Reporting on South Asia
This collection of Western reporting and journalism published by Viking/Penguin India was timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Foreign Correspondents' Association of South Asia (FCA), later re-named the Foreign Correspondents' Club. The FCC entrusted the job to three senior 'India hands': Simon Denyer (the Reuters' India and Nepal bureau chief since 2004), John Elliot (currently reporting for Fortune and The Economist), and Bernard Imhasly (ex-Swiss diplomat who was the overseas correspondent for the Neue Zuercher Zeitung from 1991-2007). That the club was founded and is located in New Delhi seems right. Historically Western, or to be more precise, British reporting on India began in Calcutta in the early nineteenth century. In those days, it took four months for news from Calcutta to reach the English port of Falmouth. Word of the 1857 Sepoy Revolt, which began on 9 May, did not reach England till a full month later. The first full-time British correspondent in India was Reuters' twenty-two-year-old Henry Collins, who arrived in Calcutta along with the first telegraph line between Europe and India in 1865. Western reportage of South Asia however, properly began after Partition and independence in 1947. Delhi became the base for Western journalists, not only for covering South Asia, but the 'Third World' as a whole. It was a place they could fly out in those prop planes to cover 'trouble spots' and to which they could return, sit and swear in the sticky heat and file their reports. Delhi was also one of the few places then that could supply a reliable stable of 'local stringers'-- local journalists who could do the reporting for Western newspapers and radio. Today, in a sign of the change, both qualitative and quantitative, that has overtaken this world, the editors write in their introduction that the FCC's "total membership is around 400, (with) over 200 foreign correspondent members, half of whom have been posted from abroad and the rest are from India. The other 200 include journalists working for the Indian media and other non-journalist associates." The change in reporting, of course, is not confined to its human personnel alone. Reporting is now conducted near-instantaneously via emails and real-time video transmission, with the ubiquitous camera eye and a host of 'informal' journalists made up of Web chat groups, bloggers and activists. All of which has led to an information 'flow' that at times is more of a deluge, a vast stream whose dwindling kernel seems to be the hard copy, the newspapers and the old-fashioned correspondent on his/her 'beat'. But, as this book demonstrates, until recently that was the way journalism used to be. Though it aims to cover Western reporting of South Asia from 1958 to 2008, there are some pieces--in a total of 79--that were written earlier. Journalism has been defined as 'instant history' or as 'history's first draft' and indeed, as one goes through these articles, one is reminded of the truth of that statement. It is surprising to see how much copy South Asia generated in the Western press, and the sheer diversity of the newspapers in which they have appeared over the last five decades. Though the major events covered are political, there are eminently readable articles on Indian Wodehouse enthusiasts, tiger hunts, religious fanaticism, the 1984 Union Carbide disaster, maharajahs and Rolls Royces, and even the American memsahib's tribulations with caste-conscious servants in India. The book has an engrossing sweep, with that urgent and immediate perspective on events that only good, on-the-spot reporting can provide--bringing to mind Sara Suleri's line about journalism's "absorption in the moment and the concomitant youthfulness suggested by such exuberant attention." The imperatives of limited space and good reportage dictated that some articles and subjects be axed; there is Satyajit Ray, but no Calcutta Naxalites, there is General Zia but no Sheikh Mujib, and so on. The editors admit as much, writing that "we have...only been able to provide glimpses of the many issues that are at work in a region of this size, complexity and rapid change. Not all momentous events or political developments are covered, partly for reasons of space and sometimes because we have not been able to secure pieces that do justice to what happened." The major criticism of this book is that it represents the Western perspective on South Asia, that it embodies the Western gaze, the neocolonial gaze at the Other. The criticism may seem a trifle unfair, given that the editors' are sensitive to it--they write that they are "aware that many of the voices heard in this book have a strong Anglo-Saxon accent." Journalism is very much a part of the neocolonial discourse, in which the Western writer (or correspondent) attempts to form coherent representations out of the strange, and often incomprehensible, realities of the non-Western world. The cultural, political and ideological assumptions on which these constructions are based are often most transparent and obvious in journalism. The piece reprinted above, for example, displays an insouciance that would not be there had the reporting been about, say, the 'troubles' in North Ireland. Or witness the 'embedded journalist' during the Iraq invasion, the American press's shameful role in joining the Bush-Rumsfield-Cheney chorus of lies about Saddam's WMDs, or the British press's breathless words on its gallant troops in Afghanistan--all underlining the Western reporters' complicity in maintaining a sometimes murderous world order. It is true of media in underdeveloped societies too. The Bangladesh press, too, plays its due role in upholding a ruling class ideology and order by shaping national discourse, a press whose wellsprings are reliance on institutional sources, a 'free-market' economy comprising of business houses, and a standardized political vocabulary. Journalism is hardly as neutral and objective as its practitioners like to think or advertise. Western reportage and journalism is naturally a part of the overall global landscape in which the relations of power (forever unequal, forever most expressive of ground realities when it is top-down) manifest themselves. All you have to do is, as Edward Said says in his book Covering Islam, is look. And ultimately books like these help us to look, too. And that may be its lasting value to us in South Asia.
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