The 125th anniversary of The Hindu gave me an opportunity to express my admiration of the newspaper in the Telegraph of 23 September 2003.
The Hindu at A Hundred and Twentyfive
My first
pleasure of the day is reading newspapers in bed (no, not The Telegraph;
it does not get to me till midday). The first newspaper I read is The Asian
Age – because it is such good fun. It is racily written, it has a lot of
pictures, and it publishes unusual material. It gets too few advertisements,
and so is expensive. But I find it well worth the price.
Then I read The
Indian Express. It fulfils most closely what I consider the function of the
press – investigative journalism. Ever since I joined the finance ministry in
1991, I have been close to the press – often uncomfortably close. As an
economist I should not be, but I am always depressed by influence of economic
forces on newspapers. Reporters try to minimize effort: they cultivate certain
people in the government or industry, ring them up around midday, and get a
story. The stories would stop if they wrote anything hostile to the sources;
that is how one gets a pliant press. Editors want to get close to the Prime
Minister, to go on junkets with him, so they pull their punches.
Considering the
pressures to be nice to the powerful, I am pleasantly surprised by the
independence we do find in our press. And this is where The Indian Express
scores highest in my view. Sometimes the stories are wrong; more often they are
one-sided. But no newspaper can be expected all the time to be objective and
fully informed. The truth emerges out from competition. Different newspapers
present different versions; and since they have to fill pages day after day,
they reshape their own stories over time. In the end, a generally accepted
version emerges. It is not always right. But it is the closest we can come to
truth. There is no better process to bring things into the open. And this
exposure is what The Indian Express concentrates on.
Finally I read The Hindu. For that is where the news appears
as a finished product. Reliability is everything. After I have read The
Hindu, I think I know the facts as well as it is possible at the moment and
in the circumstances to know. The Hindu is not as readable as other
newspapers. For one thing, they try to put down only what is new; whereas The
Hindu will make a well rounded, self-sufficient story. One may not need all
the background, but when one does – if one wants to be conscientious and
understand what is happening - The Hindu is the place to look. For
another, the desire to save effort leads reporters to repeat the same story a
number of times in different words. Reporters, however, seldom do this in The
Hindu; there is hardly a superfluous word. Third, newspapers follow
mutually conflicting objectives of having big headlines and cramming as much
news on the front page as possible. The compromise evolved by most involves a
high proportion of space to headlines, and many stories tailing on to later
pages. The Hindu almost never does this. You can stop at the front page
of many newspapers. You cannot do that with The Hindu; you have to turn
the pages if you want to get the best out of it. Finally, The Hindu is
perhaps the last daily in India that has not succumbed to the Screaming
Headline Syndrome. In an effort to catch public attention, headline writers
have increasingly gone in for sensation, slang and slickness. I often find the
headlines a pain. The Hindu is one newspaper whose headlines are in
complete words and immediately comprehensible combinations.
The Hindu celebrated its 125th anniversary on 13 September. It
published a supplement which gave a fascinating glimpse into its history. In
1878 the government of Madras appointed the first Indian judge of the Madras
High Court – T Muthuswami Aiyar. The Anglo-Indian press of Madras made fun of
him. Incensed, six young men – two schoolteachers and four law students – put
together the princely sum of a Rupee and 12 annas and printed 80 copies of 8
quarto pages, priced 4 annas each. The students soon became lawyers, chose
discretion and parted company, although one kept writing for The Hindu
for 60 years; the two ex-teachers carried on. G Subramania Aiyar became editor,
and M Veeraraghavachariar managing director.
Aiyar was a
founder member of the Congress in 1885, and host when it met in Madras in 1887.
He was a reformist; when he went to the 1889 session of the Congress in Bombay,
he married off his eldest daughter Sivapriyammal who had been widowed at 13. He
attacked the Hindu society for its attitude to women and to low castes. An
advertisement in the newspaper in 1893 had the heading: “Wanted virgin widows
to marry.”
His radicalism
made colourful reading, but was disastrous for the newspaper’s finances. As
they worsened, the two friends quarreled, and Subramania Aiyar left in 1898.
The newspaper became conservative; but that only accelerated its decline. In
1905, Veeraraghavachariar sold off the newspaper to its legal adviser, Kasturi
Ranga Iyengar, for Rs 75000. K Ranga as he would be called today had business
sense. He stopped sending the paper to those who did not pay, bought
telegraphic news from Reuters, and introduced a sports page which was
particularly good on English cricket and horse races. When he died in 1923, The
Hindu was the second largest newspaper in the south with a circulation of
17,000.
Kasturi Ranga
Iyengar’s elder son K Srinivasan served as managing editor till 1959; the
younger son, Kasturi Gopalan, became publisher and printer, and attended office
every day from 1913 till 1974. On Srinivasan’s death, Gopalan’s elder son, G
Narasimhan, became managing director; in 1965, his brother, G Kasturi, became
editor. The 1960s were perhaps The Hindu’s heyday: in 1965 The Times
chose it as one of the world’s ten best newspapers, and in 1968, the American
Newspaper Publishers’ Association gave it its World Press Achievement award. In
the 1960s it also had three strikes – the only ones in its history.
Today G
Narasimhan’s son N Ram is editor-in-chief; G Kasturi’s son Venugopal is editor
of Business Line, the best Indian business newspaper. The
newspaper is still headed by the great-grandsons of Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, the
lawyer who bought it 98 years ago. It is a family enterprise in the Indian
tradition. The 1990s have seen many business dynasties crumble; The Hindu,
on the other hand, doubled its circulation.
The Hindu’s strength has lain in the fact that it had the southern market sewn
up. Just as The Times of India was once an addiction of western Indians
and The Hindustan Times that of Delhiites, many south Indians could not
do without their morning dose of The Hindu.
But that is
changing. The Indian market is getting integrated; and with satellite
communications, a newspaper can be both national and local. The Times of
India has made inroads into the northern market; The Hindustan Times
seeks to go eastwards. These brash, slapdash, animal-spirited newspapers are
going places; the day is not far when they will storm The Hindu’s
bulwarks. The Hindu, of course, has prepared itself for this with its
various city editions; but to succeed, it will have to acquire sizeable
readership outside the south. Can it? Will it? I do not know. But while it
tries, it will have one loyal reader in the savage north.
