In this column we will be featuring the writings by award winning women journalists in India found in the collection of the book ‘Making News Breaking News Her Way. It is a publication by Tranquebar Press in association with Media Foundation, New Delhi which instituted the annual Chameli Devi Jain Award for an Outstanding Women Mediaperson in 1980.
Sheela Barse
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] revisited the Chameli Devi Jain Award citation – composed on an old manual typewriter -twenty-six years after receiving it. There I found a sensitive appreciation of the freedom of expression. The citation tracked my journey as an ‘investigative journalist’, then a relatively new term and identity to which few appeared to aspire. For, the themes, content and style of my writing, were not what editors would readily recommend to their reporters. I was a freelancer and had neither applied for the award nor submitted clippings. Yet they chose me. A flock of rare birds, the Media Foundation panel!No doubt, decades of handout journalism and the suspension of constitutional rights during the Emergency, from June 1975 to March 1977, had triggered a compelling urge within me to nurture and strengthen independent, reporting. Reporting which created space for the common man and intruded into the money-and-political-power-centric newspages with the abrasive authenticity of Bharat. But surely, the selectors’ and jurors’ sterling professionalism had not sprung out of nowhere.
The Emergency actions that attempted to fell the Banyan Tree of our democratic life, axed my passivity. I felt that a spectator-chatterati mentality had helped the Indira Gandhi government and power-centric Indians to manacle our fundamental freedoms to their whims. An urge to repossess my self-value and my proud Indian citizenship simmered within, fuelling a desire to actively participate in, and further the process of, democracy. Carving out space for the voice of the ordinary citizens in the media and public fora seemed the best option, despite the predominance of political and handout news. In such a climate, sodal coverage was mostly desk- bound and shunted to the weekly feature page, and development reporting was rare.
I went about studying issues and documents, tracking down irrefutable facts and then linked them to values, letting anger, pathos and raw reality pulsate in my writing. I was labelled an ‘investigative journalist’. Later, reporters termed me ‘an intrepid woman’ who walked into police stations, delved into the flesh-trade and explored drug dens. But, for me, the best stories were those that gave voice to the voiceless. I wrote unhesitatingly about how oppressive governance confiscated from the people their status as citizens. For instance, a story about the cruel tribal land acquisition for the Dapchari Milk Project a few miles from Thane; a sharp critique, from the development planning perspective, of the then chief minister’s secretly planned Operation Eviction targeting Mumbai’s migrant population (this article was used in the famous 1982 PIL case in the Supreme Court on slum dwellers); a series on children in brothels, which led to at least two projects for their care and education; and issues of women prisoners, which received wide recognition.
My commitment and values were tested time and again. In 1982-83, newspapers fell in line with the Maharashtra home minister’s ‘directive’ to not publish me and take away my roji roti. My reports and PILs on prisons were politically hurting.
The editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India told me that his peers were chary about publishing me but he valued my contributions. He knew I earned my living by freelancing, so ‘could I write under my sister’s name?’ I declined the offer. I would rather make an honest living selling raddi.
The Bombay Union of Journalists summoned me to explain my ‘unethical’ act of using information acquired as a journalist, to assert constitutional rights through the courts! In response, I wrote an article, Journalism as Activism’, arguing that I would any day expand the limits of journalistic conventions to fit my values and constitutional concerns. Though the final print version was not exactly as I would have wanted, I am happy to say I received letters and telegrams from all over the country for that piece.
The freedom of the press in India is tentative, mostly circumscribed by the insecurities of editors and reporters. Before the explosion of television channels, one also had to deal with mental blocks regarding unconventional stories or points of view. Among my rejected stories was a compassionate piece on eunuchs, criticism of Vijay .I
Tendulkar’s work and my argument against isolation of the J aged in old peoples’ homes. I often had to make a case prior to exploring an issue. I cannot say that my success rate in convincing editors was high. Often my stories were held back for weeks, such as the one on the dwindling of bird species in Mumbai.
I had to write in English-language publications to make an impact at policy levels and to get minimum life-sustaining remuneration. This saddened me. The powers-that-be ignored Hindi publications, even though their editors were culturally rooted, great litterateurs and wonderful human beings. Unlike the snooty and often unimaginative English newspaper editors, they treated me with dignity and fairness. On seeing me enter the office, Dharmaveer Bharati, acclaimed poet and editor of the prestigious Dharmayug, always walked out of his cabin, twirling a cheroot in his tobacco-stained fingers, to comment on my latest writing and share some recent experience. My memories of the ever-popular satirist, film scriptwriter-editor, Sharad Joshi, are of him laughing with joy, delighting in ideas or in someone’s success. Well-known author Ganesh Mantriji and I, engaged in conversations on different issues, even after Parkinson’s disease crippled him and forced his retirement. But no warmth ever developed between any English-language newspaper editor and me, probably because I am not Westernised. In his poem ‘Bouna’ (Dwarf), Editor Vishwanath Sachdev wrote how intellectuals are happy to be dwarfed by giant business houses that take immense pride in their English-language newspapers.
Appropriately enough, the newspaper person who cared for my work and freedom was a freedom fighter –the legendary Indian Express Group owner, Ramnath Goenka. Ramnathji was disturbed when I said that people tolerated and practised child labour. He hung his head in shame and frustration. He had been a member of the Constituent Assembly, which had ordained that ten years into Independence, all children below fourteen years should be in school. Finally he said, ‘Use my paper. Write everything you want on that issue.’ He promised to increase my remuneration when I mentioned the high costs of investigative journalism.
Ramnathji once spumed an MLA who had sought his intervention to stop me from writing critically of the so- called social work of politicians. I turned to the press baron again, when I clashed with the Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court after his judgement had gone in favour of the powerful, in a case involving the molestation of a fourteen- year-old in a Mumbai remand home and her subsequent death by fire. He consulted his confidante, Gurumurthy, about legal support for me despite having just recently come out of a prolonged coma.
The media is flourishing commercially today. Reporters enjoy opportunities and assistance. But bold, in-depth reporting on anything but the current cause celebre is still largely missing. What journalists do not write about is a matter of grave concern. There is hardly any worthwhile reporting on the people who feed this nation -the farmers. The invisibility of the other economically deprived is equally painful.
As implied in the Chameli Devi Jain Award citation, I was not a hit-and-run artist. Wherever necessary, I paused and soothed victims of sexual savagery and cruel injustice taking the help of Hindu spiritual ideas. I reached out to the scriptures to survive in a tough world and stay true to my core beliefs. Visitors to my home often cast curious and surprised glances if they saw my puja room. But a journalist-activist did not need to conceal the foundations of her inner strength and her dharma-oriented personality when in public view.
My journey post the Chameli Award? Well, among the major issues I took up were the rights of the mentally ill, child deaths due to nutritional and medical neglect, international cabals of child-sex assaulters and …the plight of birds.
When I moved to Pune to live beside a riverside green belt, it was inhabited by more than a hundred species of birds that used it as their resting, feeding and nesting sites. Flocks of river egrets, magpie robins, parrots and mynahs would fly past. Crested bulbuls meditated, perched on the plants on my window-sill; larks, sunbirds and bats dropped in occasionally; three generations of tiny bee-eaters were born in one of my soft leafy plants. But now, electromagnetic emanations from nearby software companies and other disturbances have destroyed everything -the river, riverbed, ancient aquifers, the birds and the clean and healthy atmosphere. Birds, recalling their flights over millennia, still wing their way to their favourite sanctuary, rich in food, foliage, terrain and water, and…drop dead.
The practice of dharma has helped me overcome the anger and occasional desire to curse those who torment or harm Bharat. Today, I would like to remind us of our traditional heritage that believes in the coexistence of all creatures living in mutual respect and harmony.
Sheela Barse is a dedicated social ac tivist and an award- winning journalist. She has been a member of a number of government committees at the state and the national levels. For close to two decades, she has conducted tireless and pioneering campaigns for a variety of social causes such as malnutrition deaths, prison conditions and children in jails, and fought public interest litigations for social justice. She was given the Chameli Devi Jain Award in 1984.
