For now, it appears that Indian-language newspapers bolster a sense of Indian-ness and an Indian nation at least as much as they promote feelings of unique local grievance and separateness. Their proprietors illustrate why this may be so. In 1993, twenty families and a public company owned the newspapers that controlled more than 70 percent of audited daily circulation in India. Together, the three families on whom I drew for examples - the K. M. Mathew (Kandathil) family of Malayala Manorama in Kerala, the Sarkars of Ananda Bazar Patrika in Calcutta and Ramoji Rao of Eenadu in Hyderabad alone control more than 11 percent of daily circulations. These families have much in common. They are prominent members of the elite in their region, but they are also acknowledged as members of an Indian national elite.
Newspaper proprietors have a national identity and national interests. They meet regularly in a number of forums: the Audit Bureau of Circulations (336 members in 1994), the Indian Newspaper Society (565 members in 1990) and the All India Newspaper Editors' Conference (425 members in 1990). Many of these newspaper-owning families now have members who have been educated overseas. They have experienced "being Indian" in the world, as well as "being Bengali" in Delhi. They share the problems of their industry: long-standing struggles with national and state governments seeking to dominate the press, the price of newsprint, the vagaries of the Registrar of Newspapers for India (RNI), the official whose job has been to monitor and regulate the press, labor unrest in the face of new technology. Delegations of leading proprietors travel together overseas on buying trips for newsprint: larger, combined orders get better prices.
These families often agree on models of what a Hindi news paper should be. Aveek Sarkar worked in British newspapers under Harold Evans, one time editor of the Sunday Times in London. Ramoji Rao sent one his two sons to the William Allen White School ofJournalism in Manhattan, Kansas. All three of K M. Mathew's sons have done courses with the Thomson Foundation in Britain. Ananda BazarPatrika, Eenadu and Malayala Manorama are instantly recognizable to an English-languagejournalist as highly polished productions, even if the script is indecipherable. Even sensational Tamil papers like Thanthi or Gujarati papers like Gujarat Samachar and Sandesh have the flavour of a New York Post or a British Sun. The "package" is international, even though the con- tents must be sensitively local. The three families to whom I have referred are not unique. They have much in common with the more down-to-earth proprietors of Hindi, Gujarati or Tamil newspapers. Among Hindi newspaper proprietors, there is a sense of coming of age. Once, Hindi journalists assert, they were regarded as "second-class citizens," the poor relations of the English-language press. In 1993, however, Ashwini Kumar, an owner of Punjab Kesari, declared: We people [now] get more importance than [the English press].... We feel that we are not less than them and we are rather one up now .... I have seen a change in the last 5-6 years. The politicians - especially the people who are the policy- makers in Delhi - they have started talking very, very seriously about Hindi ... - not "language" - national newspapers.
The key word is "national": the owners of the major Hindi language news papers see themselves and their newspapers as influencing not just their localities but the Indian nation specially have a considerable effects in communal matters. The idea of "an Indian nation" has meaning for them: their businesses work at a national level, not merely in dealing with a national government and reporting "national" news, but in garnering national advertising. Most international and national news arrives at most Indian-language newspapers in English. Most local news arrives in the regional language. Journalists engage in constant two-way translation, as they file for national or international Hindi news agencies and translate national and international stories into the regional language. This explains my attraction to the image of a prism, and many proprietors also see their role in this way: their newspapers mediating daily between the Indian nation (and the world) and their regions. It is possible of course to smash prisms; but for the time being, the interest of Indian-language newspaper proprietors lies in keeping them brightly polished, flashing incessant messages between region and nation.
India's best-known news magazine, the fortnightly India Today, illustrates the complex relationship between an international community, the English- speaking national elite in India and prospering regional elites. India Today has conceptualized all three groups as markets - markets requiring distinctive treatment. First, for Indians overseas and foreigners interested in India, it produces four international editions: a general edition, one for North America, one for the U.K and a special Malayalam edition for Kerala people working in the Gulf states. Second, its domestic English language edition, which regularly focuses on the international activities and achievements of Indians, carries an implicit message that India measures itself against the best in the world. And third, since 1986, when India Today launched its Hindi edition, it has begun domestic editions in Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Gujarati. By 1994, total circulation exceeded 1 million copies a fortnight, of which the English-language edition constituted one-third.
Each of the Indian-language editions seeks to cater to aspects of its own culture that will make readers buy the magazine. For example, each of these editions carries fiction, though the English-language India Today does not. The Indian-language editions are sometimes criticized for the woodenness of their translated language. (They are usually 30-40 percent original material and 60- 70 percent translations from the English-language edition)." But their substantial circulations indicate that such language does not necessarily put readers off. Each Indian-language edition aims to capture regional advertising that otherwise India Today would miss. Thus the process of selling advertising bounces between region, nation and globe, much as "news" itself does.
This discussion highlights the complexity of the transformations affecting a multilingual state in an age of media revolution. Analysis of nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe, which has inspired much theorizing about Indian and other "nationalisms," seems to me to offer little possibility of fruitful prediction. World capitalism bombards India with examples and demands. Indian capitalists - in this essay, newspaper proprietors - adapt those demands to conditions and people they strive constantly to understand. In doing so, they and their newspapers refract their regions to India and the world and in turn refract the world and India to their regions. The process may homogenize or disembowel local cultures; and its dependence on advertising no doubt promotes consumerism; but the process does not necessarily subvert ideas of an "Indian nation."
