'Victims of Cruel Fate'. Suicides and murders are favourites, but, an editor pointed out, they generally have a positive side. The story of a murdered taxi driver in 1992 brought Rs 13,000 in donations for his widow, and the 'Victims of Cruel Fate' feature was said to have collected and distributed more than Rs 10 million over 20 years. The intense rivalry between the two weeklies in the 1980s illustrated the blending of Kerala issues with the techniques of international capitalism. Founded in 1969 by M.C. Varghese, who once worked in the production department of Deepika, Mangalam is a job-printer-to-media-moghul story. Having an interest in people and believing he knew what they liked, Varghese started a magazine with 250 copies printed on a treadle press. In 1984, it hit 7,70,000 and passed Manorama Weekly (6,37,000). Until Mangalam actually took the lead, the Manorama people "did not take it that seriously". Once
threatened, however, they called in the Market and Research Group (MARG) from Bombay, "felt the pulse of the reader and changed our style a bit". By 1990, the two publications were on roughly, even terms, selling about a million copies each. Subsequently, Manorama Weekly recovered its lead of former times. It did so by asking readers what they wanted to read. It commissioned serials on themes that market-research indicated would appeal to readers and developed plots as the stories went along, again in consultation with target groups. The magazine hired writers to produce novels from story ideas that had already been tested with market-research groups of readers. At Mangalam, M.C. Varghese credited his success to his "people interest"; At the revamped Manorama Weekly, the recipes of modern marketing replaced the intuition of Charles Dickens. Though no women were involved in the production of either magazine, both magazines agreed that the majority of their readers were women. The editor of Manorama Weekly in 1993 estimated women were 70-75% of its readers. There was an element of condescension in this. We wrote, they said at Mangalam, for the "lower strata of society". But for the two magazines to sell two million copies a week in a state with only 30 million people, suggested that a lot of men were furtively reading Mangalam or Manorama Weekly, disguised perhaps behind a copy of a 'reputable' daily or, given Kerala's powerful Communist tradition, the works of Karl Marx. What is important for our discussion is the way in which publications were compelled to seek as many potential readers as possible: all religions, all castes, all genders. To survive and succeed, print needs mass readership which comes only from such widening and including. As India's most literate state with its most buoyant newspaper industry, Kerala may offer a standard by which to gauge the constraints on readership imposed by levels of literacy, wealth and television penetration. By the 1990s, virtually every adult in Kerala was able to read and write. Mass literacy campaigns in the early 1990s were held to have eliminated the last pockets of illiteracy. Indeed, at Mangalam, they claimed that many old people came to literacy classes because they wanted to be able to read Mangalam for themselves. For a number of years, the ratio of dailies-to-people stuck at between 50 and 60 dailies per 1000 Keralites. This was far higher than the all-India average of about 30:1,000 or the next-best languages which were in the range of 30-to- 40 dailies per 1000 speakers. Figures for the 1990s are ambiguous, though the 1992 rise in the circulation of Malayalam dailies, which would give a 70:1000 ratio, seems more accurate than the surprisingly low daily circulations published by the Registrar of Newspapers for India for 1991. Since the 1980s, readership has not grown as fast as the proprietors of Malayalam publications would wish. The National Readership Survey of 1995
(NRS-1995) found that no Malayalam daily ranked in the top 10 Indian dailies in terms of readership. This results from the fact that a number of Malayalam dailies compete so intensely that no single newspaper, not even Malayala Manorama, dominates. Similarly, Kerala households appear to want to buy their own newspaper, and the number of individual readers of each copy may be declining in Kerala, even though circulations continue to rise. At Mangalam, for example, the editors maintained that some families bought three copies because each member wanted a personal copy to take to work or school. Malayalam newspaper circulations also illustrated the limitations of purchasing power. The state of Kerala falls below all India averages for per capita income. And the national averages themselves are low. NRS-1995 estimated that 75% of urban households in India had monthly incomes of less than Rs 3,000 (about US $85). In Kerala, a family of four needs perhaps 40 kg of rice per month - a cost of about Rs 300 for good rice at 1993 prices. A daily newspaper - Rs 60 per month - may represent the sacrifice of eight kg of rice or nearly a week's supply. The 70:1000 people-to- dailies ratio of Kerala in 1992 may represent as high a consumption of newspapers as India can expect without major increases in wealth. Finally, the effect of television on reading habits in Kerala in 1990s underlined the importance of lively, local close-to-home content for successful mass media. Though Doordarshan, the government-controlled national television network, had been available in Kerala since the early 1980s, its production standards were poor, even in Hindi, the language in which most broadcasting is done. Production in Malayalam was limited and uninspiring. The start in 1991 of Star TV, a multi-channel satellite broadcaster based in Hong Kong, and the launch of Zee TV, a Hindi channel on the same satellite in October 1992, brought uncensored (by Indian governments at least), slicker television to Indian viewers, but none of it in Malayalam. Asianet, a Malayalam channel owned by Indian investors and beamed at Kerala from a Russian satellite, began in September 1993 but faltered in the face of bureaucratic delays in connecting Kerala homes to the signal (either by cable or reception dish). Until television in Malayalam was sufficiently widespread, immediate and local, it was newspapers and magazines that still reflected and embellished daily life in ways which induced people to spend their money. It would be foolhardy to argue, however that Malayalam newspapers, because they have long led India on most statistical measures, provide models of the future for other parts of the country. Television has just begun to transform Indian media, and its effects may render obsolete all previous experience. The Malayalam experience does, however, illustrate the force of capitalist practices and international technology, yet the necessity of adapting those forces constantly and skilfully to
local conditions. The contest to control Mathrubhumi exemplifies the sentiment that can be aroused when outsiders affront local honour. The key to expanding circulations, according to editors at Mangalam, is, "involvement of the weekly with the day-to-day social life of the people".
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Marathi: Big Newspapers Are Elephants By Robin Jeffrey
To understand the Marathi press, one needs to appreciate two cities-Mumbai (Bombay) and Pune (Poona). Mumbai is the Manhattan of India-a buzzing, multi- lingual magnet of an island. As well as the industrial and commercial focus of India, it is the base for the advertising industry and for India's two biggest newspaper chains, The Times of India and The Indian Express. Pune, on the other hand, is Maharashtra's Boston (indeed, both have brahmins) where history, culture and more cultivated ways of life are supposed to prevail. Mumbai's magnetism has meant that it is not a solely, or perhaps even predominantly, Marathi city. Migrants come from all over India to seek their fortunes in what ought to be called, if New York is the Big Apple, the Big Mango. Virtually, all of India's languages are spoken in Mumbai, and daily newspapers in Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Sindhi, Tamil and Malayalam are published here. Marathi journalism, on the other hand, first flowered in Pune under the renowned patriot Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1857-1920) in the 1880s, and Marathi's dowager daily, Sakal, began in Pune in 1932, another product of nationalist idealism. Mumbai's dominance distorts any attempt to take simple snapshots of 'Maharashtra' as a whole. Though Maharashtra in the 1990s was India's most urbanised major state with 39% of the population living in cities, one-third of those urbanites lived in Mumbai. After Kerala and Goa, Maharashtra was India's most literate state, but 17% of literates lived in Mumbai, though it accounted for only 12.5% of the population. Maharashtra appeared as India's most industrialised state, but most of that industry was concentrated in Mumbai and its immediate neighbourhood. In rural Maharashtra, particularly the dry districts of the east, literacy and urbanisation were below all-lndia averages. As a consequence of these contrasts, Marathi journalism acquired two distinct styles. One is embodied in Sakal, the other in the intensely competitive commuter newspapers of Mumbai like Navakal, Mahanagar and the Shiv Sena's Samna. The two styles also capture two of the motives for publishing a newspaper: idealism and profit. In some ways, Sakal was a classic newspaper of the nationalist period. But its idealistic founder, N.B. Parulekar had been influenced by American papers during his years at Columbia University. And though he started Sakal (morning) to advance Gandhi's movement for independence, he also introduced genuine daily journalism to Marathi. Previously, as a veteran Sakal journalist recalled, Marathi journalism had amounted to opinions published two or three times a
week; the staff went home at 7 pm. Parulekar's Sakal hired reporters, paid stringers in small towns and covered crucial local topics like fluctuations in the price of mangoes. In its first years, Sakal appears to have been ridiculed and deplored in much the same way that old elites scoff at the expanding popular press of the 1990s. "People used to joke about its [Sakal's] district and taluka correspondents' reports about village fairs, pilgrimages and crops." But Sakal built a place in the hearts of the people of Pune and its neighbourhood-and a circulation. By the early 1960s, Sakal sold 69,000 copies a day. The Mumbai-based Marathi dailies of the two chains (The Indian Express and The Times of India) sold 1,22,000 and 75,000, though Mumbai had a population five times greater than Pune. Sakal in the 1960s represented "a real success", according to a widely travelled editor, and "a standing testimony to the viability of the provincial press". Though begun as a part of the nationalist cause, it established itself as a successful business by making day-to-day concerns, not just of Pune but its rural neighbourhood, a preoccupation. By the 1980s, this became a recognised essential for any Indian language newspaper seeking circulation. But Parulekar brought such techniques to Sakal from the 1930s and showed that they complemented, rather than detracted from, the goals of the nationalist movement. By the 1960s, Sakal kept full-time correspondents, each with a telephone, in every town in its neighbourhood. It ran training camps for its journalists, promotions and cultural events for its readers and letters to the editor on its front page. Parulekar converted Sakal into a private limited company in 1948, with himself, his French wife, their daughter and one or two other shareholders. When he died in 1973, he left the paper with practices and traditions that wore well. It survived the first shocks of India's revolution in newspaper technology and carried on for more than 10 years. But he also left a complicated ownership structure: a minority of shares went to his wife and daughter but most went to individual trustees and to a trust. Widow and daughter do not appear to have got on well with the trustees and the trust, which put their shares on the market at the end of 1984. The Pawar family, whose best known member was Maharashtra politician, Sharad Pawar (chief minister, 1978-80, 1988-90, 1993-95), bought them over the opposition of Parulekar's wife and daughter who went to the courts. At the same time, the rapid changes overtaking the newspaper industry, and the death of the long-serving editor, S.G. Mungekar in 1985, reinforced the sense that Sakal was at a turning point. The sale and renovation of Sakal illustrate the increasingly tight interlock between capitalism and newspapers. In the early 1980s Sakal's circulation fell when newspapers elsewhere in India, including its Mumbai rivals the Maharashtra Times and Loksatta, were
recording rapid increases. The Pawar family turned the paper into a public limited company in 1989, and P.G. Pawar, a brother of the politician, became managing director. Emphasising marketing, he sent representatives around India to promote the paper and overseas to study marketing techniques. Prior to the acquisition by the Pawar family, Sakal had been competently run, but old-fashioned and perhaps over- staffed. The new owners took it in the same direction as renovating newspapers around India: towards marketing surveys, new management practices, aggressive selling of advertising and improvement in labour-saving technology. "I sell my news and views to the reader", P.G. Pawar said, "and I sell my readers to the advertisers". Sakal's annual turnover grew by 5 times in eight years-from Rs 60 million to Rs 300 million. The emphasis on selling and marketing was in keeping with the trend at successful newspapers throughout India. But the process could not be straightforward and simple. Some employees had joined Sakal when Parulekar was alive, and one felt in the offices and newsrooms of Pune in 1993 a sense of transition-of new brooms brushing up against old dogs. There was a sense, too, of attempting to learn, or define, a new business. For example, one of Sakal's corporate advisers, whose job was to promote advertising, was "a housewife until three years ago" and a former classmate of the managing director. In the hunt for advertising, "we experimented", she said. From 1990, Sakal began to look for advertisements outside of Maharashtra, and she and her colleagues travelled India to promote Sakal and "learnt as we went along". India's economic 'liberalisation' that began in 1991 greatly aided the hunt. Between 1990 and 1993, Sakal raised its advertising rates three times, but the ads kept flowing in as Sakal told advertisers about the purchasing power of rural Maharashtra, and television manufacturers and financial houses looked for ways to sell products and raise capital. Sakal co-operated with financial institutions to turn its small-town offices, promotions and good name, which in Parulekar's time were deployed for drama festivals and grow-more-food campaigns, into investment seminars and introductions to the stock market. Every meeting in a district or even a taluk town was said to draw 200 or 300 people. The emphasis on advertising surprised and annoyed some of Sakal's readers and employees. "The concept [of selling ads] didn't exist" previously at Sakal. If a reader wished to place an ad, he was welcome to do so; but to go touting for ads was thought to be demeaning; and a newspaper employee whose job was simply to sell advertising would have been seen as a wastrel who simply roamed around performing no useful service. Such views had no place in an expanding daily newspaper in the 1980s. Sakal did, however, harbour characteristics of earlier times when commercial concerns were important yet less insistent, and the new
management could turn older ways to new ends, sometimes with fruitful effect. Sakal's circulation manager in 1993 had been with the newspaper for 32 years, and circulation manager since 1985. Circulation records were kept in ledgers, the department was still to be computerised, and his methods stressed the need for intimate knowledge of the newspaper's agents. His white, long sleeved, heavily ironed shirt, carefully clipped moustache and standard-issue horn-rimmed spectacles captured the placid civility found in the best Indian offices of the pre-1991 era. And Sakal had been a successful newspaper during that time. By 1993, the knowledge of agents, distribution and market towns had to be exploited urgently. "The competition is growing so severely", said Sakal's young deputy general manager, formerly a college lecturer in English, a purchasing officer and assistant secretary of the Pune Chamber of Commerce and Industries. This] must of course be welcomed. It appears that only the papers that are at No I and No 2 will really survive...Only by way of increasing circulation can I push my paper to No I position, and...for the last two years we have been all the more aggressive on the circulation-promotion-subscription point of view. But that aggression, he said, had to be married to the sobriety that long-time readers associated with Sakal. Sakal would not print its name on balloons, kites and T- shirts. Sakal aimed to educate, inform and improve as well as sell. The Marathi newspaper industry in some ways provides a microcosm of Maharashtra, both geographically and socially. Geographically, four major newspapers divide the state among them. Sakal dominates Pune and through its edition in Kolhapur, the south (circulation all editions 1995: 2,57,000). Loksatta (circulation all editions 1995: 3,24,000) of the Indian Express reigns in Mumbai, a clear leader over its rival from The Times of India, the Maharashtra Times (1,58,000). Based in Nagpur, Lokmat (circulation all editions 1995: 2,64,000) led in the east of the state. Founded as a weekly in 1952 by Jawaharlal Darda (b.1923), a Congress politician and minister, Lokmat became a daily in 1971. Darda's son, Vijay Jawaharlal Darda (b.1950) became the managing director in the 1990s. It is perhaps not fanciful to suggest that the readiness of the Pawar family to acquire Sakal in 1985 may have had something to do with the advantages that ownership of Lokmat appeared to have given the Darda family. Competition in the 1990s was intense, and the newspapers jumped, like moves in a game of checkers, into towns of rural Maharashtra. Loksatta put editions into Pune (1988) and Nagpur (1992) to challenge the two rivals in their strongholds. Sakal started an edition in Nasik (1989) to confront Lokmat, which itself began publishing from Ahmadnagar (1988) to encroach on Sakal territory.
Socially, however, Maharashtra's contrasts glared most strikingly in Mumbai. The sprawling city's commuter railways, bubbling economy and swelling population created a newspaper market unrivalled in India. Morning dailies in English, Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi rubbed shoulders with an array of evening newspapers aimed at commuters. Among both categories were tough, scrappy papers that conjured up images of scruffy, broken-nosed street-fighters. Such newspapers aimed for different audiences, and the old elites deplored them; but they won readers and were capable of provoking riots and demonstrations-at least against themselves, if not among citizens of Mumbai. Navakal, Aapla Mahanagar and Samna, had much of what even the new managers at Sakal deplored. Navakal's circulation in the 1990s often exceeded 3,50,000, which in Canada or Australia would have made it one of the biggest papers in the land. In India, it ranked in the top ten. But Navakal was produced by one family in premises no bigger than an average Canadian or Australian family home, and Navakal was the oldest continuously publishing daily newspaper in Marathi. Its editorial offices stood on the second floor of a yellow-washed three-storey building with three roller-doors at ground level. The presses and storage area for newsprint took the ground floor, rather like a garage under a house. Navakal was run by a peculiar genius, both ridiculed and admired in the journalism of western India. His family had been in the business since the first world war. Navakal was founded in 1923 by K.P. Khadilkar, a Chitpavan brahmin, "one of the trusted lieutenants of Tilak", twice editor of Tilak's Kesri and a noted playwright, "the Shakespeare of Maharashtra". The paper was said to have "reached the zenith of its popularity" when the British convicted Khadilkar of sedition in 1929 and the father of the current (1996) owner became editor. Circulation fell sharply after independence, and when Nilakantha Khadilkar (b.1934) joined his father in the publication in 1956, it was, he said, down to 800 a day. It staggered to 5,000-6,000 where it remained through the 1960s, limited by ancient flatbed presses that could not produce more than 10,000 copies a day. Nilakantha Khadilkar's journalistic recipe captured essential elements of newspaper success, a complex blend of attention to detail, business sense, idealism and art. First, a newspaper had to pay its bills, and in Navakal's position, with little capital, it could only do this by making money on its sales, something very few newspapers do. Navakal was always a four-page broadsheet. In 1993, it sold for 75 paise, less than a third of the price of many dailies and half the price of most; but they ran to 10 or 12 pages and their per-page cost was therefore less than Navakal's." So Navakal becomes the costliest newspaper to purchase",
Khadilkar concluded. But people do not carry a pocket calculator when they buy their newspaper. Navakal's notably cheap price gave it a huge advantage among poor people who wanted to read. With any other Mumbai daily at Rs 1.50 or more, you had a newspaper to read; but with Navakal at 75 paise, you had a newspaper and half the price of a cup of tea still left in your hand. But how could a brahmin of the old elite, grandson of 'the Shakespeare of Maharashtra', attract readers for whom such trifling calculations were important? In part, it was because Navakal showed textbook attention to newspaper economics, production and cheap distribution. Big newspapers are elephants; they can't move quickly. I move quickly. For instance,... for newspapers there are S[tate] T[ransport] buses right from 10 o'clock at night so I catch the first ST bus which travels long distance:.. all of them reach [distant towns in Maharashtra] before 6 o'clock [in the morning]. On Mumbai island, Navakal's five motorised three-wheelers beat the big dailies because the latter used the same truck to transport two or three different newspapers. If one was late in production, the truck waited and everything was delayed. People must have their newspaper when they want it-early, in the case of a morning daily. Navakal got the paper out quickly because it printed only one edition which it sent throughout Mumbai and Maharashtra. Readers then were not buying Navakal for the latest news. The "local news coverage of Navakal cannot compare with a paper with 12 pages", Khadilkar admitted. "We select [and highlight] one news [item] ... and that is the news about which people discuss". In short, Navakal's choice was intended to provide the day's teashop conversation for hundreds of thousands. The editor's inspiration was something no capital according to Khadilkar, could buy. A good headline will at least make a difference of five or 10,000 [copies]. Every day. I have judgement that this headline will bring me so much. If you write it in this manner, my circulation will increase so much. Out of 10 judgements, 9 will come true. The paper had also to be readable. Navakal was set in notably large type-14 points or about a quarter larger than the normal body type of other dailies in Marathi Hindi. Print clarity was crucial. ...with offset, even with the first offset machine, printing will be as good as that of The Times of India because...attention to printing...[is] more important than the price you pay for the machine. In offset attention is more important. In the old days, [with the] best machinery you get best result. Not so now.
See this "g" [he said, examining a muddy character in The Times of India]. Is that the way for the biggest capitalist newspaper to print a "g"? I am taking care of this letter also. Because now...I can beat them in quality of writing...[and] also [in printing]. I know what it means to be without money knowing all the time that I am better than you, but you have [more equipment]. Navakal had to reach readers early; had to be easy and inviting to read. But why did readers want a four-page paper with great many lottery results and cinema advertisements and not a lot of news? Much of the answer appeared to lie in the unique resonance that Khadilkar's long front-page editorial essays achieved with a wide range of readers. The deft style was said to appeal both to the values of a once-genteel but now bypassed high-caste elite and to the cynicism of the Marathi working class. Poor readers welcomed the allusions to classical literature and religious themes as a window on, and an invitation to be part of, a world of 'high culture'. Higher-caste readers accepted such devices as natural. Navakal played on the theme that the rich and powerful systematically exploited the poor and deserving and that Navakal was one of the few voices able and unafraid to speak. I am honest-that is the only extraordinary thing about me [Khadilkar said]. And people believe that I am honest-that is more important. People believe that everybody else is dishonest. The editors [of the big papers] are paid editors. They are writing to the tune ... of their owners, which is part of my propaganda-that they are hired ... hired by whom? By the big capitalists to serve their interests. They cannot write the truth; only I can write the truth. One per cent of the population ... rules this country by deceiving; they are exploiting 99% just by deceiving... From where [do] they bring [get] money? From the people on the streets ... [The] poor are exploited...I put all these things with all my heart, because...here is a newspaper which reflects our values, reflects our anguish and which attacks the government and the big shots...and people now love it [the paper]. Outsiders might describe Navakal as a "down-market paper meant for the coolies", but a circulation of 3,50,000 (ABC, July-December 1994) for a four-page newspaper demonstrated that newspapers were more than monopoly printing presses and management systems. Navakal represented inspired demagoguery. It was often stridently anti- Muslim and frequently in tune with the Shiv Sena, Mumbai's
Hindu-chauvinist political movement. But what the paper demonstrated so well was the unpredictable mix of business sense, technical mastery and cultural intimacy central to successful newspapers, as they struggle to become part of people's routines of life in newly reading societies. Two other Marathi newspapers of Mumbai strengthen this impression that sensitivity to, and reflection of, popular interest and prejudice are crucial in spreading the newspaper habit. Samna is the daily of the Shiv Sena, the aggressive political organisation built around Bal Thackeray and a programme of Hindu and Marathi supremacy. Thackeray, who is listed as Samna's editor, himself worked for many years as a cartoonist in English-language newspapers. The paper was founded in 1989 as the Shiv Sena moved away from its original Mumbai-for-Marathis focus, which regarded south Indian immigrants as important foes, to an anti-Muslim, India-for-Hindus emphasis which had wider electoral potential. In the mid-1990s, Samna had an audited circulation of 96, 000. In 1990, during the first round of the campaign to destroy the mosque at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, Samna was at the forefront of the familiar newspaper war. On 3 November 1990, Navakal had brought out an early edition with a front-page headline that 20 of the would-be stormers of the mosque had been killed. It re-plated-Khadilkar usually brought out only one edition-for a new edition that raised the number of headline dead to 100. Samna also decided on 100 dead "in an eight column headline in reverse types-above which the paper cordially invited the prime minister and chief minister of Uttar Pradesh to black their faces in shame". Neither paper of course had a correspondent in Ayodhya. In the second and successful attack on the mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992, Samna and Thackeray declared "this is Dharma Yudh [religious war] and not confined to Mumbai alone, and in the whole country you [i.e., Muslims] will have to pay the price for it." Samna in December 1992 and January 1993 played a textbook role in disseminating fears and stereotypes. In creating awareness of larger social groups-in transcending neighbourhood and word-of-mouth communities-newspapers are fundamental. Samna in the 1990s did not create Hindus and Muslims or even suspicions between them. But it embedded in Mumbai exaggerated tales of indignities done faraway. It gave such tales the dignity and durability of print. And its calls for "redress"- "It is time for Hindus to act ... The next few days will be ours" - profited from the stamina, "authority" and transportability that is the essence and strength of print. Samna had a privileged position which grew out of the way in which newspapers and journalists control themselves and are controlled by others. As the voice of the Shiv Sena, Samna was protected by the most aggressive bully-boy operation in Mumbai. According to critics, no newspaper in Mumbai enjoyed the same degree of free speech as
Samna. Even the biggest organisations like The Times of India took pains to avoid falling out with the Shiv Sena. A turgid piece on Indian heroes written by a graduate student and published in the Illustrated Weekly of India, the venerable magazine of The Times of India group, brought threats against the group and abject apologies from the magazine's editor. The article had made the mistake of trying to discuss the documented history of Shivaji, the Marathi hero of the17th century from whom the Shiv Sena takes its name. More telling, however, for the nexus between political gangs, newspapers and urbanisation were the attacks on another Mumbai evening daily Aapla Mahanagar. Founded in 1990 by a young journalist, Nikhil Wagle, Mahanagar was wrecked and its staff attacked by ruffians from the Shiv Sena in October 1991, for "criticising Thackeray". Mahanagar was on the street the next day with an editorial saying that it accepted "the challenge" thrown down by the Shiv Sena. "And ... these people, the Shiv Sena,...are so fascist",Wagle recalled, that ...after my editorial...it was a comic thing: their entire office was protected. They got police protection, because they thought that [when] I wrote ... "we will accept the ... challenge", that I will attack you [ i.e., that we were going to attack them]. It was so foolish! Politically, Wagle and his colleagues were independent journalists, committed more to putting out a paper people would read than to any particular line. Indeed, he confessed a grudging admiration for Khadilkar and Navakal for their ability to read the mind of the people and to be many things to many different groups. In terms of newspaper economics, the conflict with the Shiv Sena was beneficial: within three years, Mahanagar was selling more than 1,20,000 copies a day, and its Hindi counterpart, 60,000. Mahanagar continued to fight: Wagle was jailed for four days by the Maharashtra legislature in 1994 for ridiculing its procedures. And the evening newspaper market in Mumbai grew to well over 3,00,000 copies in the mid-1990s, by far the largest evening market in India. The success of evening newspapers in Mumbai contrasts with the relative lack of importance of weekly magazines in Marathi. It is as if the life of the city looks for news- accounts and explanations of what is going on in the streets-while in less frenetic, more rural parts of India (Tamil Nadu, Kerala or even Gujarat, for example), people have the leisure to absorb the fiction of weekly magazines. Only one weekly in Marathi, published by The Indian Express group, exceeded 1,00,000 copies (1,03,000) in the mid-1990s; Sakal's weekly managed only 37, 000. What does this examination of the Marathi press tell us about the dynamics and ramifications of the newspaper business in India? It
leads irresistibly towards considerations of influence and control. Perhaps nowhere in India is the press judged to be more capable of influencing - inciting - people in the street than in Mumbai. Perhaps nowhere too are the efforts to control the press - to intimidate, to muzzle - more pronounced. Such efforts extend from the attacks on Aapla Mahanagar and the imprisonment of Wagle by the legislature to the threats to The Times of India group after the publication of the article on Shivaji. Outcomes of these struggles do not necessarily confirm one proposition about newspapers under threat: that, "if officials do not resort to extreme coercion and civil associations have some room for manoeuvre, it is the large one [i e, big newspaper organisations] that can put up the best fight". Wagle and Khadilkar make more waves in Mumbai than The Times of India's publications. "The Times of India has lots of things to lose", said Wagle. "They have big building[s], they have big office[s]". A few big newspaper chains are easier to control and mould than a dozen Wagles and Khadilkars. Size-central locations, large investments in presses and offices-can make big newspaper organisations vulnerable. In the short-term at least, it is easier for a hostile state to turn off the power to two or three big newspaper plants (as Indira Gandhi's officials did in New Delhi on the night her "emergency" began on June 25-26, 1975) or throw a police cordon around their offices than to close a score of Khadilkars and Wagles scattered round a large state. This raises a second area in which the Marathi press provides illustration. Individual genius and imagination are fundamental in the newspaper business. To flourish, a newspaper must be integral to the culture in which it lives. The operations of Khadilkar and Wagle-and, indeed, Samna of the Shiv Sena as well-are subtle, constantly changing responses to the Marathi-readers of Mumbai. Market research aims to achieve the same goals and no doubt sometimes can; but the intuition of the inspired editor are inimitable- and far cheaper. Marathi offers greater scope for small newspapers and peculiar geniuses because Mumbai dominates Maharashtra yet Mumbai is not an overwhelmingly Marathi city. Because various languages-Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam-are all heard and read on the streets of Mumbai, concentration of newspaper ownership has gone less far. The market for the Marathi press is more segmented-between the regions of a great state, between Mumbai and Pune, between them and the rest of Maharashtra and in Mumbai itself, between Marathi and other languages. In these segments, various newspapers and proprietors can survive and even thrive. On the other hand, in regions where a single language prevails almost alone-Kerala or Andhra Pradesh, for example-consolidation of the industry may come quickly once the compulsions of capitalism arrive in earnest. In such regions, one or two organisations may soon eclipse all others.
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Malayala Manorama One bright morning, more than a century ago, Malayala Manorama came into being. Founded by Kandathil Varghese Mappillai on March 14th 1888, Malayala Manorama has had a stimulating effect on the minds of the Malayalees. It spurred social progress, defined cultural sensibilities. It has been an overwhelming presence while reflecting and exploring the life and times of Kerala. Manorama has had good times and hard times; it has known tyrant's thunder and human tenderness. Encounters with extinction were part of its exciting evolution. It has been a saga of courage and endurance, of triumph and excellence, of dedication and commitment to the people and their aspirations. The years have not blunted our mission; we breathe the ideals of our illustrious founder and his visionary successors. The long list of best-selling products 1.The WEEK 2.Bashaposhini 3.Karshakashree 4.Manorama Weekly 5.Manorama Annual 6.Vijayaveedhi 7.Vanitha 8.Vanitha Hindi 9.Kalikkudukka 10.Magic Pot 11.Balarama 12.Balarama Digest 13.Amarchitrakatha 14.Thozhilveedhi 15.Knowledge Adventure CDROM 16.Hindi Year Book 17.English Year Book
18.Tamil Year Book 19.Malayalam Year Book 20.Bengali Year Book 21.MalayalaManorama Newspaper -- is a testimony to this fact. Our field of vision has expanded, our horizons have widened. As the world goes digital, we are stepping into cyberspace. For long ago, our destiny became interlinked with yours. For more than a century Malayala Manorama has had a stimulating effect on the mind of the Malayali. It spurred social progress, defined cultural sensibilities, and even set political agenda. It has been an overwhelming presence while reflecting and exploring the life and times of Kerala. Manorama has had good times and hard times; it has known tyrant's thunder and human tenderness. Encounters with extinction were part of its exciting evolution. It has been a saga of courage and endurance, of triumph and excellence, of dedication and commitment to the people and their aspirations. Long ago, our destiny became interlinked with theirs. This link is thicker than the printing ink. It transcends language. Banegaon, in earth-quaked Latur, was a heap of crushed sunflowers. Fifteen months later, we sang the story of its rebirth. We rebuilt the village and saw sunflower smiles on rustic faces. Hearts beat for us in Kerala. Hundreds of hearts for whom we ensured free surgery. For the good earth, we honour the unsung farmer with the 'Karshakashree' Award. Our field of vision has expanded, our horizons have widened. We have publications in five languages, and from print we have stepped into television and cyberspace. The years have not blunted our mission; we breathe the ideals of our illustrious founder and his visionary successors. The following pages tell the story of Malayala Manorama-and how it has gone beyond journalism. One bright morning, more than a century ago, the first joint stock publishing company of India came into being. It was founded by Kandathil Varghese Mappillai at Kottayam, a small town in the princely state of Travancore, onMarch 14, 1888. The great poet Kerala Varma named it Malayala Manorama. It turned out to be an enchanting, enduring name. The company started with one hundred shares of Rs.100 each. The investors paid in four equal installments. The first installment was good enough to buy a press. It was a small hand press, a Hopkinson & Cope, made in London. The press was installed in a vacant building, which would later become a school chapel. A local craftsman, Konthi Achari, made the types for the
imported press. It was a Herculean task. Being phonetic, the Malayalam script had a few hundred letters for the 53 vowels and consonants and their different combinations. The first issue of Malayala Manorama appeared on March 22, 1890, while Kottayam was hosting a highly popular cattle fair. It was a four-page weekly newspaper, published every Saturday. There were a few other newspapers around, mostly organs of Christian churches. But most people in Travancore did not have basic human rights. As Varghese Mappillai was a man of letters, there was a profusion of poetic outpourings and literary debates in Manorama. But its heart was with the underdogs. Its very first editorial was a fervent plea for education of Pulayas, untouchables who could not even walk on public roads. It was the voice of human dignity. Thus began Manorama's unflagging fight against injustice and iniquity, and people grew close to it. Manorama grew with them, too. From a weekly it grew into a bi-weekly in 1901, a tri-weekly in 1918 and a daily in 1928. Today, the daily is published from eight centres in Kerala: Kottayam, Kozhikode, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Palakkad, Kannur, Kollam and Thrissur. The new unit at Malappuram was inaugurated in February, 2001. Manorama Online, the Internet portal was inaugurated in20 June, 2003. The march goes on, winning hearts every step of the way. Kandathil Varghese Mappillai was only 31 when he founded Malayala Manorama. Already, he was an accomplished writer. A high thinker. And very enterprising. He was a shroff like his father. But, unlike his father, he had no head for figures. His head was full of dreams and poems. He quit the job and become Editor of Kerala Mitram, a Malayalam newspaper run by a Gujarati businessman called Devji Bhimji, inKochi. Later, he taught Malayalam at C.M.S. College,Kottayam, an early cradle of English education in India. He launched Malayala Manorama while he was a teacher. Even the Maharajah of Travancore, Sree Moolam Tirunal, held him in esteem. The Maharajah gave Manorama the Royal Coat of Arms. With a slight variation, it adorns the newspaper's logo. It was an honour from a ruler who established the first legislative council in India in 1888, the year Manorama was born. Varghese Mappillai campaigned, through editorials, for greater power for the legislature. He sparked many a political debate. And he spent reams on literature, throwing the pages of Manorama open to the finest poets and writers. He also nurtured new talent. Soon after its birth Manorama triggered a war over alliteration. It was the fiercest literary debate in the history of Malayalam. Literature was intoxicating stuff those days. In 1891 Varghese Mappillai formed a literary club, Bhashaposhini Sabha. It brought together the tallest poets and writers from Travancore andCochin States and the British-ruled Malabar. Locking creative horns, they shed awkward angularities of dialects. The Sabha held keen literary contests. Once, the challenge was to churn out, within five hours, a verse drama of one hundred stanzas in four acts. Poet Kunhikuttan Thampuram did it in four hours. He simply dictated it.
An offshoot of the Sabha was Bhashaposhini magazine, which Varghese Mappillai started in 1892. It remains the greatest literary journal in Malayalam. A poet himself, Varghese Mappillai was a social visionary. He inspired the building of several schools and libraries. Shortly before his untimely death at the age of 47 he did something unthinkable in hidebound Travancore: he established a residential girls' high school at Thirumoolapuram in 1904. The whoosh of it can still be heard in the strides Malayali women have made. The fifty years from 1904 were eventful for Malayala Manorama. Those were years of evolution, struggle, oblivion and glorious rebirth. After the death of Kandathil Varghese Mappillai in 1904, his nephew K.C Mammen Mappillai was the natural choice as Editor. The uncle had groomed the nephew, who too was a teacher. And he proved a worthy successor. Mammen Mappillai built into Manorama the kind of grit and determination Indian journalism had never witnessed before. He maintained the secular and literary tradition set by his uncle. And he infused it with a new vigour, setting a lively style, starting columns for women and children, and initiating debates on politics and industry. He made Manorama a powerful catalyst of social change. He straddled diverse fields. He was a teacher, writer, legislator, social reformer, banker, farmer, planter, industrialist, insurance baron..... He lived a full life many times over in 80 years. The National & Quilon Bank under his chairmanship was one of the most successful banks in India in the 1920s. The new Guardian of India Insurance Company, which he founded, had an enviable reputation. Popularising rubber cultivation, he gave Kerala's economy a new bounce. Rubber became the economic backbone of Kerala's midlands. The champion of rubber was a man of steel in the Sree Moolam Legislative Assembly and in the stormy conflicts in the Syrian Church. He played a pivotal role in the abstention movement and struggle for civil rights and responsible government. To break him, Travancore Diwan (prime minister) Sri C.P Ramaswamy Iyer broke his bank by engineering a run on it in 1938. Everywhere his voice throbbed with the spirit of freedom. Malayala Manorama was sealed and Mammen Mappillai jailed. All his property was confiscated. The immediate provocation: Manorama had published a news item of deaths in Neyyattinkara following a cruel Police firing by Sir.C.P's goons. He walked out of jail two years later. His brother K.C. Eapen, who was arrested with him, was carried home dead. Mammen Mappillai built Manorama all over again. It eventually became the best-read newspaper in India. Inaugurating Manorama's belated Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1951, Indian President Rajendra Parasad said: "I was much pleased to have an opportunity to participate in the Diamond Jubilee celebrations of the Malayala Manorama. It was because I thought it was not a celebration of the paper only, but a Diamond Jubilee celebration of the services of its soul and life, Sri Mammen Mappillai." Mammen Mappillai breathed his last on the last day of 1953. The Chief Minister of the united Travancore-Cochin State, A.J. John, and his cabinet ministers led the
funeral procession. And the people raised in his memory the K.C. Mammen Mappillai Hall in Kottayam. It was poetic justice that the Memorial hall came up where a park in the name of the Diwan had stood. Built in 1957, and rebuilt in 1997, this beautiful edifice stands in perpetual tribute to a man who built an empire in human hearts. Five days after K.C. Mammen Mappillai's death, his son K.M. Cherian published his last dictum. "By God's grace, Manorama is in a position to create and garner a forceful public opinion. This may be used for the good or the bad. But, we should consider it as a public trust bestowed upon us for the selfless service of humanity." "You will have no qualms to use Manorama as a sacred public trust or an institution God has trustingly bestowed upon us to be used without fear or favour from anyone. You should always work with this in mind. God has placed in our hands a mighty weapon. To use it for our personal, vindictive and vitriolic ends will be an unpardonable and immoral act injurious to the faith bestowed on us by a large number of people. God does not want that. And hence our eternal vow should be to tirelessly work for the success of fairness, justice and morality." It remains a sacred, inviolable dictum for Malayala Manorama. For nine long years Malayala Manorama lay in chains. By any estimate, it was the stiffest price paid for freedom of expression in Indian journalism. The 1930s were tempestuous years of India's struggle for freedom. Malayala Manorama was in the forefront of the struggle in Travancore. It was actively involved in the civil rights agitation, the formation of the Travancore State Congress and the historic campaign for responsible government. Mammen Mappillai's trenchant articles in Manorama invited the wrath of the all-powerful Diwan Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Iyer. He believed that Manorama was bankrolling the State Congress. "I will crush them," he swore in wild rage. He did not wait too long. He banned Manorama for carrying a brutally frank report on firings and military atrocities at Neyyattinkara on September 1, 1938. On September 10, 1938, armed police confiscated the Manorama office in Kottayam and sealed its doors. Later,K.C. Mammen Mappillai was arrested. The vengeful Diwan was out to crush Manorama. This he did. And the civil liberties it championed. The day Manorama was banned was the saddest in the life of Mammen Mappillai. It was the champion of press freedom. Overnight, it lay inert with an iron hand clamped over its mouth. This he did. Words lay dead in the throat for nine years. India won freedom on August 15, 1947. In less than three weeks, the Diwan fled Travancore in ignominy. His stratagems to keep Travancore out of the Indian Union failed. And on November 29, 1947 there was jubilation: Malayala Manorama was back. It was a glorious rebirth. As Malayala Manorama was struggling to break out of its nine-year-long banishment, a 50 Years-old former professor came forward to strengthen K.C. Mammen Mappillai's aged elbows. It was his eldest
son, K.M. Cherian. He teamed up with his father as Managing Editor. It was Cherian who paved the way for Manorama's magnificent comeback. On Mammen Mappillai's death, Cherian took over as Chief Editor in 1954. His immediate goal was the emotional integration of the people ofTravancore, Cochin and Malabar, which were uniting to form Kerala State. He won great acclaim for the excellent effort. Cherian kept his father's last dictum close to his heart. And he cherished lofty ideals. Under his inspiring leadership Manorama went from strength to strength and launched an edition fromKozhikode in 1966. Cherian also started a few other successful publications. The circulation of the newspaper soared from 30,000 to 300,000. And that of Manorama Weekly, which he had revived, rose to 329,000. Prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, while visiting an allied concern, remarked: "I shall confess that part of the reason which made me agree (to the visit) was also the fine record of Mr. K.M. Cherian and his family in every business they have undertaken." Cherian was Chairman of Press Trust of India and President of the Indian & Eastern Newspaper Society (now Indian Newspaper Society). He won several national honours, including the Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan. He died onMarch 14, 1973. If Kandathil Varghese Mappillai conceived Manorama and K.C. Mammen Mappillai moulded its character, K.M. Cherian gave it the Midas touch. And he won it national glory. 'Keep the family out and bring in the professionals!' is one way. There's a better way. Keep the family in but make them professionals first. That's the way things are working out at Malayala Manorama today and nobody could wish for anything better. The man who thought up the better way, K.M. Mathew, joined Manorama as General Manager in 1954. As a true professional, Mathew proved his mettle before he became Managing Editor under his eldest brother,K.M. Cherian. When Cherian died in 1973, Mathew took over as Chief Editor. He nurtured the newspaper and made it branch out like a giant banyan tree. It has truly been a phenomenal growth. Mathew could find competent lieutenants within the family to run Manorama. Until 1981, his well-trained nephew Mammen Varghese assisted him. He helpedK.M. Mathew launch M.M Publications, which brings out Balarama and Vanitha, the best-selling Indian magazines for children and women. Today, Vanitha has a Hindi edition. And Balarama has had several offshoots. Mammen Varghese continues to be Printer and Publisher of Malayala Manorama newspaper. Another nephew K.O. Kurian, holds that responsibility in Manorama Weekly. Mammen Mathew, eldest son of K.M Mathew, is Editor & Managing Director. Another son, Philip Mathew, is Managing Editor and the youngest, Jacob Mathew, is Executive Editor. George Jacob, Grandson ofK.M. Cherian, is Director. All in the family, maybe, but each one has a track record of professionalism. The levels of professionalism that K.M. Mathew infused in them in his quest for excellence. Yet, Mathew is best known for his caring, nurturing brand of journalism. While spurring Manorama into circulation conquest and spawning a dozen
other best-selling publications he gave journalism a human face of compassion. Who else would have sent a team of reporters to war-torn Kuwait and asked them to concentrate, not on the war, but on helping frantic expatriates return to Kerala? His initiatives often went beyond the ken of conventional journalism. Once he built a hundred houses for the poor. Then he rebuilt an entire village in the distant Maharashtra. Later, he gave poor heart patients a new lease of life. Mathew liked to build and heal. He triggered a host of development projects in Kerala by initiating a series of seminars on industry and environment. In the 1980s he set an easy-to read writing style for the mass circulated Manorama Weekly. It sustained the reading habit of neo-literate adults. Down to earth, he honoured the farmer-with a biannual award and a monthly magazine. He has won several awards himself, including Padma Bhushan. Mathew regularly sharpened Manorama's managerial and technological edge. And he honed its news gathering skills. But has excelled himself in building emotional bonds with the readers, giving them information with the human touch. A year after Malayala Manorama became a daily it gave birth to a children's organisation. It is called Akhila Kerala Balajana Sakhyam. Founded in 1929, the Sakhyam aims at the full flowering of children's talents. It unleashes creative energy and builds leadership qualities. It was K.C. Mammen Mappillai's baby. And he nourished it through the columns of Malayala Manorama. Over the years, it has grown into the largest democratic institution of its kind inAsia. Its motto: Service. It has a branch in almost every village in Kerala. The members, in the age group of 6-18, elect leaders to run the Sakhyam. In the process they breathe in the spirit of democratic discipline. It has become a great movement, unique in very respect. While developing physical, mental and aesthetic abilities, the Sakhyam initiates the children to community work. The whole approach is constructive. The Sakhyam has constructed a hundred houses for the poor, built roads, dug canals and distributed food during natural calamities. The children build and create. And care. The Sakhyam is helping children shape destinies- their own and the nations'. Growth…multifaceted and on target. It sums up Manorama's progress over the years. Today, the Malayala Manorama daily is published from eight centres: Kottayam, Kozhikode, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Palakkad, Kannur, Kollam and Thrissur. With a combined circulation of more than 11, 00,000 copies a day. A unit at Malappuram was inaugurated in February 2001. That's growth, smooth and sustained. The Kozhikode edition got rolling in 1966 and the Kochi edition in 1979. Manorama became the first language daily in India to have a facsimile edition, fromThiruvananthapuram, in 1987. The second edition from the Malabar region, after Kozhikode, was launched at Palakkad in 1992. The Kannur edition arrived in 1994 and Kollam the next year. The Thrissur edition was born in 1998. A new edition was
commissioned in Malappuram. In 1982, Manorama launched The Week, a news features magazine in English. It is among the best-read English magazines in India. Manorama has grown into a highly successful publishing house with a slew of other immensely popular periodicals. Besides the daily newspaper, there is Manorama Weekly for the common man. It is the largest selling weekly in India. The weekly Balarama is the best-selling children's magazine in India. Children of school -going age have two other playmates fromManorama: Balarama Amarchitrakatha and Balarama Digest. For pre-schoolers, there is the delightful Kalikudukka.. Plus there is its cuddly English version, Magic Pot. For women, there isVanitha, the largest circulated women's magazine in India. Vanitha's Hindi edition, launched in 1997, became an instant hit. School students have found a reliable study aid inVijayaveedhi. And job seekers have a guide in Thozhilveedhi. Karshakashree- a bold experiment in farm journalism - has won over the farming fraternity. Bhashaposhini, the literary journal, is sought - after by the high-brow reader. For lovers of literature, there is also the Manorama Annual. For the scholar and the knowledge - seeker, choices come in five languages: Manorama Yearbook is published in Malayalam, English, Hindi, Tamil and Bengali. And in CD-ROM, too. It is called Manorama Knowledge Adventure. Publications for different age-groups, different tastes and needs. But all for the family. Besides, Manorama has a vibrant presence on the Electronic Media. Manorama Vision, its television software division was launched in 1993 producing quality television serials and news and current affairs programmes for Malayalam television channels. Its music division, Manorama Music, was started in 1995. On the Web, Manorama Online has a magnetic pull. And it has exciting plans in cyberspace. Watch this space! Malayala Manorama has always relied on appropriate technology. From hand - composing of cold type and treadle presses, it moved to hot metal composing and rotary letter presses. And then to photo-typesetting and web offset presses. All at the right time. It has been a continual adaptation to change. Today all eight units of Manorama are connected on a high speed Wide Area Network using fibre-optic cable network, the first newspaper in India to be so lined. In 1986, the then ultramodern facsimile system connected Kottayam to the other units for transmission of the newspaper pages. Today a more modern, more flexible and faster editorial system links all the centres. There is a computer on almost every desk in the organisation. It's a wired world out there in Manorama. And the newspaper's home on the Web is just a small part of it. Far away from Kerala, a village of golden sunflowers has taken a new name. It calls itself 'Malayala Manorama Banegaon.' No one there reads Malayala Manorama, India's largest selling language newspaper. They only love it. A love that bloomed after the heartbreak of
September 30, 1993 when the earth shook in tectonic terror. The quake flattened more than forty Maharashtrian villages, killing thousands of people, their cattle and their fowl. Among them lay Banegaon in Latur, in grim ruins. In that hour of inconsolable grief, we set up relief fund with Rs.10 lakh and turned to our eight million readers. We appealed to them. "Let us reach out and touch the frozen face of Latur." Our readers had no bonds with Latur: most of them had never even heard of the place. Yet, within 45 days, the fund swelled to Rs. 2.39 crore. It was more than what any other newspaper in India could ever collect for relief work. We could have handed over the money to the relief agencies and sat back. But Banegaon had become an obsession. We were determined to rebuild it ourselves, keeping even the contractors out. Renowned architects spent a gruelling month in Banegaon, studying the milieu. They visualised a holistic village. Then a team from Manorama took over. An entire village came up in just 15 months. It is a complete village: 163 houses, roads, a library, hospital, a panchayat office, an open air theatre, a unique village parlour called chavady, a gymnasium, a big pond to collect rainwater, and even a Hanuman temple. The layout is aesthetic. Each house has a courtyard, two rooms and a bathroom and space to keep the cattle. For privacy, there is the compound wall: for togetherness, eight houses form a cluster, which suits the joint families. When Manorama announced an award for the most innovative farmer in Kerala in 1992 there were ripples of amusement in the land of backwaters. Why honour a hick? Why not a technocrat, social reformer, artist or academic? People wondered. But then, the century - old newspaper had always stood by the underdogs and voiced their throttled aspirations. Fighting for their social and political rights, it remained close to the good earth. It encouraged the people, who had been relying mainly on paddy and coconut, to grow tea, coffee and rubber as well. Eventually, agro-industries and exports bloomed. Though Kerala is just 1.2 percent of India's total area, it produces more than 90 per cent of India's rubber and pepper, 60 per cent of tapioca, 45 per cent of coconut and almost the entire lemongrass oil. It is abundant in tea, coffee and spices, and is the largest producer of a number of other crops such as banana and ginger. The Malayali farmer has worked wonders cultivating more than a hundred crops on five million tiny holdings. People savoured his fruits, not his labours. They took him for granted, and even looked down upon him. College educated new generation would not hold a spade. Little was done to honour the farmer until Manorama instituted the biennial 'Karshakasree Award', the first of its kind in south - east Asia. It carried a citation, a gold medal and Rs.1 lakh in prize money. The prize money would later be raised to Rs.1.50lakh. The search for the best farmer was systematic. Research organisations, government agencies, NGOs and Manorama news bureaus sent in resumes of several farmers. An expert team pruned the list and video-taped the
work of select farmers. Then, a panel of judges, including World Food Prize winners Dr. M.S.Swamintathan and Dr. V.Kurian, chose Velayudhan for the 1992 award. Velayudhan had yoked modern technology to traditional wisdom and changed the rocky face of Mulayam hamlet in Thrissur District. It was sweet success for him: he had started off with just one beehive. It grew into a colony of coconut palms, rubber, pepper, plantains, herbs, fish, fowl and pigs. "I am very pleased to learn.' said Nobel - winning agriculture scientist Dr. Norman Borlaug, "that Malayala Manorama is sponsoring an award for excellence in agriculture.' Manorama went further. In 1995 it came out with a monthly magazine exclusively for farmers, aptly called Karshakasree. The award, given every two years, has invested the half-naked farmer with the dignity he deserved. While an Internet-savvy world was grabbing eyeballs, Malayala Manorama went for the heart. It did a random survey of cardiac cases in Kerala in 1999 and realised that many patients were in misery because they could not afford surgery. Most poignant was the plight of children with congenital complications. All that their parents could do was bite down quivering lips, sigh and wait for death. It was cruel irony: they were dying young when Kerala boasted high literacy, high life expectancy, low birth and death rates, and a high concentration of hospitals. Their bleak lives were far removed from glowing statistics. The survey made good copy. It also opened valves of compassion inManorama. The newspaper set apart Rs.25 lakh to bear the full cost of surgery for 30 patients. Heartened, Madras Medical Mission offered to do free surgery for 20 others. The endeavour was called 'Hridayapoorvan', meaning 'from one's heart'. As it announced five medical camps to pick 50 patients, Manorama faced an avalanche of 8,000 applications for admission. Manorama was in a predicament: it would be heartless to pick only 50 and forget the rest. It doubled its contribution and appealed to its readers for help. The readers responded soulfully. Some sent in cheques for lakhs of rupees. Some others handed over a hard day's earnings, salty with sweat. Children broke their piggy banks and dropped tinkling coins into the fund. So that hearts would keep ticking. Hope rose in many hearts as the medical camps opened in October 1999. Renowned cardiologist Dr. K. M. Cherian led a team of 11 doctors from Madras Medical Mission at the camps held at five 'K' towns -Kollam, Kannur, Kozhikode, Kottayam and Kochi . They examined 6201 patients. Before the year ended, the fund grew toRs. 3 crore, just enough for 395 heart surgeries. Living up to its name, the Medical Mission made it 500, offering 105 free surgeries. Thirty more patients benefited thanks to assistance from the Prime Minister's Relief Fund. All the operations were over by December 2000. Except a dozen all were successful. In their hen-scratched letters thanking Manorama, there was a refrain: "You have given us a new life." For the first time in the world a newspaper had offered the ultimate gift - the gift of life.
Timeline of Malayala Manorama 1888 Malayala Manorama Company founded by Kandathil Varghese Mappillai on March 14. 1890 The first issue of Malayala Manorama appears on March 22. It is a weekly newspaper. 1892 Publication of Bhashaposhini. 1901 Manorama becomes a bi-weekly on August 7. 1904 Kandathil Varghese Mappillai passes away on July 6. K. C. Mammen Mappillai becomes Editor. 1915 Manorama starts publishing daily World War supplements. 1918 Manorama becomes a tri-weekly on July 2. 1928 Manorama becomes a daily on January 16. 1929 Akhila Kerala Balajana Sakhyam formed on May 29. 1930 Manorama commences publication of Annual Numbers. 1937 Publication of Malayala Manorama Weekly on August 8. 1938 Manorama proscribed in Travancore on September 10. It makes a surprise appearance from Cochin State on September 14 but folds up after three months. 1939 Mammen Mappillai convicted and jailed. 1941 Mammen Mappillai released from jail. 1947 Manorama restarts on November 29. 1950 The first rotary press installed. 1951 President Dr. Rajendra Prasad inaugurates Diamond Jubilee celebrations. 1953 Mammen Mappillai passes away on December 31. 1954 K. M. Cherian becomes Chief Editor on January 1. K. M. Mathew joins Manorama as General Manager.1956 Manorama Weekly restarts. 1957 Mammen Mappillai Memoriall Hall at Kottayam opened.
1959 Publication of Manorama Yearbook in Malayalam. 1965 Publication of Manorama Yearbook in English. K.M.Cherian awarded'Padma Shri.' 1966 President Dr. S. Radhakrishnan inaugurates Platinum Jubilee celebrations. Kozhikode Edition started on December 1. 1970 President V.V.Giri inaugurates Balajana Sakhyam state convention. 1971 K. M. Cherian awarded 'Padma Bhushan.' 1972 Balarama launched. 1973 K.M.Cherian passes away on March 14. K.M.Mathew becomes Chief Editor. Mammen Varghese becomes General Manager. 1975 Vanitha launched. 1979 Kochi Edition started on January 15. 1982 President N. Sanjeeva Reddy inaugurates Balajana Sakhyam Golden Jubilee celebrations on January 31. The Week magazine started on December 26. 1986 President Giani Zail Singh formally commssions the facsimile transmission system at Manorama, Kottayam, on August 30. 1987 Kerala Chief Minister K.Karunakaran inaugurates Thiruvananthapuram Edition on February 16. 1988 President R. Venkataraman inaugurates Centenary celebrations at Kottayam on March 23. Commemorative Postage released. Scheme launched to build 104 houses for the poor and the handicapped. Mammen Mathew takes charge as Editor & Managing Director on September 1. 1989 Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi is chief guest at the Centenary celebrations valedictory in New Delhi on March 18. Manorama Yearbook in Hindi released. Tarzi Vitachi, columnist, delivers the First K.C. Mammen Mappillai Memorial Lecture on m March 19. 1990 Tamil Nadu Governor Dr. Bhishma Narain Singh releases Manorama Yearbook in Tamil on March 15.
1992 Chief Minister Karunakaran inaugurates Palakkad edition on April 22. Bhashaposhini celebrates its Centenary on April 25. Union Agriculture Minister Balram Jakhar presents the first Karshakasree Award to K. K. Velayudhan on August 1. Vice President K. R. Narayanan inaugurates the computerised digital photo transmission unit on September 27. President Dr. Shanker Dayal Sharrma dedicates Manorama's 104 houses for the poor on October 27. The President hands over the 525th house built under K. M. Cherian Memorial Housing Scheme for Manorama employees, on October 27. Kerala Governor B. Rachaiah is chief guest at the valedictory function of Diamond Jubilee celebration of Balajana Sakhyam on October 27. 1993 Manorama Vision, the electronic media division, formally launched on October 18. Manorama takes on the task of rebuilding Banegaon, a quake - hit village of Latur, Maharashtra, with 'Bhoomi Puja' by Chief Minister Sharad Pawar and Editor Mammen Mathew on October 24. Governor Dr. P. C. Alexander unveils a commemorative plaque. Bernard Levin, chief columnist of The Times, London, delivers the second K. C. Mammen Mappillai Memorial Lecture in New Delhi on November 10. 1994 Vijayaveedhi launched on January 5. Lok Sabha Speaker Shivraj Patil presents the second Karshakasree Award to A. J. Joseph on April 12. Chief Minister Karunakaran inaugurates Kannur Edition on December 17. 1995'Manorama Music' launched on January 1. Columnist Nikhil Chakravarthy inaugurated Kollam Edition on March 27. Publication of Karshakasree magazine on September 2. Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao hands over 'Malayala Manorama Banegaon' to the villagers on December 8. 1996 Manorama Yearbook in Bengali released in Calcutta on April 18. Union Agriculture Minister Chaturanan Mishra presents the third Karshakasree Award to S.J. Rasalam on August 11. 1997 President K. R. Narayanan inaugurates the rebuilt K. C. Mammen Mappillai Hall on September 18. Prince Philip of the United Kingdom inaugurated the Internet Edition of Malayala Manorama, Kochi, on October 17. Publication of Vanitha, Hindi, on December 10. Gene Roberts, Managing Editor of The New York Times and Chairman of IPI, delivers the Third K.C. Mammen Mappillai Memorial Lecture in New Delhi on December 16. 1998 A.P. Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu presents the Fourth Karshakasree Award to K. C. Kuriakose on November 20.
1999 Malayala Manorama knowledge Adventure CD-ROM released on March 4. Publication of Balarama Digest on November 13. Hridayapoorvam camps for heart patients during October - December. 2000 Publication of Magic Pot on March 1. Union Minister Suresh Prabhu presents the fifth Karshakasree Award to M.M.Subrahmanyan Nair on March 26. Malappuram Unit inaugurated. 2002 Manorama Online launched on June 20.
