For a greater cause

In my 30 year career as a journalist, never have I had the opportunity to write for a paper published in my mother tongue, Sindhi. So let me start with a ‘Thank You’ for affording me this privilege, an opportunity to feature my thoughts in this glorious paper, The Hindvasi, and that too on an occasion no less than the centenary edition.

My idea of The Hindvasi travels back to the days I was a school kid and the paper came home but only on a Sunday, if memory serves me right. It was the paper my parents read, and particularly my mom – who stretched it through the week and took it up every day she had some time free from household chores. The Hindvasi was a gift that kept her company till the next edition came along the next weekend. It was her sole newspaper reading, apart from some books she read in Sindhi and the Guru Granth Sahib, which she read sometimes in the local gurudwaras she visited every once in a while, on many occasions me tugging along.

I don’t know when but somewhere along the line, The Hindvasi habit dropped. And the paper stopped coming. Did we unsubscribe or did the paper not reach us in time or because our vendor no more supplied it, I do not know. But it is interesting how much a paper can become a part of you and your life, and then, equally quickly, can be forgotten – not because the product serves you any less than it did yesterday but perhaps because the readers silently adjusted to not having it. My mom could only read Sindhi and Gurmukhi (though of late she hardly reads anything because of a rather weak eyesight). So The Hindvasi was important. My mom was deprived of the reading but she didn’t seem to mind. My dad could and did read the other papers that kept coming. It was from him that I picked up my early lessons in reading.

I would sometimes read the English section of  The Hindvasi but since I never learned Sindhi in its full majesty, the Arabic script that makes it stand apart (and shine) from all other Indian languages, a large part of the paper was beyond my reach. Sometimes, my mom would read out parts of a story though. Sindhi was my subject in high school but we studied in the Devanagiri script – the examination board authorities and the school were both kind enough to devise the syllabus in such a way that the subject was not a big challenge; they let us write the script that we all had mastered by then while learning Hindi. For us it was simple: We wrote Sindhi in Hindi!

What this essentially means is that the language was never really embraced by us. The true potential of a language is the joy that it can provide by reading the original literature, written and published in the language and read by those who can read and understand that language in its script, not an adaptation thereof.  With less and less of this happening, the language is certainly not growing, and is in fact dying. There have been intermittent calls of taking action to stop the slide. But we fear this is a losing battle.

In this rather bleak scenario, the continued publication of The Hindvasi is a cause for celebration. At a time when bigger and better known papers with robust circulation figures are facing huge cut backs, when less of us are reading the physical paper, when even the Hindustan Times suddenly closed down several of its English editions, I can only imagine the pressure on the publishers of The Hindvasi.

Yet, its capacity to keep the flag flying tells us a small and exciting story of how, even in these challenging times, even when business models for a traditional paper are broken, it is possible to keep up publication, serve the constituency and continue to build on a rich heritage and tradition.

You can’t do this if your mission is profits alone. You can do this if your mission is the passion for the product, if the paper becomes the cause and its publication the source of energy for the publishers and the readers. In fact, that is the entire history of the business of newspaper publishing. It is linked to the history of our freedom struggle, and goes back to the very core of what an editor is or should be.

The late Lala Feroze Chand, a member of the Servants of the People Society founded by Lala Lajpat Rai and a close associate of Lalaji himself as also the editor for some time of The Times of India said it beautifully in a lecture delivered over four decades ago (on August 18, 1973): “India’s freedom struggle was blessed with a number of front rank leaders who were brilliant editors too, though their journalistic contribution we are likely to lose sight of. They were the glory of Indian journalism, and the profession does itself honour by cherishing their memory as such. Here I must content myself with naming just half a dozen who to my mind constitute stars of the first magnitude – Annie Besant, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lajpat Rai, Abdul Kalam Azad, Mohammed Ali – and a luminary in a class by himself – Mahatma Gandhi.”

This is the tradition of Indian journalism, now long lost to a corporatised culture of cut-throat competition, the large eating up the small and all racing towards a mishmash of content that mixes and blends, turning it into an unrecognisable new form, editorial that in many cases informs less and sells more.

I do not know the publishers or editors of  The Hindvasi. I cannot claim to understand the motivations that keep them going in difficult times like these. But I can sense their energy, their enthusiasm and their drive for the cause of the language and for reaching out in Sindhi – all of these are qualities that deserve to be applauded. We owe the paper and its pioneering founders and all those who have kept this tradition alive a debt of gratitude, not merely the Sindhi language readers, not merely journalists but the entire nation and all those who care for our rich heritage because what is helped to be supported and preserved and nurtured in the process is the richness of an entire language that is closely tied to a language that is considered by many in India to be the mother of languages – Sanskrit.

So here’s an aspiration – could the celebration for completion of a 100 years of uninterrupted publication of The Hindvasi be turned into an occasion to not only celebrate, which we must; to not only launch a bumper edition, which we must; but also to use the occasion for a revival and rejuvenation so that what we have – sooner rather than later – is a product that is even sharper, even more tuned to its audiences and a canvas and a mandate far larger than it takes today.

A newspaper reports events, ideas, trends and policies. It entertains. But it has an even larger agenda building role that no newspaper must miss. It is in this avataar that The Hindvasi can take up a bigger role for a new era, an era in which we read less on newsprint and mostly on electronic screens of all shapes, sizes and forms, an era in which we have all the data at the tap of a finger but none of the information that helps us makes sense of it all. The Hindvasi already has an e-paper but that is just a beginning. It can and must take on more. In that, it can shine even brighter, and send out a powerful message to the entire journalistic community – that it is possible to not only survive but also thrive even in today’s age and time. This is a time that calls upon us to do more, not less. We can continue to engage, work with newer models and use the occasion of a centenary to renew the pledge as it were and show the path of growth and service to many more people.

(The author is Editor and faculty member of the S P Jain Institute of Management & Research)