Recently, there was a very unusual book launch in Delhi. Two women from underprivileged families in rural Bundelkhand addressed a packed audience at the India Habitat Centre and told them what it was like to be a neo-literate woman reporter on a local Bundeli language newspaper in two of the most backward districts of Uttar Pradesh — Chitrakoot and Banda.
Their colourful eight-page weekly appears in both the Chitrakoot and Banda variants of the lilting Bundeli language, and their stories expose corruption and injustice affecting the same villages where the paper is read by some 25,000 people.
For standing up and telling the truth, they have been sexually harassed and frequently threatened — at one point with a
masked man with a gun. Attempts have been made to buy all copies of the paper to keep news from getting out, to buy the whole paper and to close them down. But Khabar Lahariya — News Wave — keeps on making waves.
Very articulate themselves, the story of their newspaper, which is supported by the NGO Nirantar, is told in English in this fascinating book by Farah Naqvi. Naqvi has been involved in the project from the beginning. She writes knowledgeably and sensitively, and does not hesitate to highlight the mistakes that were made as the project developed and from which they tried to learn, or the continuing problem of financial sustainability. Compared to the big Hindi dailies like Dainik Jagran and Amar Ujala, Khabar Lahariya is tiny. But in a masterly analysis of the operations of the totally bogus, the small and the large newspapers in the region — down to the quid pro quos with the jeeps that transport them — Naqvi
demonstrates that these papers do not serve the cause of the poor.
Khabar Lahariya is an experiment that, in contrast, kills several birds with one stone. Newly literate people need appropriate material to read; otherwise they forget what they have learned. Khabar Lahariya is aimed at the whole of society, not just women. And when reporters expose cruelty and corruption, they can — and have — succeeded in having grievances redressed. Besides such stories, the paper also carries easily comprehensible information on development, panchayats and women’s issues, not to mention human interest stories, jokes and some world news.
{{/usCountry}}Khabar Lahariya is an experiment that, in contrast, kills several birds with one stone. Newly literate people need appropriate material to read; otherwise they forget what they have learned. Khabar Lahariya is aimed at the whole of society, not just women. And when reporters expose cruelty and corruption, they can — and have — succeeded in having grievances redressed. Besides such stories, the paper also carries easily comprehensible information on development, panchayats and women’s issues, not to mention human interest stories, jokes and some world news.
{{/usCountry}}Naqvi profiles several of the paper’s reporters, who tell her how their lives have been transformed by the career they have chosen. For them it was a real challenge to write at all, then to collect facts and write news stories, to design the paper and finally to distribute it themselves in remote villages. Importantly, they have had to learn to recognise the difference between journalism and NGO activism.
Sometimes the distance between Bharat and India seems very great. When Khabar Lahariya reporters spoke in the plush surroundings of Delhi’s Habitat Centre, they bridged that gap. By reading Farah Naqvi’s extraordinary account of their experiments with truth, the English reader can bridge it too.
Gillian Wright is a Delhi-based writer and translator