Marathi Press India
Marathi: Big Newspapers Are Elephants By Robin Jeffrey
To understand the Marathi press, one needs to appreciate two cities-Mumbai (Bombay) and Pune (Poona). Mumbai is the Manhattan of India-a buzzing, multi- lingual magnet of an island. As well as the industrial and commercial focus of India, it is the base for the advertising industry and for India's two biggest newspaper chains, The Times of India and The Indian Express. Pune, on the other hand, is Maharashtra's Boston (indeed, both have brahmins) where history, culture and more cultivated ways of life are supposed to prevail. Mumbai's magnetism has meant that it is not a solely, or perhaps even predominantly, Marathi city. Migrants come from all over India to seek their fortunes in what ought to be called, if New York is the Big Apple, the Big Mango. Virtually, all of India's languages are spoken in Mumbai, and daily newspapers in Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Sindhi, Tamil and Malayalam are published here. Marathi journalism, on the other hand, first flowered in Pune under the renowned patriot Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1857-1920) in the 1880s, and Marathi's dowager daily, Sakal, began in Pune in 1932, another product of nationalist idealism. Mumbai's dominance distorts any attempt to take simple snapshots of 'Maharashtra' as a whole. Though Maharashtra in the 1990s was India's most urbanised major state with 39% of the population living in cities, one-third of those urbanites lived in Mumbai. After Kerala and Goa, Maharashtra was India's most literate state, but 17% of literates lived in Mumbai, though it accounted for only 12.5% of the population. Maharashtra appeared as India's most industrialised state, but most of that industry was concentrated in Mumbai and its immediate neighbourhood. In rural Maharashtra, particularly the dry districts of the east, literacy and urbanisation were below all-lndia averages. As a consequence of these contrasts, Marathi journalism acquired two distinct styles. One is embodied in Sakal,
To understand the Marathi press, one needs to appreciate two cities-Mumbai (Bombay) and Pune (Poona). Mumbai is the Manhattan of India-a buzzing, multi- lingual magnet of an island. As well as the industrial and commercial focus of India, it is the base for the advertising industry and for India's two biggest newspaper chains, The Times of India and The Indian Express. Pune, on the other hand, is Maharashtra's Boston (indeed, both have brahmins) where history, culture and more cultivated ways of life are supposed to prevail. Mumbai's magnetism has meant that it is not a solely, or perhaps even predominantly, Marathi city. Migrants come from all over India to seek their fortunes in what ought to be called, if New York is the Big Apple, the Big Mango. Virtually, all of India's languages are spoken in Mumbai, and daily newspapers in Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Sindhi, Tamil and Malayalam are published here. Marathi journalism, on the other hand, first flowered in Pune under the renowned patriot Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1857-1920) in the 1880s, and Marathi's dowager daily, Sakal, began in Pune in 1932, another product of nationalist idealism. Mumbai's dominance distorts any attempt to take simple snapshots of 'Maharashtra' as a whole. Though Maharashtra in the 1990s was India's most urbanised major state with 39% of the population living in cities, one-third of those urbanites lived in Mumbai. After Kerala and Goa, Maharashtra was India's most literate state, but 17% of literates lived in Mumbai, though it accounted for only 12.5% of the population. Maharashtra appeared as India's most industrialised state, but most of that industry was concentrated in Mumbai and its immediate neighbourhood. In rural Maharashtra, particularly the dry districts of the east, literacy and urbanisation were below all-lndia averages. As a consequence of these contrasts, Marathi journalism acquired two distinct styles. One is embodied in Sakal,