A Look Back at a Pioneering Indian Editor

As Indians justly proud of our inheritance of a robust democracy, a strong set of liberal values and a free press, we take pride in the narratives of our birth as a nation, and acknowledge the tremendous contribution of our nationalist newspapers, vernacular and English. It was the nationalist press that aided the freedom struggle by adding idealism, enthusiasm, drama and vivid imagery to the Non-Cooperation Movement, the Quit India agitation and finally Independence. By turning these political events into moments of celebration, our national imagination was enriched and strengthened.

The set of democratic values that India’s constitution-makers embedded in the constitution included freedom of expression, thereby enabling a free press. This fortunate legacy has provided generous scope for the media in India to fulfil its responsibility in upholding democratic values and ensuring the citizen – the republic’s primary stakeholder – is well served by the set of governing institutions that have been thoughtfully put in place.

It is a matter of regret that today, most of the media, save for a few honourable exceptions, have preferred to forfeit this fundamental right, and have become craven conscripts in a dangerous political project that seeks to alter India’s pluralist national vision into a Hindu nationalist one. As is well known, the strategy of the Hindu nationalist project includes blatant attempts to manipulate and rewrite India’s history. The aim is to wipe out of our collective historical memory, the major figures who have loomed large in our historical imagination of preceding centuries of India’s rich and colourful past. All this is to ensure that these inconvenient facts do not intrude on the narrative of a Hindu nation.

This is precisely why we need narratives and counter-narratives to ensure our remembrances of our past are as multi-faceted and authentic as possible, and to tell us how we got here as an independent nation. We cannot afford one-sided accounts, however appealing to our imagination they might be.

The prevailing narrative about the Indian media is weighted heavily in favour of the Indian-owned and edited nationalist press, which was a vigorous participant in the national struggle for freedom. In independent India, this legacy has helped the Indian media take its rightful place as a stakeholder in India’s democracy.

As we resist the self-serving politically driven attempts to rewrite our history and erase our pluralist past, we should also acknowledge that in writing our own media history, we have not paid enough attention to an entire branch of the press that existed before Independence and played an important role in public discourse, reflecting British colonial interests at first, but later a clutch of land-owners and business magnates. The Indian press is one of the oldest in the world and that relative antiquity owes more to the fact that under British colonial rule, the first newspapers in public circulation were owned by colonial businessmen and edited by Britishers. Newspapers like the Times of India, the Statesman and the Pioneer, owned by British corporate groups and run by British editors, were influential voices in the public discourse in the years before Independence.

There has been virtually no scrutiny or documentation of the British-led newspapers that are an intrinsic part of India’s media history. It is remarkable that the British-led press, alongside the nationalist press, held their space in a rapidly changing political environment in the tumultuous years leading up to Independence. More striking is that these papers managed the transition from British colonial rule to Independence and have survived as significant voices today. The dearth of narratives on the British-edited press reflects an inexplicable and inexcusable gap in our historical understanding of the rise and growth of the press in India.

Given that we need to urgently illuminate what is clearly a dark area in the history of the Indian press, a new biography of S.N Ghosh, the first Indian editor of the Pioneer – a British-owned and edited paper that had Rudyard Kipling on its rolls and Winston Churchill as a war correspondent – is a welcome perspective.

Scent of a Story: A Newspaperman’s Journey is a biography of Surendra Nath Ghosh who joined the Pioneer as a cub reporter in 1927 and was its editor from1946 to 1972, ending his association with the newspaper, only in the 1980s. Written by his son, Shankar Ghosh, this book – which chronicles for the most part S.N. Ghosh’s long decades at the Pioneer – has the promise of providing a new perspective on journalism in the twilight of British colonial rule.

The biography is written in first-person, in the voice of S.N. Ghosh, based on the author’s recollections derived from his father. The result is a rambling and disjointed account.

Ghosh’s journey from cub reporter to editor is indeed a fascinating story to tell. It is after all a story of the complexities that an Indian journalist would have had to face in a work environment where British editors were continuing to direct the narration of increasingly volatile political events, as nationalist sentiment was intensifying by the day. Clearly, journalists like Ghosh would have found it far more difficult than their counterparts in papers helmed by Indian nationalist editors. They had the additional burden of having to negotiate the slippery terrain of maintaining their own intellectual integrity and sense of national pride while balancing their required loyalty to newspapers run by the British establishment.

S.N. Ghosh’s story is also the story of the Pioneer, India’s second oldest newspaper. Started in Allahabad in 1865 by George Allen – a British businessman in Kanpur whose chief distinction was mentoring the famous Rudyard Kipling – the Pioneer is itself a fascinating case study of an enterprise emerging under British colonial rule, finding its voice in the swiftly changing political times and managing to survive the transition to Independence as an Indian-owned and edited newspaper.

Therefore, this account by Shankar Ghosh of the life and career of his father is timely, offering as it does glimpses of the atmosphere and sense of those challenging times.

Yet this book which promises much, given that it could help illuminate a less known part of our journalistic history, does not live up to its potential. The biography is written in first-person, in the voice of S.N. Ghosh, based on the author’s recollections derived from his father. The result is a rambling and disjointed account, often lacking focus that does not provide for a vivid portrait of Ghosh and his times. Why the author chose to adopt this clumsy literary technique is baffling as it confuses the reader. Possibly trying to produce a ‘memoir’ as authentic as possible and relying on his own recollections, the author says he has decided to voice the narrative “in my father’s words as that is how I remember most of the incidents”.

This is a short-sighted literary technique as it compromises the detailing of the larger picture of Ghosh’s evolution as a journalist and of his intellectual profile. The first few chapters present a rambling and disjointed narrative which dwell on obscure anecdotes about family, childhood and other relatives. These anecdotes lack edge and are jumbled up with vignettes of Ghosh at his workplace, encountering various larger-than-life personalities.

What is unfortunate is that this narration by the author of his own father’s life and times, assuming his father’s voice, does not contain enough information about Ghosh’s own political views, which are required to illuminate more clearly his role as the first Indian editor of an Anglo-Indian daily at a very pivotal moment of Indian history.

Emerging from Shankar Ghosh’s narrative is a picture of a line of doughty British editors, from Edwin Howard and F.W. Wilson to Desmond Young, under whom the young S.N. Ghosh learnt his trade and managed to keep his spirits up. The interesting takeaways that emerge are of the British editors and their Indian proteges becoming increasingly conflicted between their loyalties to the British establishment and their journalistic duty to capture the true essence of the political turbulence and the ascendancy of nationalist sentiment. As recounted by his son in S.N. Ghosh’s voice, when the Pioneer was helmed by British editors, the paper sought to increase its circulation by wild swings from “the Kipling-esque White Man’s Burden and Churchillian Pax Brittanica …to writings considered bordering on Bolshevik”

This disconcerting style that runs through Shankar Ghosh’s memoir, robs the narration of his father’s encounters with major personalities such as Motilal Nehru and Govind Ballabh Pant of all gravitas. Perhaps unintended, the result of this story-telling technique is to reduce these leading political figures to caricatures. For instance, on Pant, the author, speaking as his father, says, “In time, I was a patient ear to Pant Ji and got many scoops—not that I published everything for that would be malicious and betrayal of trust.” Pant was “afflicted”, according to S.N. Ghosh, “with ‘essential tremor’ (the involuntary shaking of the head) brought about by British lathis and if he decided to say no, an extended look coupled with shaking of the head conveyed his feelings without having to say anything”.

A rich moment like becoming the first ever Indian to edit the Pioneer is wasted and reduced to prosaic descriptions of material details of the family’s consequent social and material elevation. Rather than highlighting the significance of this path-breaking appointment of S.N. Ghosh as editor in the larger national context, the author launches into rapturous descriptions of the editor’s work desk inherited from a British predecessor which “had drawer knobs of Burma teak”. He waxes eloquent on the editor’s flat which had an ambience that “lent its occupant a certain status and princes, politicians, VIPs and other visitors all felt at home and importantly, in a mood to share confidences”.

Disappointing too is the lack of focus on S.N. Ghosh’s privileged position as editor in the run-up to Independence. While the author dwells in detail on his father’s loyal attempts to keep the Pioneer financially afloat by using his political contacts to get the Jaipurias of Kanpur to buy the paper, he is unable to provide a perspective of Ghosh as editor at a crucial period in India’s coming of age as an independent nation. The memoir fails to live up to its purpose of presenting S.N. Ghosh as the Pioneer’s first Indian editor in a ring-side seat, witness to exciting moments in India’s modern history. Ghosh had a long sojourn at the helm of the newspaper, and to his credit he kept the Pioneer anchored to liberal values which it was till many decades later, for which history would remember him kindly.

But for all its clumsiness of story-telling, the memoir is an earnest attempt to tell the other side of the story of the antecedents of Indian journalism. It is also a timely reminder of our collective duty as journalists to ensure the historical truth be upheld in all its shades, including the grey. More research and biographies need to be written on the journalism on the “other side” of the national struggle as it would aid our understanding of our great journey and the sacrifices made by our forbears in ensuring the rich legacy of democratic values and human rights that we have today.

Malini Parthasarathy is currently Co-Chair, The Hindu Group and Director, Editorial Strategy. She was formerly Editor of The Hindu.