Book review: Mrinal Pande. The Journey of Hindi Language Journalism in India: From Raj to Swaraj and Beyond

This fine-printed, slim volume, focused on an ambitiously long temporal survey of Hindi journalism, signposts a large number of headlines of its own for the small sections within chapters. While the challenge of what to pick from a bewildering variety of media forms that may be defined as journalism remains, the story of Hindi print is indubitably a compelling one and some of the discussions are incisive. Not the least because they are offered by a bilingual insider and a veteran media practitioner with aeons of experience of working across corporate houses in print and TV—as reporter, editor, columnist, fiction writer, as well as the only woman chairperson of the Prasar Bharati Board. Making full use of the media trade and subscription data published in corporate and government reports, Pande takes us through some of the eventful passages that have brought us to the current state of manufactured consensus and designer, feel-good interviews routinely showcased by the ‘godi media’, that is, the one ensconced in the lap of the government.

‘Godi media’, a ubiquitously cited and readily understood term, is a lexical invention by very well-known news reporter-anchor Ravish Kumar. Going beyond denoting the familiar conventions of handing down one-way communication by the state-owned television and radio channels, print products, websites and mobile apps, ‘godi media’ includes private outlets that were under no obligation to toe the state and ruling party line, but have been doing exactly that, unscrupulously and uncritically. The book avoids the term, but in the historical narrative presented here, we do find its early traces, lineages and building blocks, especially after the turn towards a globalized neo-liberal order that heralded a period of ‘paid news’ in print media. Paradoxically, the mainstream press was also labelled as ‘presstitute’ by the same powers that are gleefully patronizing it while routinely harassing small, independent and critical voices. Within this largely depressing narrative of a moral free fall from the haloed days of a formidable anti-colonial patriotic struggle, and a valiant revival after the clampdown during the Emergency recounted by the author, we must add that it still remains a rapidly changing and vibrant mediascape, if we enlarge our optics beyond print and consider it as an intermedia space.

This book, however, is a history of Hindi journalism defined narrowly as print media, with long jumps and major elisions. The author does underline certain important distinctions vis-a-vis the confident European bourgeois public sphere theorized by Jurgen Habermas, and dwells upon Gandhi’s own theory and practice of media autonomy from advertisement, a legacy that continued as a reluctance to embrace advertising in the decades after independence. One of the competitive battles the Hindi press fought and ultimately won was against the English newspapers and magazines that remained advertisers’ favourites owing to the deep pockets their subscribers supposedly possessed. The notion was revised when Hindi readership made an obvious leap in the 1980s with the rise in literacy and middle-class numbers in the U.P. and undivided Bihar. The surveys, Pande tells us, conducted by such corporate houses as Hindustan Lever and Dabur in the 1990s spotlighted ‘the dark underbelly of readership data’ and proved beyond doubt that Hindi belt could no more be considered downmarket for advertising. This coincided with the trend of top leaders from non-Congress parties promoting Hindi journalism and patronizing Hindi journalists. Political advertising complemented the new managerial strategies of offering lucrative commissions to hawkers in regional markets, and publishing multiple local, even city-based, editions worked well for such newspapers as Rashtriya Sahara, Amar Ujala, Dainik Jagaran, and Dainik Bhaskar. The latter two still maintain their top positions.

The tiny chapters of this data-rich book, with conclusions appended as after-thoughts, appear less than equal to the task of capturing the bewildering diversity and staggering voluminosity of media products labelled under Hindi language journalism in the last century, and in this century, so far. From within the Hindi print world, a discussion of omnibus periodicals that ruled the public sphere during the second half of the last century and combined literature with features on politics, society, economy, culture and religion, such as Dharmyug; Saptahik Hindustan (once edited by Pande); Maya, Ravivar and Dinman deserved closer analytical attention, as did Aaj, Aryavart, Nai Duniya, Prabhat Khabar and Punjab Kesari among daily newspapers.

The story of technical innovation in the production, processing and dissemination of newspapers after the digital turn, recounted through the interviews with bhasha pioneers of computing and web editions of newspapers is a refreshing one. A Hindi newsroom that always played catch up with technological advances taken for granted by English editions turned it upside down when Hindi editions began subsidizing their sisters in English. However, the chapter dealing with the skewed representation of women and Dalit representatives in newsrooms could very well have gone deeper to study such concrete YouTube examples as National Dastak and Ambedkarnama, and could even refer to alternative newspapers like Khabar Lahariya and alt news. Blogs played a major role in expanding the Hindi public sphere and some of the reporters and anchors doubled up as bloggers to carve out a larger than straight-jacketed televisual identity for themselves. Their current reputation was built on these affordances and a switch over to YouTube was a natural and small step away from the corporate media conglomerates turning wholesale lapdog.

Published a couple of years ago, this book naturally stops short of documenting how the dominance of the state-aligned print and TV media has finally been challenged by several ‘upstart startups’ in the virtual public sphere. With their subscription and viewership numbers witnessing an astonishing boom during the 2024 general elections, a new crop of hard-hitting, recalcitrant, fearless, and continuously fact-checking YouTube news channels, amplified by global posts and ‘reposts’, ‘WhatsApp forwards,’ ‘shares’ and ‘memes’ created by Social Media users, simply outperformed and outsmarted the shrill roars of the mainstream media. No less significant is the fact that the host languages of these critical YouTubers are mostly Hindi and/or other Indian languages, and not English which has a limited reach even though it commands unlimited power. This new energy owes its strength to a long history of dissenting journalism for which there is a well-documented archive and scholarship in Hindi, of which we get just a flavour in this schematic introduction.