by HADIA AKHTAR KHAN
On fighting corporate media with journalism from below.
Hadia: P. Sainath is an award-winning writer, journalist and activist. Currently based in Mumbai, he serves as the founder and editor of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), which is an independent, multimedia, digital platform which showcases the stories of rural people and their impact on Indian politics and more. Hi Sainath!
P.Sainath: Hello Hadia!
Hadia: What inspired you to become a journalist?
P.Sainath:There was no grand design. I come from a freedom struggle family. Many of my grandfather’s generation, uncles, aunts – participated in the freedom struggle. The Indian press is really the child of the freedom struggle. There was no nationalist leader worth his or her name who did not double up as a journalist. Our greatest journalists were Gandhi, Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh. Not many people realize that Bhagat Singh was a professional journalist. He wrote in four languages: Hindi, Urdu, English, Punjabi. In his last 270 days in prison, he learned Persian and wrote something. He did all this before he was hanged at age 23. I began journalism at age 23. For anyone who felt close to the values of the freedom struggle, it seemed natural to go into the press because that is what all the freedom fighters I ever knew did.
Hadia: You worked in corporate media for a couple of decades. What made you decide to leave and start a people’s media organization?
P.Sainath: The Indian media was in transition. I was very lucky to join the United News of India (UNI) (a news agency now in collapse) in 1980 soon after the collapse of the emergency. From 1977 onwards there was an explosion in media because the main business-owned media had crawled when asked only to bend, as the saying goes.
A lot of people who would not otherwise have gone into journalism went into it. I did my M.A. in History and was doing my PhD when I decided that journalism was far more interesting to me than academia.
“In the first 100 to 150 years of India’s media’s history, there’s much to be proud of. Before independence, most of the militant newspapers had been launched and nurtured by freedom fighters. ”
I worked in very different kinds of ownership platforms. UNI was a trust. These organizations were controlled by major newspapers who were providing themselves with a cheap news service. There was a relatively greater autonomy in UNI. Then I worked with. R.K. Karanjia in The Blitz. He made me the Deputy Chief Editor three months after I had joined for something else. I worked there for ten and half years. That was a family-owned newspaper. Then as a freelancer, my work appeared almost entirely in forums like the Times of India, which was family-owned but run on corporate lines.
In the first 100 to 150 years of India’s media’s history, there’s much to be proud of. Before independence, most of the militant newspapers had been launched and nurtured by freedom fighters. Gandhi launched three, Ambedkar three. One freedom fighter, H.S. Doreswamy, who is in my book, The Last Heroes, is quite a character. He was running one newspaper but he registered it under six different titles. When the British shut down one, the next day the same paper, same publisher, same writers, would appear under a slightly different name – Peoples’ Voice, Peoples’ Choice, Peoples’ Champion. It would be the same content. He drove them nuts with his behaviour.
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