On the darker side of Urdu journalism and more

Parwana Rudolvi, a veteran Urdu journalist, started his career as a journalist in 1952. It was Maulana Abdul Waheed Siddiqui of the daily Nai Duniya, Delhi who was his first employer. When the newspaper launched its Kanpur edition, he sent Parwana there as the head of the Kanpur bureau. In 1955 he switched to Siyasat, Kanpur as it had offered him Rs.25 monthly more than what Nai Duniya used to pay him. Siyasat ceased its publication in 1956. Parwana brought out Siyasat-e-Nau, his own daily, from Kanpur itself from 1956-58. He also worked with daily Hindustan, Mumbai for some time in the year of 1958-59.

In 1960 Parwana joined the daily Da’wat, Delhi and worked for it till 1967. “As I was not the member of Jama’at-e-Islami or did not subscribe to its ideology, it did not inducted me among its permanent staffs. Those who joined the newspaper after me, elevated to the status of permanent staffs but as soon as it used to come to my case, Majlis-e-Shura did not use to decide anything. I was left with no option but to leave it”, said Parwana. In 1968 he joined Pratap, Delhi and worked with it till his retirement in 1990. He passed away on April 12, 2008 in Delhi.

In this interview with Arshad Amanullah (AA) on November 8, 2006, Parwana Rudolvi (PR) had spoken his mind regarding some trends which have recently crept into Urdu journalism and are having a bearing on its professional praxis.

AA: What is the current scenario of the journalism in India in general?

PR: Number of the Urdu newspapers has increased nowadays but their quality has shamefully gone down. One of the reasons is that now they don’t need to translate news from English. Urdu service of UNI provides them digitized (electronic) version of Urdu news translated from English. Most of the Urdu newspapers are free from the obligations of copy editing and copy proof. Consequently, if the translator commits a mistake in translating news from Hindi to Urdu, you will find that mistake as it is in all Urdu newspapers. In this sense, the Urdu service of UNI is standardizing the variety of journalistic praxis earlier in vogue in the world of Urdu.

AA: What are new trends in Urdu journalism?

PR: Rashtriya Sahara, the daily newspaper, is a revolution in the Urdu journalism. It pays handsome salary to its staffs. Though Sahara does not have that wide readership, it’s successful because it brings out simultaneous editions from more than six cities. This simply never happened in the history of the Urdu journalism.

AA: What is the darker side of the ‘revolution’?

PR: The network of stingers the Sahara has been able to establish is really remarkable. The dark side of the stinger culture which is exclusive to the Sahara in Urdu is these stingers do not get paid well. They generate their own sources of income at the local level. They do a lot of non-journalistic activities to wield influence among the locals.

AA: How do you rate the contemporary Urdu newspapers when it comes to content?

PR: The content they offer is very substandard by any yardstick of journalism. If there is a mistake in a news-item offered by UNI, no body bothers to cross-check or verify it. The language the Urdu newspapers of the North use nowadays is not upto mark. In contrast, those of the South attach a lot of importance to the niceties of the language.

AA: Would you like to shed some light on the distribution mechanism of the Urdu newspapers?

PR: Distribution of Urdu dailies is quite a challenging affair. It’s difficult to get agents for them. The agents you find are exclusively Muslims, an imam or a muezzin of some mosque. He does not pay the money back to you on regular basis as his own financial situation is not good. So, on some pretext or other, he shows his incapability to pay the money back to the newspaper. Moreover, the expense to send newspapers from Delhi to even Meerut seems very high to the proprietor.

AA: Internet has come to revolutionize the world of journalism. Did it bring changes in the Urdu journalism also?

PR: Siyasat, Hyderabad was the first Urdu newspaper to launch its internet edition around 15 years ago. Though a number of other Urdu newspapers have also come up with their web-edition and started maintaining it on regular basis nowadays, it has of no great use to Urdu users of the country. Computer literacy and familiarity with the internet is almost negligible among those who can read the Urdu script. They cater to the needs of the Indian Muslim Diaspora communities across the world. Even internet edition of the Urdu dailies don’t manage to attract commercial ads.