Samachar1 Samachar (N.M.) Is a Relatively Recent Loanword From

Samachar1 Samachar (n.m.) is a relatively recent loanword from Sanskrit. R.S. McGregor’s Oxford Hindi-English dictionary defines the word as follows: “Proceeding, practice or behaviour; state, condition,” and lists its uses: “1. an occurrence. 2. (often pl.) news, information. E.g., kya samachar hai, what is the news?”(p. 986).2 Sanskrit words for news include vartta, under which the following entry can be found: (n.f.) an account of anything that has happened, tidings, report, rumour, news, intelligence, story of or about. Monier-Williams gives an example of the word’s usage, ka vartta, ‘what is the news?’3 Another word used in this sense is samdesa (meaning communication of intelligence, message, information, errand, direction, command). Vartta and to a lesser extent samdesa continue to be used in this sense. For instance, the Hindi arm of the news agency United News of India (UNI) is called Univarta; and Sandesh is the name of a newspaper in Gujarat. But if we take the example of Doordarshan, which probably has a wider reach than any other Indian news service, the word for ‘news’ is today signaled most often by samachar. The contemporary importance of the word samachar is shaped by the linguistic Sanskritisation that developed in Northern India during the nineteenth century, as part of a series of attempts to redefine Hindustani around its Sanskritic rather than its Persian roots, and to eliminate words presumed to be foreign. Colloquially in Northern India, a more commonly used equivalent is khabar (n.f.), a loanword borrowed from Arabic, denoting: 1. news; information. 2. report, notification; message. 3. rumour. 4. (fig.) heed, care, attention. 5. (fig.) good judgement or sense (ibid., p. 227).4 Khabar refers on the one hand to imperial practices of information and intelligence allied to politics and governance, and on the other, to a term in social usage. Kya khabar?is a more frequent colloquial form in Northern India, for example, than kya samachar?5 The resort to samachar in the sense of ‘news’ is a modern usage, modelled after its western precedent. It is not clear why samachar was preferred to vartta or samdesa, 1 I have benefited from the critical comments of several persons in writing this note, including Venkatesh Chakravarti, Xavier Dias, Kathryn Hansen, Anjan Ghosh, K. Gopinath, Aniket Jaaware, Anjali Mody, Anupama Rao, Lee Schlesinger and Rajeswari Sunderrajan. Thanks to Jairus Banaji for his help with Arabic sources. 2 R.S. McGregor ed. The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993. 3 References to Sanskrit words here are derived from M. Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary Etymologically and Philologically Arranged with Special Reference to Cognate Indo-European Languages. New edition greatly enlarged and improved by E. Leumann and C. Cappeller. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1999 (1899). For vartta, see p. 945; for samdesa, p. 1143; for samachar, 1159. 4 See also Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. Ed. J. Milton Cowan. 4th ed. Considerably enlarged and amended by the author. Ithaca, NY: Spoken Language Services, Inc. 1980, pp. 260-261. 5 In South India, however, samachar is used colloquially to denote news, and here the linguistic Sanskritisation is perhaps not so much about cultural authenticity as it is about rendering literate knowledge in a more widely intelligble form. My thanks to K. Gopinath for helping me to see the force of this point. except perhaps for its novelty. Modern usage of the word is reflected for example in the name Bombay Samachar, the first Indian-owned newspaper, published in Gujarati beginning in1822. Today the distinction between khabar and samachar points, at least in northern India, to a difference between popular usage and a relatively Sanskritised official realm. Newspapers and news programs on Doordarshan as well as on privately owned channels, for example, are more likely to classify their communication as samachar. By contrast, when the term khabar is used, it signals a more informal, less official tone, as a curious effect of a Sanskritized public culture. We should note that the translation of a concept (i.e., from news to samachar) points to the translation of a set of practices as well. Three features of news as a western institution deserve notice in this context. Firstly, it is identified with a widespread culture of print literacy. Second, the communication of news is assumed to be objective and transparent when subject to professional strictures. The attendant implication that readers should be able to judge matters for themselves points back to the assumption of a generally prevalent literacy. Third, the ultimate anchor of professional news judgement is the presumed neutrality of the state, as the last court of appeal in civil society. It is when the state is perceived not to be neutral that news media is allowed to be partisan on behalf of the public. A colonial history of governance could not provide the context in which the above conditions obtained. For example, transparency about the social conditions of its production might have lent a subversive quality to news in the colonial era. In practice, the difficulty was resolved through an audience that was stratified by language. Jawaharlal Nehru described the English press in India in 1936: A reader of the newspapers would hardly imagine that a vast peasantry and millions of workers existed in India or had any importance. The British-owned Anglo-Indian newspapers newspapers were full of the doings of high officials; English social life in the big cities and in the hill stations was described at great length with its parties, fancy-dress balls and amateur theatricals. Indian politics, from the Indian point of view, were almost completely ignored by them, even the Congress sessions being disposed of in a few lines on a back page. They were not considered news of any value except when some Indian, prominent or otherwise, slanged or criticised the Congress and its pretensions. Occasionally there was a brief reference to a strike, and the rural areas only came into prominence when there was a riot….Indian newspapers tried to model themselves on the Anglo- Indian ones but gave much greater prominence to the nationalist movement.6 The fact that English was spoken by a tiny minority was concealed by equating the language community, principally the British, with India as a whole. It was in the Indian language press, by contrast, that anti-colonial and nationalist sentiments took their shape. But beyond questions of politics, the social world they portrayed was still at an elite level, far removed from the lives of ordinary Indians. We might say that the terms news 6 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1936, p. 48. and samachar each referred to distinct strata of Indian society, although they claimed to stand for the country as a whole. Indian politics now receives copious news coverage, but in other respects Nehru’s remarks on the English language press’s creation of a world unto itself is relevant even today. Since independence, the influence of the English language media has if anything increased, although English is still spoken only by a small fraction of the population. At the same time, the readership for Indian language news media has now far outstripped that for English news. For example, of the ten largest circulating newspapers, only one, the Times of India, is in English. Still, Indian language papers, including Hindi media, continue to be considered regional; for example, they command far lower advertising rates. The premium readership lies with the English language press, and in the view of advertisers, they are the truly national audience. The widespread resort to English as a means of social mobility, as an access to technical expertise, and as a link language with global connectivity, reinforce this dominant position. Interestingly, the Indian language press has in fact borne the brunt of criticism in the colonial as well as in the post-independence era, being charged with disorderly and rabble-rousing tendencies. In the former era, it was of course the seed-bed of political radicalism in the Indian national movement, and in the latter era, it is at times accused of fomenting unreliable and partisan, e.g., communal sentiments. Whatever truth there might be in these criticisms, such judgements have mainly emanated from the English language press, which unfortunately pays little attention to what the Indian language media think of it. Criticisms from the Indian language media, that the former has preserved a colonial attitude towards the society even after independence therefore have some truth to them. It remains to be seen to what extent this carry-over of a colonial relation between English and Indian language news is an artifact of print media. With the exponential growth of electronic communications, Indian language media have gained considerably in their influence vis-à-vis English language media, although the latter are likely to retain their advantage as portals to and symbols of a larger world in a way that Indian languages cannot. The irony is that the very assurance of English-language speakers of their leadership function renders them insular in ways that are not always true of their vernacular counterparts. .

Load more