Jug Suraiya's New Book

Jug Suraiya bills his new book, JS & The Times of My Life, as “a worm’s eye view of Indian journalism.” That might make you think it dishes up gritty stuff about a profession – trade rather – that has long been the receptive home of drunks, cynics and misanthropes. It does not; the book is an elegantly written memoir of a person who declares, “I never wanted to be a journalist” and is far too gentle at heart to say anything mean about the interesting menagerie of the newspaper industry. In fact, he keeps his eyes firmly fixed on the decent (if not always admirable) people who came his way during four decades in journalism. There are, however, many oddballs and eccentrics, finely observed and presented with the deft economy of style that is the hallmark of his “Jugular Vein” column in The Times of India.

 For many readers, especially fans of the now defunct JS, India’s first break-the-mould “youth magazine,” the book will be a trip down memory lane. Jug was one of the small group that launched the weekly in 1967, initially with the irredeemably square name Junior Statesman. In a city caught in the tumultuous, angry rise of the CPI (M) to power, the JS tried to be “fun” in a derivative, campy, Carnaby Street way, but with enough of desi spice to earn an ardent young following. However, it could not escape a host of dour well-wishers: those who willed it into a well. The critics were particularly annoyed because the editor who launched the magazine was the multi-talented and irreverent artist Desmond Doig, large and pink and very much a remnant of the Raj, except that he wasn’t. The Brits in Calcutta, especially those who administered The Statesman, looked down on him as chi-chi, their term for Anglo-Indian. Unlike them, his heart was firmly in India, or perhaps more accurately in its northern hills.

 Jug describes the early mad, desperate days of JS when a handful of us – I was part of the gang, along with “Dubby” Bhagat – took on the job of putting out a profusely illustrated weekly magazine without a day of experience in what needed doing. “Months of planning, of preparation, of stockpiling articles, and pictures, and comic strips, and columns, had culminated in this. And suddenly all the planning and all the preparation were as though they’d never happened at all. … How had zero hour come about? It all seemed a blur. The four of us – Desmond, Dubby, Papa and I, with Desmond leading, always – had done all the work. Desmond had planned, designed, done layouts, selected the pictures, drawn illustrations. Dubby, Papa and I had written and written some more. … That was the easy part. The hard part was the blocks, and the physical and social structure of The Statesman.” The “blocks” were the lead plates that went on The Statesman flatbed press; we had to lug them down from the etching shop to the Job Department and bring back the page proofs when they were ready. Strictly speaking, that was the job of the paper’s army of “peons,” but they were by then strictly unionized, and entirely unenthusiastic about the additional work for the JS. In Jug’s description of The Statesman social hierarchy we inky writers were the “Shudras,” the “untouchables.” 

Jug’s account of what happened at and to JS is valuable historical material, not least because of his description of the diversity of interesting characters the magazine attracted or brought into focus. At one extreme there were Mother Theresa and Edmund Hillary, at the other the schoolboy duo of M.J. Akbar and Shashi Tharoor, early contributors to the Schooltalk column. There is Jayaprakash Narayan, there is Rekha the Sonagachi prostitute, there are Dev Anand, Shirley Maclaine, Zeenat Aman and Boris Lissanevitch, ex-ballet dancer who had come to India with Diaghilev’s troupe and done a bunk to marry and settle in Nepal as Kathmandu’s first European hotelier, running the famous Yak and Yeti. [Unfortunately, Jug has left out Desmond’s favourite anecdote about how Boris, put in charge of hospitality for visiting Princess (or was it Queen?) Elizabeth, had found too late that the flush in the royal loo did not work; he arranged for a Nepali boy to keep watch through a peephole and pour down a bucket of water whenever necessary.]

The book has a priceless description of C.R. Irani, the Managing Director who took over The Statesman when Andrew Yule & Co. sold it. “The new MD exuded a military air, as pervasive as the musky scent of the Aramis cologne that he wore. He sported a safari suit, with epaulettes. From his pockets, crammed with cartridge-like ballpoint pens, dangled metallic fobs, like wartime medals. The lens of spectacles flashed with combative zeal. He did not walk; he quick-marched to battles only he could see, a short, strutting Napoleon in the making. He scared the shit out of me.”

After Mrs. Gandhi declared the “Emergency” and took to arresting journalists, Irani grew paranoid. “Each morning the MD would come to the JS, tucked away on a mezzanine floor of The Statesman building. Striding into Desmond’s cabin, he would as for the JS team to be summoned. All of us would troop into Desmond’s cabin. … The MD would address the congregation. ‘Desmond, boys, they’re coming to take me away. I expect them at any moment. But even after I’ve gone, remember: Keep Fighting the good fight, keep the flag of freedom unfurled. That’s all. Thank you and God bless till we meet again.’ Then, heels clicking counterpoint to the silent strains of ‘We Shall Overcome,’ the MD would march out, presumably into the arms of the waiting constabulary. They never came. In the afternoon, Desmond would phone the MD’s secretary, Gaver, to ascertain his fate.

 “‘The MD’s gone’ she’d confirm.

“‘To Lalbazaar lockup?’ Desmond would ask.

 “‘To the Bengal Club for lunch, she’d reply.”

 Irani soon became the man that Statesmanwallahs most loved to hate; and they had their reasons. For the JS crew that reason was the manner in which he closed the magazine. They got word of it when Johnny Angel, the man Desmond had hired to carry the “blocks” down to the Job Department, returned one morning to say there would be no more JS. 

 Jug’s description of his next super-boss, The Times of India’s Samir Jain, is kinder, but equally revealing. The account of his life and times at the Times as the paper arced down in ethical and editorial quality is probably less judgmental than many would like, but then, that is Jug. The stories from Delhi are more diverse and broader in scope than those from Calcutta, and for me it was a reintroduction to someone I had lost track of during four decades away in New York. I am glad to say he has not changed centrally. He has managed in the book, as in his column, to maintain his integrity as a person, to keep his beloved wife Bunny in view, to stay in touch with his humanity in a world that often loses sight of it, to give voice to Brindle the street dog that became part of his family, and to keep a fascinating story flowing effortlessly from cover to cover.

The Indian Press - 4: Ending an Era

In 1889, the Amrita Bazaar Patrika published a secret official memorandum by Mortimer Durand on the state of the Kashmir frontier. British officials in Calcutta (then the capital) claimed it was not accurate and further, that it “could not have been obtained except by a distinct and criminal breach of trust.” They took no action against the paper – since the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885 the bureaucrats had become wary of public criticism – but later that year the regime adopted an Official Secrets Act.

It made criminal the “wrongful obtaining of information on any matter of State importance” as well as the receipt of such information. This marked a watershed in the history of Indian journalism, which in the early days often saw officials of the East India Company serving as editors and writers. In the 1850s the Bombay Secretariat even had an “editor’s room” where information of public importance was provided, and journalists could consult official records. That easy interaction ended as Indians entered the bureaucracy and the ranks of journalists.

By the first decade of the 20th Century there were numerous Indian-owned publications critical of British rule. Valentine Chirol, a journalist for The Times of London who wrote the incendiary Indian Unrest (1910), listed those he considered particularly offensive: Hind Swarajya, Yugantar, Gujarat, Shakti, Kal, Dharma Hitaishi, Khulnavasi, Kalyani, Bedari, Prem, Vartabaha, Akash Kesari, Karnatak Vaibhav, Rashtramath, Vishwaritta, New India, Bande Mataram, Sandhya, Bengalee, Hitabadi, Dacca Gazette, Jung Sial, Navasakti,and Sahaik. There were others on his list published by Indians abroad.

Most of the names on Chirol’s list will ring no bells with readers today, but collectively they should sound a giant gong, for they represent every part of the country and indicate how wide the nationalist wave had become. None of the papers of the nationalist era had the mass circulations of modern newspapers, but they had devoted and attentive audiences. They made educated people politically aware, underpinning the age-old Indian commonalities of culture and religion.

Read, passed around and discussed, they also succeeded in spreading nationalism slowly but surely to the villages where India lived. Simple village folk might not have known much about the specifics of the changes afoot but they became aware of the stirrings of a new age. By the end of the First World War, the British could no longer count on the blind loyalty of the armed forces, and that deprived them of any hope of holding on to India.

The British were all too aware of the long-term implications of the emergence of a nationalist Press, and resorted to overtly discriminatory treatment of Indian journalists. Pat Lovett, a British journalist in Bombay, wrote of the differences in treatment and attitude: “Candour compels the admission that there is far more liberty allowed to the British-owned newspapers than to those edited and owned by Indian nationalists.” The latter suffered “the vigilant antipathy of the Bureaucracy in marked contrast to the fraternal tolerance extended to the British section.” He went on to note a reciprocal duty incumbent on British journalists: “if an administrative measure is attacked by the Indian-edited Press it is the duty of the British-edited Press to defend it with all its ordnance.”

In the final phase of British rule, The Times of India and The Statesman were staunch supporters of the regime. The TOI was always more openly racist and pro-British, a fact that has not kept its current Indian owners from continuing to advertise the paper as “A Bennet Coleman Company” as if it were a badge of honour.

More to come.

The Indian Press - 2: "White Mutiny"

It is ironic that after Edward Lytton's insufferable personality and policies provoked a pan-Indian political consciousness, the next jump in national awareness was prompted by the liberal policy of his successor, George Ripon. With a personality and attitude towards Indians in stark contrast to those of his predecessor, Ripon won much applause, especially after he repealed the Vernacular Press Act in 1881. Two years later, he had a member of his council, Courtney Ilbert, propose that Indian judges be allowed to hear criminal cases against Europeans if there was no British judge in a district. (The ban had been introduced after the founding of the Indian Civil Service a decade earlier.)

The “Ilbert Bill” as it came to be called, infuriated the British community in India, which was by then steeped in the concept of European “Aryan” superiority to the degenerate “natives.” A “White Mutiny” broke out. British-owned newspapers vented rabid contempt for Indians and there was ever-angrier invective in public forums. The British community in Calcutta ostracized Ripon socially, and a group that included civil and military officers even plotted to kidnap and ship him back to Britain. There was widespread talk of his assassination.

The mounting wave of racist anger forced Ripon to back down; he agreed that in case an Indian judge should preside over the trial of a European, half the membership of the jury should be European, As that condition was unlikely to be met in any district without a British judge, the mutineers declared victory. However, their self-congratulatory celebrations blinded them to the impact the whole affair had on Indians. Their racism had fostered a new and energetic nationalism. In Bengal, the most politically advanced region of the country, there followed an unprecedented cultural and political awakening that spread across the land in the subsequent decades.

As nationalist sentiments found voice in patriotic song and soul stirring novel, as Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s stage plays advocated widow remarriage, as college students evinced an avid interest in European revolutionary history, Indian society began to undergo the slow but inexorable change that eventually made British rule an unsupportable anachronism. The Indian Press was never the same after the Bengal Renaissance; protestations of loyalty to the Crown which were regularly tacked on to articles as a way to avoid charges of sedition sounded ever more hollow and the critical perspective grew ever sharper.

The next big steps in Indian journalism were technological. In the second half of the 19th century, the telegraph and the railways transformed the process of gathering and distributing news, and Reuters ushered in the era of agency reporting. In 1862 it took mail nine days to reach Calcutta from Bombay and Madras, six from Delhi, seven from Karachi; by boat, dispatches from London took five weeks from London, and from China it took an incredible two months. By 1870, the transmission of headline news took only minutes between India’s major cities.

Meanwhile the railways shortened mail carriage times to four days between Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. The 1870s saw several important trends: the publication of the first illustrated journals; a growing number of daily newspapers; the diversification of content in regional newspapers, and emergence of a national audience. As commercial houses took to advertising, the resources of successful publications grew significantly, and so did their readership. From the 1880s, commercial advertising became the major source of newspaper revenues.

The leaders in this period continued to be anti-national British publications, most with missionary roots. In Bombay the merger of the Telegraph, the Standard, and Bombay Times created The Times of India in 1861. In Calcutta, John Bull became The Englishman. In the South, The Madras Times founded in 1860 engendered the Madras Mail eight years later. All these publications were heavily dependent on government subscriptions. Madras also had several small weekly papers edited by British officials who argued that being “non-covenanted” (non-contractual) employees they could do so without breaking the rule against such work.

A covenanted officer who did break the rule was Robert Knight, perhaps the most influential Englishman of his era. He was the founding editor of the Times of India and of The Indian Statesman, which later merged with Friend of India to become in 1877 The Statesman of Calcutta. As an official he had participated in the discussions about the need for the regime to have its own media organ that led to the founding in Lahore of The Pioneer (1869) and The Civil and Military Gazette (1872). He advocated a more pro-active role to influence editorial opinion, urging the creation of a Press Bureau and the use of financial incentives through government subscriptions and advertising to encourage the loyalist Press.

In 1871, there was only one Indian owned daily newspaper in the country, The Indian Mirror edited by Keshub Chandra Sen in Calcutta. Sen also directed the Hindu-reformist “pice journal” Sulaba Samachar in Bengali, which had the then enormous paid circulation of 4000. (The Times of India had a print run of 3000 into the 1890s.) In Bengal the zamindar-supported English weekly Hindu Patriot had an influential readership, as did Shome Prakash in Bengali. The centre of gravity for the Indian-owned media remained Calcutta, where more than half of the country’s 38 publications in 1876 were located.

To be continued.