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 skillfully to local conditions.
The second largest Malayalam 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 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.
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 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.
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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