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Journalism of Courage
Elsewhere in the world, industrialised countries experienced four or five generations of widespread literacy and familiarity with newspapers before television arrived in the 1950s and 1960s. Even then, television seemed to take a terrible toll on print. Evening newspapers died in North America and Britain in the 1960 and 1970s. Although populations grew, newspaper circulations remained stagnant or fell.
If that was the effect among people long accustomed to newspaper consumption, people encountering print and television simultaneously might decide that literacy and print were unnecessary. Television alone would do. India, an Australian commentator mused, might 8220;leap-frog over literacy8221; and become 8220;a post-literate society just as it survives now as an illiterate one.8221;
Publishing in India provides evidence. When Doordarshan, India8217;s government television broadcaster, screened the popular Mahabharata serial on Sunday mornings in the late 1980s, the Telugu daily, Andhra Jyoti bought the Telugu rights to the screenplay, translated the script from Hindi into Telugu and added between 40,000 and 50,000 copies to their Sunday sales. Telugus bought newspapers to understand television. Similarly, the famed Tamil propensity for weekly magazines owed much to the spread of the Tamil film industry and movie-going habits of Tamils. People read magazines to follow films and film stars. For Indian-language newspapers, able to adapt to and ride on it, television can be beneficial.
Newspapers can also count on the growth of literacy in Indian languages. It is slow, unstoppable and immense. Between 1991 and 2001, India8217;s literate population will grow by more than the total population of Japan. In 1991, roughly 50 per cent of adults were literate; in 2001 the proportion will be at least 60 per cent. In ten years, something like 150 million literates will have been added to the 350 million literates of 1991. Literacy alone, of course, does not make people newspaper readers. The ability and desire to buy a newspaper are the other pre-requisites. But the addition in a decade of 150 million people to the potential pool of newspaper buyers helps the odds for people who produce newspapers.
Literacy, moreover, was being gained not merely in the mother tongue but in the unique script of the mother-tongue. The market for Indian-language newspapers was thus divided into protected segments, which, as we have seen, may help to preserve diversity of ownership. Consider Punjab and Punjabi. By the 1990s, primary schools in Punjab had turned out hundreds of thousands of people comfortable in reading the Gurmukhi script. It was a guaranteed market for publishers of newspapers in Gurmukhi. The Hindu management of the Hind Samachar company, publishers of Punjab Kesari in Hindi and Hind Samachar in Urdu, thus made a careful business decision when it started Jag Bani, a Punjabi daily in Gurmukhi, in 1978, just over a decade after the creation of a Sikh-majority, Gurmukhi-promoting Punjab state8230;
8212; Excerpted from India8217;s Newspaper Revolution8217;, by Robin Jeffrey, Oxford University Press, Rs 545.
