{ONE}
“SUNDAY WAS A DARK DAY for India,” The Hindu’s editorial read on 7 December 1992. “The Hindu shares the nation’s sense of deep anguish at this painful moment.”
The previous day, a mob of Hindutva activists had razed the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, convinced that the sixteenth-century mosque stood over the birthplace of the deity Ram. The editorial delivered searing judgment. It spoke of “religious fanaticism at its ugliest” and “a barbaric savagery reminiscent of the crude traditions of settling scores in medieval history.” It declared that the mosque’s destruction had “delivered a lethal blow to the image of a secular and democratic India.” As redress, it argued for the mosque to be rebuilt. The editorial was titled “Unforgivable.”
In November 2019, the Supreme Court pronounced a long-awaited verdict on the ownership of the disputed site. It ruled that the mosque had been demolished illegally, yet controversially awarded the land to a trust for the construction of a Ram temple. Muslim claimants were given an alternative site for the construction of a mosque. In an editorial titled “Peace and justice,” The Hindu declared, “There comes a time when the need for peace and closure is greater than the need for undoing an injustice.” It praised the court for upholding “the faith of millions of Hindus” and saw the verdict as a “great relief to all peace-loving people” because of “the bitter truth that the fear of a Hindu backlash if there was an adverse verdict was genuine.”
After almost three decades of the “unrelenting pursuit of communal polarisation,” The Hindu said, “the majoritarian, revanchist forces in the country have fatigued their secular adversaries into passive acquiescence.” It was hard to tell whether this was an explanation or an excuse.
IN THE HEART of Chennai, a centuries-old road winds up to St Thomas Mount, named after one of the apostles of Jesus. Long called Mount Road, the thoroughfare is today known as Anna Salai, after CN Annadurai, the first chief minister of Tamil Nadu. History seeps along the asphalt—note the venerable Higginbothams bookstore, the modernist LIC building, the ornamented headquarters of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam—before pooling at its base in Fort St George, the site of the city’s founding and now the seat of the state government
The Kasturi Buildings, headquarters of The Hindu since 1883, stand a short drive from the Fort. Large red letters announce the newspaper’s name from atop the whitewashed façade of the main building—resembling, perhaps without intention, a front page with The Hindu’s masthead. The entrance, at the base, is where the anchor story would be.
Framed on a wall inside is a photograph of Jawaharlal Nehru reading The Hindu in 1960. Next to it, given pride of place, is a colourised portrait of S Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, who took control of the newspaper in 1905 and whose descendants still own it today.
We showed up early for an appointment with Malini Parthasarathy, the chairperson of the Hindu Group, and were put in the care of her secretary. It was September, in the wake of the second wave of COVID-19, and the building was nearly deserted. We walked through a maze of corridors to the secretary’s office, and from there to a canteen in an adjacent building, with an attendant to show us the way. There we paused until news came that Parthasarathy—“Malini amma” to our guide—had arrived.
From behind the desk in her spacious office, Parthasarathy faced a portrait of her late father, Srinivasan Parthasarathy—one of Kasturi Ranga Iyengar’s four grandsons, and the publisher of the paper from 1959 until his untimely death in 1961. She greeted us warmly and plunged right in.
“Why is Caravan doing an interview at all?” she asked in a tone of mild exasperation. “I don’t know why you are doing a cover story on The Hindu.”
In March 2020, just before a disastrously ill-planned countrywide lockdown to combat COVID-19, Narendra Modi had invited some twenty owners and editors of major media organisations to speak with him via video conference. An official press release later stated that the attendees agreed to “work on the suggestions of the prime minister to publish inspiring and positive stories.” Parthasarathy represented The Hindu and afterwards tweeted, “We were privileged to be part of PM @ narendramodi’s interaction … He has strategic clarity on how to move forward. We are certainly in good hands!”
The Caravan published a report critical of the meeting and of The Hindu’s subsequent coverage, which broadly followed Modi’s brief. Parthasarathy had not taken this kindly, and had let it be known on social media. “I request you to be fair and balanced,” she told us now. “If it is biased, I will be disappointed.”
The video conference was neither Parthasarathy’s only encounter with Modi in recent times nor the only occasion for disapproval of what some perceive as her concessions to the ruling dispensation. She caused consternation when, in July 2019, she tweeted about a “warm and illuminating conversation” with the prime minister, thanking him for sharing “insights about his vision for the country going forward.” Nistula Hebbar, The Hindu’s political editor, attended the meeting too, and Parthasarathy posted a picture of the three of them posing cheerfully for the camera.
This July, Parthasarathy tweeted that she had “the privilege of calling on Prime Minister @narendramodi” for “an illuminating conversation in which he shared his perspective on issues of current public interest.” This came just days after it became public that Vijaita Singh, a reporter with The Hindu who covered the security establishment, had been targeted by the Pegasus spyware, which its Israeli makers say is only sold to state actors.
Facing another storm of complaints, Parthasarathy wrote, “Our 142+ years of hard-earned reputation was built by reporting that was factual & not driven by political prejudice or bias. We @ the_hindu are determined to restore the honesty & credibility of our reporting & commentary.” N Ram, Parthasarathy’s second cousin and predecessor as chairperson, felt compelled to tell the public that he had nothing to do with the meeting. He tweeted, “we will do our very best to prevent The Hindu’s ‘hard-earned’ reputation and legacy of 142+ years ‘being squandered away’.”
These meetings have focussed particular scrutiny on The Hindu, but they are far from the only causes of it. The newspaper is at a crossroads in more ways than one—in its journalism, in its business model and in terms of its hallowed position in the national consciousness. Much of that position owes to The Hindu’s identification as a bastion of liberal and secular thought, but recent indications are that the fortress is embattled both from outside and within.
Numerous former and current staff at The Hindu told us that the newspaper has lately become extremely careful when it comes to reporting on the Hindu Right, including the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Many also said that the opposition to Modi and the Sangh’s Hindutva ideology that permeated The Hindu’s work until not so long ago is increasingly at odds with the sympathies of its core readers, many of them Brahmins. Meanwhile, the paper continues to struggle to adapt to the digital transformation of the news business and to wean itself off a dependence on traditional print advertising, a large chunk of it from the government. By the accounts of The Hindu’s own leadership, the reliance on government ads was especially acute as private advertising dried up during the pandemic-induced lockdowns. Recent years have seen losses and shrinking revenues, and newsroom conflicts and downsizing have led to plenty of bitter departures.
This leaves many questions hanging over the future of a newspaper unlike any other. The Kasturi family has proven itself an unusual class of proprietors. Generations have been intimate with not just the business of publishing but also the work of journalism, unlike other clans in charge of India’s many family-owned publications. Parthasarathy and Ram both served in the newsroom before rising to the ranks of editor and chairperson, and many others have followed the family tradition of working on the paper. And, unlike the countless examples where proprietors muscling into editorial matters have degraded their publications, the Kasturi family’s editorial stewardship of The Hindu has sometimes produced commendable results. Through periods of its history, the paper’s journalism has been considered a cut above that of its major rivals, primarily the English-language dailies based out of Delhi and Mumbai. The Hindu is the second most circulated English-language newspaper in the country and the only paper from the south widely read in the national capital.
The family’s generational tenure also translates to an unusual distribution of control. The four main branches of the Kasturi clan, sprung from the grandsons of the original patriarch, each have roughly a quarter of the shares of Kasturi and Sons Limited, a holding company controlling all of the publishing house’s interests. The Hindu Group, a subsidiary, is governed by a board comprising 12 directors, all but one of them from the family. It controls The Hindu, the fortnightly news magazine Frontline, a business paper and assorted other publications. As is the way with ancestral property, each branch’s holdings have been subdivided across generations of heirs, many of them with political and personal differences. Where other newspapers are typically under more consolidated direction, here power is contested between shape-shifting family factions and alliances. Tensions between Parthasarathy and Ram, for instance, have repeatedly spilled into the open over the years, as have other boardroom conflicts. The newspaper’s editorial tenor is subject to the board’s prevailing politics at any given time. It has traced paths across a spectrum spanning everything from left-liberalism to Hindutva, though more often than not with fidelity to the shibboleths of Brahminism and national security.
“The problem is collective ownership,” a senior official of the Hindu Group told us. “There are diverse political affiliations.” The official described three broad ideological partitions within the family and the board: one stream hewed to the left, another has largely adopted liberal positions and a third is sympathetic to ring-wing causes. “There have been several disruptions in the company,” the official said, “not just due to ideological differences but also for power.”
In Parthasarathy’s telling, the anxieties over all these things are overblown. “Generally, my effort as chair is to really try to get the business model more modernised,” she told us. She admitted that 2020 was a hard year financially but said things were better now. “Ad revenue has really done well. Digital, we are doing very well in subscription. One part is that we want to improve our digital offering. But the larger part is that we are doing well.”
On the meetings with Modi, she insisted that she has nothing to hide. “I am just open,” she said. “That’s why I put it on Twitter, I put it everywhere. If I meet a politician, I put it on Twitter.” Journalists see lots of public figures, and “just because you go and meet a politician doesn’t mean you are close to them.” The trouble was a “prejudice that you can’t meet people on the right.”
If the meetings were journalistic work, they produced no direct fruit: neither Parthasarathy nor Hebbar published any interview or story based on their private conversation with Modi. When asked what she had discussed with the prime minster, Parthasarathy responded, “Nothing about The Hindu. Just asked him generally what his views are, generally just a lot of discussion and engaging him on why he thinks a particular way.” She said some people thought she had gone to ask for advertisements, but “not even once has The Hindu asked for a government favour.”
As for the dissention from Ram, whose ideological and editorial inclinations have always leaned left-wards, Parthasarathy thought it was “silly to read in some slant and say, ‘Oh, she meets Modi and she is trying to counterbalance Ram.’” She played down dissent within the family. “We may not be in daily touch,” she said, but “it’s not an all-consuming battle either. All of us fundamentally have the same affection for The Hindu.”
She had her complaints with the way the newspaper functioned earlier. “I think we have been too ideological, generally,” she said. “I think we need to be more inclusive of different stories.” She wanted the paper “to be in tune with our readers” and “to be more into story-telling … more about the craft of story-telling and less of the ideological-prescription kind of thing.”
But Parthasarathy drew two hard lines. First, she said, “We cannot be anti-Hindu culture. It’s not our tradition.” Second, “Anything that is against basic democratic values, The Hindu will never support.” She explained that the newspaper has to stand up for press freedom, for example, and that she had protested against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. “It’s not as if we say it’s okay to expunge a Muslim or any minority,” Parthasarathy said. “None of us is saying that, nobody is.” At The Hindu, she added, “there is a basic liberal sheet from which we all operate. I told Modi also. He doesn’t mind.”
{TWO}
THE HINDU’S CREST is embossed above the entrance to the Kasturi Buildings. It shows a map of India enclosing a conch shell, cradled in a lotus and flanked by an elephant and Kamdhenu—the mythical cow mother, part-human, part-avian and part-bovine. The component themes are unmistakable: Hinduism and the nation.
Started as a weekly in 1878, The Hindu was a direct response to a debate raging in the Madras Presidency at the time. T Muthuswami Iyer had been appointed a judge of the Madras High Court, becoming the first Indian to hold the office. A Hundred Years of The Hindu, an official history published on the paper’s centenary, describes the founders as six young men associated with the Triplicane Literary Society, a forum “to discuss current topics.”
They were spurred on by “the feeling that there was no Indian newspaper to represent Indian opinion,” a feeling that “became stronger when the Anglo-Indian (British-owned) newspapers in Madras criticised in unfair and unflattering terms the appointment of Mr (later Sir) T Muthuswami Aiyer as judge of the Madras High Court and they could not reply.”
The Hindu’s contemporary rivals were the British-owned Madras Times and Madras Mail. A Hundred Years presents the paper as their anti-colonial challenger and declares that “when The Hindu made its appearance it became the sole representative of Indian opinion.” The paper’s founders saw the defence of Iyer’s appointment as a nationalist objective, but there were others who viewed The Hindu’s birth through a different lens.
Iyer was a Brahmin, as were the six founders of . Writing as “A Dravidian Correspondent”—a hint at a non-Brahmin identity—a columnist in the opposed Iyer’s elevation on the grounds
