MARATHI JOURNALISM - ROBIN JEFFREY

 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.