There was a time, in the ’60s and ’70s, when, for countless newspaper readers across Asia from Seoul to Singapore, Sunday wasn’t complete without their favourite weekend read, The Asia Magazine. All major Asian newspapers used to carry it as their regular Sunday supplement, produced from a small editorial office in Hong Kong.
Asia Mag was a unique experiment in regional publishing, offering a common Asian fare to disparate groups of readers. And it was an instant hit, with a start-off print run of more than a million copies. Of course, there was the Far Eastern Economic Review, but the king-emperor of pan-Asian publishing was entirely dependent on individual subscriptions. In the case of Asia Mag, it was newspaper groups that provided the patronage. What the newspapers got from the arrangement was quality reading matter they couldn’t have easily produced on their own. What Asia Mag gained was an instant circulation boost, and consequent advertising support, it couldn’t have easily achieved.
The brains behind it was an Indonesian journalist-entrepreneur named Adrian Zecha, who had an uncanny sense of business. When he launched Asia Mag in 1961, Asia’s media were still working in isolation within their own circles of relative underdevelopment. Zecha saw in the situation an unexplored niche and proved to the world that regional publishing wasn’t just an idle dream.
He brought out of national closets a whole generation of journalists and writers who might be called Asia’s first internationalists. Pan-Asianism became a worthy goal and a spirit of cooperation was in the air. It was this awareness of the idea of Asia these journalists and writers helped spread that certainly prepared the philosophical ground for the founding of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in 1966 and of the Press Foundation of Asia (PFA) one year later, both in Manila.
To my mind, PFA’s role at the time was perhaps more important than ADB’s. While ADB looked after the region’s funding requirements, PFA took care of its intellectual needs. Its mission was to enhance professionalism in Asian newspapers, bring them together on a common cooperative platform, expand their talent pools, and embed in their mind the idea that development reporting, often neglected, was an important news beat. Behind that mission was the belief that a society couldn’t be strong without a strong press.
PFA evolved in the minds of two revolutionary Asian journalists — Tarzie Vittachi from Sri Lanka, the Garibaldi of Asian journalism, who was director of the Asian programme of the International Press Institute (IPI), and Amitabha Chowdhury from India, the Mazzini who, having inherited Tarzie Vittachi’s IPI mantle, lost no time to turn the programme into an independent Asia-based activity.
Chowdhury was a one-Asia diehard. Perhaps ‘zealot’ would be a better description. It was his zeal that rallied top Asian publishers to back PFA and launched a series of ‘one-Asia’ assemblies, where journalists, politicians, and government leaders met to share ideas and proclaim to the world the hopes and aspirations of the people of Asia. The region hadn’t ever seen such a flowering of the Asian spirit and U Thant, the then UN Secretary General, flew down to Manila to open the first assembly in 1970. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was there to open the third in New Delhi in 1973.
It was this pan-Asian spirit that inspired another of Chowdhury’s zealous initiatives, a Sunday newspaper called The Asian, in the late 1970s. The concept was the same as Zecha’s, but the product was very much different. While Asia Mag was only a magazine for Asia, The Asian was to be Asia’s voice to the world.
But The Asian didn’t last more than a few years. Asia Mag continued for a few more years before collapsing in the early 1990s. ‘One Asia’ assembly was held for one last time, but 17 long years after the one in New Delhi, a clear indication of the passing of a glorious period of Asia’s journalistic history. PFA still exists but has lost much of its sheen and utility. Tarzie Vittachi is dead. Chowdhury, now 82, lives in retirement, splitting time between California and Kolkata. Zecha has become a highly successful resort hotelier. When the Far Eastern Economic Review is finally buried this December, the link with the past will be severed forever (‘The end of an era’, October 22).
Perhaps the decline and fall of pan-Asian journalism was inevitable. In the last two decades, Asia’s media houses have become more prosperous and don’t need anybody to hold their hands anymore. And, thanks to economic compulsions, Asia’s oneness is no longer a dream. But let’s remember that behind today’s reality was yesterday’s idea of Asia that moved a few pioneering minds to look beyond borders and triggered a renaissance of Asian journalism that might have been short-lived but should never be forgotten.
