Nirupama Subramanian, deputy editor, The Hindu, in her chapter on ?reporting from the neighbourhood? says that when she heard about receiving the Chameli Devi Jain Award for outstanding women mediapersons, her immediate instinct was to call the awards committee and declare, ?Thank you for thinking I am deserving of this award, but I regret to say I cannot accept it because I do not think of myself as a ?woman journalist?. I am a journalist. Full stop.? She beat down the instinct and accepted the prestigious award in 2008. She also says the award made her look at her career through the gender prism. Making News, Breaking News, Her own Way is about the lives and work of the woman journalists who are the recipients of the award, in their own words.
BG Verghese, the president emeritus of the Media Foundation that is behind the awards, says in his introduction, ?We have here those who have broken ground in reporting on social and rural development, tribal outfits, consumer affairs, war, scams, the stock market, internet news, communal conflict, foreign affairs, city news, sex workers, the environment, investigatory analysis, less covered regions like Kachchh, the North East, tribal Jharkhand, photography, culture, slum women and children.? A young woman entrant to journalism today may wonder why these women are being celebrated. Because journalism as they know and understand it did not exist till the mid 1970s. A lot of the earlier awardees were true pioneers, who made it easier for the next generation of women entering media.
There are three distinctive phases in Indian media. The post-Independence, pre-Emergency days were when it was mostly polite. It did not take on the government or the corporate sector. There were of course scandals, but they were few and far between. Investigative journalism had not come into its own. When women were hired by a newspaper, they were consigned to cover flower shows and exhibitions. During the Emergency, facing press censorship for the first time, Indian media learnt to assert itself. This was the second phase. Women journalists who found their voice in the 1980s and 1990s will agree that it was a truly exciting time to be in the media?it is amazing how many of them worked for the Indian Express and the Times of India. New magazines were launched and suddenly, probably due to demand for good reporters and writers, women found the doors opening.
I did not see any glass ceiling in the business magazine I joined in the 1980s. You had to deliver and you were judged on your work. Sometimes resistance came from the people I had to meet in the then conservative Madras. This was also the time when editors were mostly supportive and the power of the marketing department remained dormant. The opening up of the economy and emergence of television again changed everything. In this next phase, many young woman resent the term ?woman journalist?.
The women awardees writing in this book represent this entire spectrum of change. Veteran journalist Usha Rai says she hung in there in the 1960s and learnt about every variety of flower that bloomed in Delhi. She covered parks and zoos; these would help her when she started making a name for herself, as a pioneer reporting on environment and development issues. She was given the award in 1990, when these issues started getting their due recognition.
Tavleen Singh started life as a secretary! As she says wryly, it was because she was a bad secretary that she ended up as a journalist. This is not quite true, of course. She trained and worked for the Evening Mail in the UK for two and a half years. But when she returned to India in 1974, she had to wait for almost a year before she got a break in The Statesman as a reporter. Within six weeks, Emergency was declared. Says Tavleen, ?By the 1980s things had changed so much that when I moved to the The Telegraph?s Delhi bureau in 1982, it consisted entirely of women? My regular beat became Punjab and Kashmir. So much had changed in the Indian press and India by then that nobody was surprised to find women reporters on the front lines of chaos and violence.?
Neerja Chowdhury, the eminent columnist and political commentator who was the first recipient of the award in 1981, found when she was following the story of bonded labourers who had worked under terrible conditions in Faridabad, after being freed and returning to Madhya Pradesh they had lapsed into bondage again. It was because either the government didn?t do its bit to rehabilitate them or they didn?t know how to handle the compensation they got. She didn?t stop at filing her report. She filed a PIL against Madhya Pradesh and the ensuing Supreme Court judgment turned out to be a landmark one in favour of the bonded workers. This was before RTI and PIL.
Barkha Dutt, group editor at NDTV, received the award in 1999 and her mother Prabha Dutt had also received it in 1982. Prabha passed away when Barkha was still very young, and she writes movingly about how her mother went to the war front (Indo-Pak war) when her editor had forbidden her to do so. Prabha pretended to take some days off to visit her parents in Punjab and promptly went to Khem Kharan and started sending dispatches that the Hindustan Times found too good not to publish. Barkha did not face any resistance from her organisation when she wanted to cover Kargil, but the army was resistant. Barkha says she had to cross multiple gender hurdles as the army felt this was no job for a woman.
The awardees are women journalists who have done path-breaking work and are well-known?Sheela Barse, Pushpa Girimaji, Madhu Kishwar, Kalpana Sharma, Anita Pratap, Sucheta Dalal, Sunita Narain and many others. It is interesting that many of the awards in the new millennium have gone to younger and lesser known journalists from smaller towns and rural India who do not have the backing of big media organisations. Their stories are fascinating as most of them are making a difference, which was what journalism was all about once. One can sense a feeling of angst and a sense of helplessness from many of the writers over the trivialisation of news, and the domination of the quick sound bite. This is why it is heartening to read Vinita Deshmukh who won the award in 2008. This activist author and weekly columnist who has used RTI as a formidable tool to fight many causes has this to say: ?A journalist true to his or her salt should rise above a newspaper and make the new media his or her area of commitment. It?s in cyberspace where true journalism can be pursued.?
So has the glass ceiling been broken? Is there any need to celebrate women journalists any more? Women still have some way to go. No mainline English newspaper or magazine has a woman editor yet. They are still not in major decision-making positions, unless they belong to the owner family. One needs to celebrate women media persons at least till these gaps are breached.