Being a land of many languages, India’s media is no monolithic phenomenon. Notwithstanding the regional differences, the vernacular media has a uniformity of character. We can broadly categorize the Indian media into the English version and the vernacular variety. I would say that the difference between these is more pronounced in the ‘space value’ of the print media than in the ‘airtime quality’ of the electronic variant.
Over to the English print media first. The lament of the learned is that sparse is the space for literature in it. Their nostalgia is for the media that propped up fiction through its columns in the golden era of the novel in Europe. After all, didn’t the classics of yore dawn on the world as the serials in newspapers?
The lament continues as the Indian media fails to address the concerns of these connoisseurs. It’s not as though it had turned its back on literature as such, but has come to be hand-in-glove with mainstream publishers to publicize what they want to be promoted, and what is that like? Well if the writer were to be famous, never mind any notoriety associated with them or the quality of their work, the publishers sign them up without a second thought. And why not, considering how it will help with the sales aspect? The eulogy-interview-review regimen in the media sets the tone for the book release. Thus willy-nilly the media helps commercial publishing by hyping the author as a new literary avatar.
Literature’s Lament: Cause And Effect
Of course, all this, I feel more often than not, tends to favour a dubious writer than highlight a deserving book. After all, it’s one thing to glamourize an author of questionable quality and another to evaluate the literary worth of a writer’s work. Well, the media hype might help buttress the publishers’ bottom lines but critiquing genuine works only serves the cause of literature. I strongly feel that while the publishers shun genuine literature for the lack of guts, the author-published books get short shrift from the media for want of space.
Other than wasting precious media space on the organization’s dime, the hype wouldn’t help, because discerning readers would see through the game anyway. I would say that in the short run, all the hype turns the novice into a literary celebrity before anyone even shows any inclination to read his work! But after being the ‘talk of the town’ for a while, most of these books collect dust in the bookstores before they become fodder to the shredding machines in time. The newspapers or magazines that hyped them would also be no more than waste paper by the month end. It is thus the media space is made to supplant the reader base, which used to be the means by which the authors of yore became the leading lights of literature.
That being the case, where is space for emerging talent to get sighted when all attention is bestowed on those that are already established in the first place? That the media only covers the activities of celebrity authors but seldom discusses the sum and substance of their works might sound absurd, but I am of the opinion that this is rampant. There is a method to this madness, to how hype is built around the authors’ persona and not over the content of their books. Won’t this prove Shakespeare right when he said: “Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving.”
However, this sad state of affairs could be redressed, while yet catering to the modern media’s penchant for the trivial. It’s a pity though, that media managers do not want to address this malaise that afflicts them, because it boils down to managing the media space for profit, with a minuscule corner still left for literary promotion.
Media organizations are dependent on advertising for revenue, and most laypeople don’t realise that advertising revenue enables media houses to get their dailies delivered at the doorsteps of the readers. But what about the rest of the vast space in print and round the clock airtime on the cable networks? Can’t more of a literary niche be created in them both without disrupting the usual news cycle? Any SWOT analysis would underline the need for the media to nourish quality literature.
When the world was not a global village, the news was not thick and fast, and that, I would say, afforded literature to get its due. Well, the times have changed, just not for the media alone! I strongly feel that the media needs to help nourish quality writing in its columns for its own well-being in the long run. How else will the language skills of future media personnel get that finesse than by going through the language grill of the current newspaper columns? If the media mangers-of-the-day fail to keep an eye on the quality of the writing in their columns, then tomorrow’s dispatches from their correspondents would bear an e-mail mark! And that would be that, but how to avert that!
All said and done, it needs to be borne in mind that bringing out newspapers is a rush job, after all, they have to reach millions of homes far and wide well before the subscribers stir out of their beds. Thus, the time available at the editorial desks to process the gathered news leaves no time to make literary drafts out of it all. It is this constraint I feel that makes it all the more important to develop language skills in the reporters and journalists alike, and that would be possible only when the books that the would-be newsmen consume have a literary quality of their own. That, in turn, depends on promoting books of literary quality in the media for a beneficial reader orientation. Shouldn’t one find adequate media space for that?
Making Space For Literature
One only needs to scan the newspapers to note how much precious space is mindlessly wasted. Understandably, politics, business, and sports besides crime, cinema and trivia take the bulk of the media space, for these are the topics that make the average readers buy newspapers. In what could be seen as tokenism, some, if not all, newspapers I would say concede moderate space for literary subjects; mainly in the form of book reviews that are left after hyping the selected works.
Nonetheless, the space for the ‘news that sells’ should be better structured so as to make enormous room for the not-so-glamorous literary cause. I have seen how news on one-page figures on another, wasting space, and if only properly drafted and edited, space so saved could be used to accommodate literature and its poor cousins of fine arts. If and when that happens, I am sure there would be media space enough for the promotion of literature and arts.
Road accidents, murders, rapes, dowry deaths, and such incidents are accorded the status of ‘dispatch’ along with headlines, and that occupies many columns. If all of them were grouped together under relevant headings, space so released would be no mean a space. Another wasteful practice with the English media is its penchant for the ‘carpet coverage’ of cricket. What the special correspondent elaborates in the main story is as well carried in the guest column of an eminent past master of the game. It is a different story with other sports though.
Same is the case with ‘trivia’ that is given so much space along with cinema. The way trivia is highlighted makes one suspect that the media is starved of newsworthy material. However, if all the trivia could be clubbed in a corner, wouldn’t that suffice to satiate the appetite of the curious? Besides, I am sure that it would save the bother for the interested readers to scan through the entire paper and miss some details. Thus, if imaginatively structured, half a page or more a day could be made available for literature and the fine arts in all English dailies.
Proper Utilization To Promote Literature
What about the proper utilization of space? If that extra space goes to the favoured writer I do not feel it would make value-addition to literary columns. Book reviews are meant to be windows of literature for the potential readers to peep into. But are they as positioned in today’s media?
One would be interested in ‘new arrivals’ and what they ‘are about’ so as to find out which of them are ‘interesting’, and so we would like to be briefed about as many books as possible. Here too the media fails the book-reading public. The books that are taken up for reviews are the same that are hyped throughout, but at times what gets hyped gets rubbished as well by the same organization!
I am of the opinion that no book, whatever its worth, would never get reviewed so long as the publishers don’t throw their weight behind the same, and the books that get reviewed in every newspaper and magazine, without exception, are the ones the leading publishers push for. If not, how come all the book review editors in the country unerringly select the very same books for review in their columns? I do not think this is a coincidence. So the media, instead of bestowing upon the readers the ‘variety of many’ burdens them with the ‘monotony of a few’. Wouldn’t that suggest that it is not the editorial selection but the publishers’ pull or the celebrity push that’s the raison d’être of the book reviews?
While the English media chokes the Indian English writing thus, the vernacular media, I would say, provide ready space to bhaasha writers. Thanks to the preponderance of magazines in all regional languages, there is space out there for the bhaasha writers to get published. This largesse of the vernacular media I feel dilutes the standard of the bhasha literature, what with writers in scores having hundreds of short stories to their credit!
This much magazine space produces poets by the dozens who in my opinion are incapable of rhyming a couplet even. On the other hand, those who take to writing in English have to pen full-length fiction as a prelude, as there are no magazine routes to take his or her piecemeal work along, and the only publishing avenue available for these aspiring authors is the commercially governed mainstream publishing. I have seen how, while the budding bhaasha writer’s short story is not expected to steamroll the magazine sales, English fiction publishers have their own calculus about the return on the investment on the manuscripts they take up.
But with the right intent, the media could play an important role in promoting quality literature. If only the extra half-page that I said can be made with proper categorization of articles is earmarked for excerpts from the author-published books. This will, I feel, help readers make their own literary choices. Likewise, I think cable networks could air the book readings of the budding authors who would spare no effort to send in the videos of their reading for the screening.
Wouldn’t this help determine the type of books that the public favours, forcing the publishers to get onto what I feel is the right literary track, away from the commercial path on which they have been treading for long? So it is up to the media to first arrest the decline and then help Indian literature reach the creative heights it is capable of attaining.