Scribe Stories

Taaza Khabar is one of the films that is part of Wandering Women, a first-of-its-kind feminist documentary festival being held at Mumbai’s Godrej India Culture Lab on Saturday and Sunday to mark Independence Day. Datta travelled to Chitrakoot district in Uttar Pradesh in 2005 to document the workings of Khabar Lahariya, a newspaper run by rural women from backward communities in the region. The newspaper focusses on local news and exposes that are not covered by the mainstream media, using a name-and-shame approach.

She followed the women journalists for two weeks — the paper was published fortnightly then — as they covered local panchayat elections. This included sitting in their editorial meetings, travelling with them as they reported, went to Allahabad for the printing and the final distribution on the trains. “This was a time when cell phones had not penetrated those areas. Everything was done the old-fashioned way. It was enormous hard work, the women would travel for hours on end, taking buses and trains,” recalls the former journalist.

The 31-minute film shows how the paper, published in dialects such as Bundeli, Awadhi and Bhojpuri, is shaping democracy at the grassroots, making the police and the government accountable. Interestingly, in the seven years since it released, Khabar Lahariya has grown phenomenally — it now sells 6,000 copies across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and has an estimated readership of 80,000. Now a weekly it has its own website and a strong social media presence.