BENGALI JOURNALISM - ROBIN JEFFREY

 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 the 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?