The shifting local language mediascape

Mrinal Pande's books offers a bird's-eye view of India's language mediascape, its heft and business potential

The Journey of Hindi Language Journalism in India: From Raj to Swaraj and beyond

Author: Mrinal Pande

Publisher: Orient Blackswan

Pages: 176

Price: Rs 1,195

What do news media channels and periodicals sell? Space and time to advertisers, to be honest. Much of journalism, from this standpoint, is an intelligent way to engage with audiences ready to be aggregated for marketers.

But the media companies have come a long way from selling ad space to manipulating minds and steering public opinions. Mrinal Pande tracks this journey through time and space, from the era of movable typography to the advent of online trolls on digital platforms. All this through the lens of local-language journalism.

Today’s pervasive media goes much beyond aggregating audiences. It shapes aspirations and fuels consumption, and goes an extra mile to provide measured hype as brand solutions. Much of these transactions, the author tells you, are struck in the currency of audience-data and the scene of action has shifted to the hinterland. She takes you through what has changed in India’s language mediascape and how.

The book recounts the story of the fledgling Hindi journalism of early 20th century, its coming-of-age after liberalisation, and its dominance in today’s India. She gives you a bird’s-eye view of the Hindi heartland, its heft and business potential, spread across 11 north Indian states. She draws parallels with other local languages registering similar gains and surges in circulations.

The catchment of the “Hindi market” is a humongous 500 million mass of people, covering about 45 per cent of India. But it is still termed the “regional” market, which the feisty editor finds irritating. This, she believes, is a reflection of the elitism of top managers, advertisers, and editors who tend to be English-speaking— and male. The book is peppered with a gendered perspective of things, which is as rare in the context of language journalism as it is refreshing.

Ms Pande stays away from conjuring up the romance of journalism. She also avoids going overboard on the media’s alacrity to make a difference. She saves her insights to explain how power is negotiated in the cultural industry. And to support her point, she digs out relevant data and references from credible sources. The book’s focus is on the Hindi media business and its rising influence — both in terms of sheer numbers and deep pockets — rather than on the quality of journalism or media freedom.

The author moves rather quickly from Raj to Swaraj, taking virtual pit stops at huge events such as the freedom struggle or the Emergency. Her descriptions are succinct, such as those of the vehicles of Indian nationalism, i.e., Mahatma Gandhi’s Young India and Navjeevan, Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Kesari and Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi’s Pratap, among many other illustrious periodicals. The nationalist press faced naked repression through the draconian sedition law which is, curiously, handy even today against sundry critics and human rights defenders.

The book devotes a whole section to the fault-lines of caste, class, and power that run beneath the landscape of language journalism. It tackles, alas fleetingly, some of the biggest problems of our times, such as the curse of paid news, slackened norms of cross-media ownership, and the manipulation of readership data by media monopolies. Things that get mentioned subsequently in rapid rubrics include sting journalism, fake news, press freedom, censorship, and media ethics.

The author, however, keeps her focus on the story of Hindi, its evolution, proliferation, and emergence as the dominant Indian language. An explosion of Hindi publications, which followed, overshadowed English as the main language of power. In fact, the Hindi dailies have been giving English periodicals in north India a piggyback ride, the author notes. The new consumer (aggregated as audiences) rose in tandem with the new public (as citizens brought together by a common language) a la the German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas.

But the author believes that the rise of India’s diverse public is different from Habermas’s European public, mainly because of India’s multi-layered society and caste hierarchies which impede cohesion by language. This, perhaps, explains the existence of multiple public spheres, and the complexity of multilingual media markets.

What is beginning to change, however, is that even disparate language clusters are no longer insulated from provocative and sensational social media messaging, and Hindi is no exception. The scene shifted decisively when young people in the hinterland started lapping up whatever was conveyed to them as news on smartphones. A worrying trend, according to the author, is that the print medium has now started to copy its digital rival.

The book is a valuable source of information and insights into the world of Hindi media. I hope a Hindi version is also being planned. My own quibble is that this insider’s account is so detached that the writer — reporter Mrinal Pande — is almost missing in action. The real-life stories of her bitter-sweet dealings with media barons, as the editor-in-chief, or her encounters with the powers-that-be, as the head of Prasar Bharti, could have provided vital clues to the balance of power between media, business, and politics in the Hindi heartland.

The reviewer heads Common Cause, known for its democratic interventions