From rural India to global audiences: the women behind Khabar Lahariya speak out

Meera Devi documents a farmer during an interview in Banda. pics courtesy/khabar lahariya

The ones whose heels aren't cracked and aching/How will they understand another's pain?" is the dedication with which The Good Reporter: A Memoir of Journalism in the 21st Century (Simon and Schuster) begins. Written by Disha Mullick with Geeta Devi, Harshita Verma, Kavita Bundelkhandi, Lakshmi Sharma Lalita, Meera Devi, Nazni Rizvi Shyamkali, and Suneeta Prajapati, the book seeks to change the stoic face of journalism by using the power of vulnerability.

As the female reporters of Khabar Lahariya (KL) - India's first rural media network - narrate the pain, pleasure, and challenges they faced as an all-women led newsroom through this collective biography, they kickstart a revolution.

Excerpts from the interview

Khabar Lahariya's journalists learnt to find strength in the closeness they felt to their stories. What did they unlearn to reach this point?
Disha Mullick (DM): In the beginning, we felt the need to prove that we were capable of being reporters who are objective and balanced, and who never brought their own feelings and past into a story. We thought that including our personal anecdotes would discount our journalism; that people would say that this is not how reporters are supposed to operate. So, we never believed that we could bring ourselves and our experiences into our stories.

Kavita Bundelkhandi and Disha Mullick

It is only after many years of experience and hardships that we now have the confidence to say that there is no such thing as objectivity - whether you are a journalist or an author, one always carries a part of their history inside them. Normally, what happens to those memories? We repress them, and do not allow them to reflect in our writings. I think we have now gained the conviction to tell the world about what goes on behind that objectivity and what we bury to prove ourselves as journalists.

Suneeta Prajapati reports from Chitrakoot in 2019

We learn of the tightrope-walking between being a good woman and a good journalist, and how KL's journalists find a balance...
Kavita Bundelkhandi (KB): We still don't have it all figured out but the effort has come with challenges. To this day, it is scandalous to not wear sindoor. We've had countless discussions at the KL office about the archaic nature of wearing sindoor or a mangalsutra, and even after those discussions women would go back to practicing those protocols.

Things haven't changed a lot, yet we have managed to break many rules in our personal lives - my in-laws wouldn't let me wear a salwar suit for reporting assignments, but I told them that it doesn't make a difference since a saree probably shows more skin anyway (laughs). But I still find myself wearing sindoor whenever I visit, to keep them happy. We don't want to mislead people by saying that we have found a balance yet.

Several stories discuss the failure of Western/liberal feminism, and call for intersectionality. How did KL's reporters from rural India and lower caste families bring experiences into their reporting?
DM: I believe that Western feminism has also changed in the last couple of decades but feminism from all across the globe - Latin America, Africa, and North America - has influenced our reporting. A more localised version of feminism is important because you can't impose rules of feminism internationally onto a local body.

Meera Devi

I feel that looking at the world through the lens of local women and folk in general has been most important for us. When you're engrossed in the lives of locals for decades, you understand that no one is attached to one identity. No woman is just a woman - she belongs to a certain caste, class, and religion. These identities are hard to let go of. We want to wear all of those lenses while reporting. It's crucial that we do not simply adopt a foreign lens.

This book could be hailed as a feminist handbook as it discusses a woman's pleasure and pain as a tool for revolution. How far have we actually come?
KB: Any revolution demands sacrifice and we have made many. We have left our villages and pursued an education in the city. We decide what to eat, what to wear, we buy our own land, own our homes. All of these leaps reflect in our writing/reporting, and helps keep the revolution alive. There is happiness, anger, and curiosity, but I keep using the word revolution ever so often, because it must never stop. There is no finish line, and if it has to stay alive for another 50 years or more, the shackles of patriarchy must be broken by the women of every village, every state and every country.

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The digital shift

Our stories have reached other countries. However, we had to sacrifice the connections we made when we met people in person - the local nature of the newspaper was lost. Another challenge was anonymity. At the time, it was important that our identities remained unknown, but going digital would mean showing our faces on camera. Our biggest challenge was within the team, because many weren't willing to let go of print because of its local fabric and language.

There was a time we felt that moving to digital would be impossible. But there were issues with funding as well, so it was necessary. Shifting people's preferences from print to digital was also difficult, and for many years, print and digital worked together. Till date, some members want to resume the print edition.

Meera Devi and Kavita Bundelkhandi