Mrinal Pandey is a reputed figure in Hindi journalism. A writer, leading lady-in-chief editor and Padma Shri, Pandey has worked in the print and audio-visual mediums, and was also the chairman of Prasar Bharati. He started out as an English lecturer, but introduced himself very early in life as a journalist. In a free talk with journalist Seema Chisti on her new book, The Journey of Hindi Language Journalism in India – From Raj to Swaraj and BeyondPandey explains why he thinks vibrant Hindi journalism is in danger. Edited part.
Why do you say that Hindi journalism is passing through a phase of ‘re-feudalisation’?
‘Re-feudalism’ is basically a reminder of an India he thought he had left behind. As I explain in the book, feudal houses were the first to pull out papers, mostly to show themselves as great proponents of Hindi. They were not editors, but their names were prominently displayed. He had to cast his net for this, and always the best of Brahmins, Thakurs were found in the net. So these were early habits. Now if you analyze the media, you find the same trends, the feudal lords have come to the fore again and they are getting subtle political acceptance. In the 1990s, there was a surge in the demands for reservation and people started questioning the gender and caste component, but not anymore. All the feudal tendencies that we thought we had left behind have re-emerged.
You have written with great confidence about your early days, how Hindi, with its many dialects, enriched English journalism.
Around the 1920s, as India became aware of its authority in the world as a potential democracy, it also became aware of language as a marker of its identity. You see a very interesting demarcation of the lines between journalism in the west and journalism in the east of Lucknow. So, the then Raja Ram Singh of Kalakankar was very much in favor of Sanskritized Hindi and he said that we should invent new Hindi words from Sanskrit roots. In contrast, King Shiv Prasad of Banaras was Sitar Hind, who said that the language should be mixed language, Hindustani. These two thought patterns are very visible in journalism. And then all of a sudden you have a journalist like Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi who says, in a quirk about the language, in hell, let us meet the people, go to the settlements and help people come out of this mindset of Hindu-Muslim divide. help.
For a long time we were all in denial, we thought we had purified Hindi and Hindustani and the center of casteism, communalism and Brahminical values and gender-based discrimination, but all these were strong pillars of patriarchal society. supported each other.
Hindi journalism experienced a near-renaissance moment after the Emergency Dharma Yuga, Weekly Hindustan, Deenman, Enlightenment Edited by writers. But it suddenly died. Why?
like quotes and BolisMagazines and magazines were also feeding a rich section of Hindi journalism. He introduced many writers who later became editors. Shrikant Verma himself, Kamleshwar, Dharamveer Bharati, were agnostics. By the end of the 1980s, The print media was constantly adding new idioms and creating new genres for the inherited Hindi. Interestingly, they borrowed from languages and dialects from everywhere. All of them translated and translated.
I remember when I inherited Weekly Hindustan From Manohar Shyam Joshi, he (as Dharamvir Bharati did) started an annual number, based entirely on writings from other Indian languages. We used to hire the best writers from across the country for the best in poetry and prose. Hence, Hindi became a hotbed of best writing. It also enriched them by translating them well because it is very easy to translate from one Indian language to another, as we have the same cultural and emotional shorthand. And then it spread all around. India was introduced to Bengali writing, Tamil, Kannada writing. Marathi playwrights like UR Ananthamurthy, Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar – he gained a resonance and his plays traveled across the country. It was a normal and natural way. Just as the pilgrims carry their language, so these cultural pilgrims carried the language across the country.
That movement ended somewhere around the 80s, as the need was felt due to the changing context for hard news. When these senior writers died or retired, those who replaced them were excised. The social and cultural issues that really brought together the political and national perspective – this is when Hindi journalism began to decline. Ironically, this was also the time when new readers arrived in neo-literate North India and prominent politicians were all from the Hindi belt and did not speak English. So the footprint of Hindi kept on increasing and its soul kept shrinking. The myriad streams that nurtured it, the socio-economic reporting, the kind of long, long-running serialized travelogues he published, stopped. Boliso It was also excluded on the ground that there should be a standardized Hindi.
The Hindi journalists who trained us Rasa in their souls. Even the non-Hindi journalists we saw, Nikhil Chakraborty, Chanchal Sarkar, etc came from different sources. Even though he was a staunch journalist, he was still in touch with artists, singers, dancers. It was a period of massive brainwashing and a vision expansion and we started looking at almost the entire national landscape, with Hindi as our petri dish. Then it became about who would be number one, it became about exclusives, and the kind of people who came, they started coming on the air. The editors will travel with a team of assistants carrying their bags.
You invoke Jurgen Habermas’ idea of a ‘public sector’ with journalism as a requirement of a healthy democracy. Do you see any signs of hope? What can it turn?
We need cross-pollination everywhere. Then you will get new fruits. Because of language, because of caste, because of social interaction, political party formation and alliance building, we need cross-pollination, so that new hybrids can emerge. These hothouse plants, which have been genetically sealed to each other, are now reaching their end.
It’s time for us to once again be the throbbing hybrid that threw all kinds of distractions, but which was also enjoyable and informative to read. The most prosperous period in Hindustani music 17. was at the end of th18 th and 19 th Centuries, when caste restrictions were being eased due to Muslim influence and Hindu-Muslim contact was on the rise, so many ‘low’ castes, with their own musical treasures, joined the music and prospered . The same happened with the schools of painting. As the new medium starves for hybrids that will survive, the genetically sealed plants are bound to die. So, hybridize, or die.
The Journey of Hindi Language Journalism in India – From Raj to Swaraj and Beyond, Mrinal Pandey, Orient Blackswan, ₹1,195.
This journalist-writer is based in New Delhi.