On the face of it, satellite television, the
collapse of the eastern bloc and the globalization of capitalism should draw
the world's people inexorably towards the English language and American models.
In India, English has never been more widely taught than it is today. Around
the world scholars report the rapid and widespread extinction of small languages,
one estimate contending that 95 percent of today's six thousand languages will
have vanished within a hundred years. Yet India's "official"
languages and their distinctive scripts have never been more firmly guaranteed
- by capitalism and the apparatus of the state. These Indian languages have
never been more widely read, written and championed.
And their vigor seems to foster a sense of
Indian-ness and Indian nationality as much as it does localized regional sentiment. Though the strengths of Indian-language newspapers lie in their
sensitive responses to their own peoples and cultures, the capitalists who
control these papers have all-India, national visions and interests which their
newspapers serve. The newspapers and their owners are like prisms: constantly
catching beams from above and below and refracting them interpreting India
and the world to their region and their region to India and sometimes the
world.
The contest to use international market-research and
advertising techniques to attract advertising expenditure from Indian and
multinational companies has the paradoxical effect of reinforcing and
vitalizing some regional cultures, languages and concerns. Everywhere in India
the message is the same: new readers want to read about themselves; increasing
circulation depends on expanding local coverage; newspaper industry must give their
readers the latest, local news in language that they understand and enjoy.
Newspapers that fail to do so will lose circulation and therefore have no hope
of attracting advertisements. And as the cost of production - especially
newsprint - rises, they will slide towards bankruptcy.
"Official" status has been crucial in
taking languages to the point where the forces of capitalism, out of
self-interest, underwrite them. Languages such as Urdu and Maithili, which have
had no state government to grant them regular patronage, have not produced big
newspapers that attract major advertising. The position of neither language is
particularly secure in con- temporary India. Nor is the position of India's
smaller languages. Though 84 percent of the population is estimated to speak
one of India's eighteen "official" languages, the Anthropological
Survey of India estimates that India has 325 different languages. Newspapers
and periodicals were published in ninety-five languages in 1991. Less-spoken
languages suffer the same dilemma in India as they do elsewhere in the modern
world. The Indian languages that flourish in the 1990`s do so for three reasons.
First, they have large number of speakers; second, state patronage has braced
them; and, third, capitalists in the 1980s realized that new printing
technologies made it possible to use these languages to reach untapped markets.
In the 1990`s, the research of academic economists
reinforces awareness of rural, non-English purchasing power. A director of MARG, one of India's largest
market-research organizations, wrote that she had once been skeptical about the
rewards of paying special attention to rural markets. Recent surveys, however,
had convinced her that "the side show [rural India] is now the main
event." Some Indian-language newspaper proprietors had of course been
promoting "the main event" since NRS-II in 1978.
As part of their campaigns to produce newspapers
that both impress advertisers and appeal to readers, these proprietors
influence - entrench, standardize, and homogenize - languages. Malayala Manorama, for example, began
producing a household reference book, Manorama Yearbook, in Malayalam in 1959.
It has a similar place in Kerala to that of Pear's Cyclopaedia or Whittaker's Almanac
in twentieth-century Britain. Eenadu
has produced a style guide and a dictionary of technical terms and regularized
spellings, both of which it has sold widely to the public. Ananda Bazar Patrika has a style guide, which its editor describes
as a cross between the Chicago Manual of Style and the standards of Reuters and
the Economist. Published in 1991, it quickly sold thirty-thousand copies and
was believed to have inspired "five or six illegal editions in
Bangladesh."
Burgeoning Indian-language newspapers also propagate
written forms of their language in other ways. Most publish separate general
magazines which offer feature articles, short stories and serialized novels.
These periodicals constantly search for fiction writers whom they pay regularly
if not well (about Rs 18,000 for a twenty-part serial). The serials are
painstakingly developed to cater to current fashions among readers.
"Nowadays sex will not sell," the editor of Manorama Weekly said in
1993, but "families" do. He estimated that a single serial,
Stridhanam (Dowry), had added one hundred thousand to the weekly's circulation.
This popularizing of reading implants forms of speech and turns of phrase among
large numbers of people. Though attempting to give readers what they want -
that is, to reflect fashions - this popular fiction also creates fashion and
opinion.
The hunger for local news has similar effects.
Eenadu in 1993 published from seven centres, each of which produced its own
distinctive twelve or six- teen-page broadsheet. In addition, each centre since
1989 has been responsible for five or six surrounding districts, and into each
broadsheet each day goes an eight-page, tabloid-size "district daily"
for the district in which the broadsheet is sold. As well as an organizational
achievement, the district dailies open up opportunities for local stringers -
country wordsmiths, village school teachers, aspiring writers, who send their
stories to an Eenadu office by phone, teleprinter or bus. Eenadu has hundreds
of such stringers in addition to scores of full-time employees. They spread the
Eenadu style guide throughout Andhra Pradesh, and they bring to Telugu an
important sort of respect: that of get- ting paid for writing in Telugu and
having no need to know any other language.
'The honour of print" and the role of
capitalism unite in a story proudly told by Eenadu employees, who claim that
the district dailies "created and educated a new breed of small
advertisers." More than 2,500 advertising sales people go door to door
even in villages to sell the virtues of advertising to people who increasingly
delight in the dignity of seeing news about themselves in print. Close to 40
percent of the 200,000 column centimetres of advertising each month in the
district dailies in 1992 were personal advertisements. The ultimate achievement
was considered to be the example of a farmer in the Andhra delta who bought a
full-page ad in his district daily at a cost of Rs 6,000 to lament "the
death of a stud bull."
The entrenchment of Hindi languages newspaper is
revealed by a further innovation. Advertising agencies are increasingly
devising campaigns for specific languages. In the past, virtually all
advertising copy was written in English, and the same visuals were used, and a
literal translation made, if an agency decided to place the ad in an
Indian-language publication. Advertising people long recognized that such
material was "completely devoid of the spontaneity, rhythm and freshness
of the original."' By the 1990s, major agencies were tailoring campaigns
for multi-national companies to suit specific Indian languages and cultures
(or, at least, the ad people's perceptions of those languages and cultures).
Hindustan Thompson created a campaign for the Horlicks drink in 1991 which had different visuals and individually
written text for Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Malayalam and Tamil. The
overall theme of the ads remained the same (i.e., that home, family, security
and well-being equate with Horlicks).
In establishing widespread uniformity in these
languages, the newspapers are no doubt eliminating, or condemning to bumpkin
status, local variations and dialects. At the same time, however, the
entrenchment of, and pride in, Indian languages has never been more widespread.
The possibility of their being swept aside by a television-driven,
globe-encompassing English is unlikely. No doubt the effects of television will be vast and
unpredictable, but it may well promote the circulation of daily newspapers in
Indian languages. Magazines, on the other hand, seem almost certain to lose circulation, as people divert from leisure reading to television. But this
process may take some time. In Kerala, where television in Malayalam remains
uninspiring, Manorama Weekly and Mangalam, the two great story magazines,
continued to sell two million copies a week (ABC, January-June 1995). Daily
newspapers have reasons for optimism. To advertisers, they argue that
television, even in Hindi, does not reach people as effectively as they do. Television, moreover, may help to increase circulation. People who watch TV,
especially in languages they do not understand (as many Indians are forced to
do), want details, clarifica- tion and program schedules in their own language.
When the highly popular Hindi serial of the Mahabharata was shown on national
television on Sunday mornings in 1989-90, AndhraJyoti, a Telugu daily, bought
the rights to translate the script into Telugu, ran the translation in the
Sunday edition and gained fifty thousand in circulation. The national
readership survey of 1995 (NRS- 1995) showed a small increase between 1990 and
1995 in urban people exposed to Indian-language dailies. Circulation growth
helps to ensure advertisements and allows advertising rates to be raised. Until
the quality and quantity of television in Indian languages grows substantially,
Hindi news dailies will more than
hold their own.
The muscle-flexing vigour that national advertising
injected into the Hindi news press has had political effects, but
these stop far short of sup- porting secessionist ideas or challenging the
Indian state. Eenadu and its proprietor Ramoji Rao played a major role in
creating the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), which swept the Congress from power in
Andhra Pradesh in 1983. It was not simply that the newspaper supported the film
star N. T. Rama Rao and the TDP. Rather, the newspaper - and its rivals -
created the climate in which millions of Telugus came to share a sense that
Telugu culture was suffering indignities that required a new political party to
rectify. The "Telugu dignity" theme on which the 1983 election was
fought grew directly out of the surging interest in the printed word, which in
turn stemmed from the competition among Telugu newspapers to reach new readers.
The connections, however, were even more direct. The offices, teleprinters and
personnel of Eenadu often provided the infrastructure for the embryonic Telugu
Desam Party. A former political correspondent of Eenadu explained how he was
assigned "to select candidates" for the TDP. According to him, N. T.
Rama Rao and Ramoji Rao would later go through such lists to choose suitable
TDP nom- inees. The newspaper's network provided the initial network for the
party.
