‘Is it Interesting?’
These are words on newspaper-office boards in two 1950s Hollywood films, Ace in the Hole and The Tarnished Angels, respectively. In both films, especially the former (still among the most caustic narratives about unethical journalism), the words carry an ironic charge – a warning that the reporters will play fast and loose with the truth, or make things extra ‘interesting’.
Mirroring life, cinema has never lacked stories about compromised or corrupt media. If you watch a current Indian film or web series with a scene involving journalists, you’ll almost certainly see parasitic reporters or shrieking TV anchors. Only rarely does one find movies that show journalists doing their jobs in a principled, straightforward manner.
It comes as a relief, then, to watch the Oscar-nominated 2021 documentary, Writing with Fire. Directed by Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas, this film chronicles the ground-breaking work of the Khabar Lahariya newspaper started by dalit women in Uttar Pradesh in 2002.
For these journalists from unprivileged spaces, uncovering the truth – and speaking it to power – is paramount. The film follows chief reporter Meera and members of her team, including the outspoken Suneeta and the initially diffident Shyamkali. It chronicles their reporting on everyday issues facing the poor, including relatively common crimes and miscarriages of justice – a raped woman’s complaint is ignored by police; a TB-ridden village has no doctors – before moving on to larger political developments around the time that the Adityanath government comes to power.
Even the most rigorous documentaries have their own lenses. They aren’t ‘objective’ depictions of reality. (As if such a thing were possible.) Writing with Fire makes its political stance clear, stressing Khabar Lahariya’s attempts to look BJP’s paternalistic nationalism in the eye. One striking scene has Meera interviewing a Hindu Yuva Vahini leader who, when asked about his vision for governance, pauses, and says solemnly, ‘Dekhiye, gau-raksha, gau-seva toh meri pehli prathmikta hai’ (‘Listen, cow protection and cow service are my first priorities’) before segueing to an explanation of why he always carries a sword (his ‘Muslim bhai’ are praying for his death). It is both a comical moment and a scary one. Another scene set in Srinagar, where some journos go for a fun trip, becomes the setting for a discussion about the UP elections, and the fear that women’s rights will be curtailed in the name of ‘keeping them safe’.
At a more intimate level, though, what’s compelling about this film is its depiction of the individual struggles of these women, learning on the job, often in dire circumstances. How to negotiate the complicated world of smartphones, as the shift to digital news begins? (At a meeting, a young woman says she doesn’t even touch the mobile phone in her house, and is afraid of damaging it.)
How to keep a phone charged when there is hardly any electricity at home? On a personal note, I remember what it was like to begin self-publishing on a blog for the first time 20 years ago – choosing templates, figuring out HTML tags. How much more daunting it must be for someone who hasn’t learnt how to decipher written letters, to press a series of keys on a device to generate meaning.
But it had to be done. And the Khabar Lahariya story is, apart from anything else, about self-empowerment in the social media age. One is always aware of the constraints and pressures in these lives – whether it is through a scene where Meera’s husband talks patronisingly about the newspaper while she peels vegetables, or a glimpse of the ambitious Suneeta yielding to societal pressure to get married.
But in the end, it is our knowledge of these constraints that makes the hard-earned triumphs sweeter and more satisfying… And a universe removed from the media world that so many of us take for granted, the eight little windows full of yelling faces that might amuse gurgling two-year-olds as they eat their dinner, but achieve almost nothing of news value.