In a city where class divisions remain ingrained in the landscape, it perhaps did not come as much of a surprise when a Bengaluru magazine — produced for and by slum dwellers — died quietly. In 2013, Slum Jagatthu (Slum World), a monthly magazine in Kannada, ended its seemingly miraculous 13-year-run of over 135 issues.
For its editor, Isaac Arul Selva, 47, a Class IV dropout who has fought against an indifferent bureaucracy for over three decades, resilience is a virtue that is never far away. Egged on by friends in academic circles, he re-launched the 20-page black-and-white magazine in April 2017 out of a small room on the fringes of posh Koramangala. Here, glitzy pubs and towering malls are within a walking distance on the one side, while on the other is the site that once hosted the city’s largest slum, which has since been levelled to make way for a mall.
By February 2018, the reborn Slum Jagatthu with a cover price of ₹10 had a paid circulation of 300 readers — a far cry from the 2,500 it had reached earlier in this decade. “But we add more than 50 subscribers every month,” says Mr. Selva. A free online edition is put up on their blog and circulated through social media to slum leaders across the State.
A six-member team churns out the edition with a few laptops and some mainstream newspaper articles on slum dwellers stuck on the walls. Mr. Selva and Balamma K., who manages the office, are the only team members who have stuck through since the first Slum Jagatthu was published in 2000. What is constant, though, is that those working in the paper are slum dwellers.
For Hariprasad Anandpur, who works full-time with little guarantee of assured monthly pay, the magazine has allowed him to live a lifelong dream amid words and thoughts. The 34-year-old, who comes from a nomadic tribal community, was working as a helper for a wedding caterer until he attended a four-day workshop on media conducted by Mr. Selva. For over 10 years, after he had cleaned up lavish dinners in wedding halls, he jotted down his thoughts as poetry.
“When I was younger, my books were burnt to make me focus on work. Now, writing is my work and these new thought processes are my motivation,” he says, adding rather glumly, “I wasted more than 12 years of my life working mindlessly in the catering firm.”
Archiving slum history
Mr. Selva realised during the four-year break in publishing Slum Jagatthu that the larger society lacked a consistent archive cataloguing the thoughts of the urban poor. The renewed avatar of the magazine deviates from its previous form, which primarily disseminated information on slum schemes, infrastructure issues in slums, and new slum policies. It now focuses on the living history of slums, building a record of the lives and aspirations of slum dwellers, and critiques of policies such as the Smart City scheme that excludes slum dwellers.
“It isn’t enough to write that a slum doesn’t have basic amenities while neighbouring areas have developed. It is important to ask ‘why?’. Slums in cities are the products of the discriminatory thinking that sees Dalit colonies in villages remain a few centuries behind their neighbours. It is important for slum dwellers to start questioning these discriminatory practices,” says Mr. Selva.
Vision
Mr. Selva is never short of dreams. He wants the magazine to reach at least 4,500 registered slums and around 11,000 public libraries.
At an annual subscription of ₹100 — any more and it would be out of reach of slum dwellers — there is no viable business model yet for the small newspaper. Instead, it runs on ingenuity and idealism, raising funds through fellowships and consultancies.
The team dismisses the idea of approaching private enterprises for advertisements as the language of marketing would run contrary to the voice of the paper.
As a registered newspaper, Slum Jagatthu even refuses to carry ₹1,500-worth government ads it is entitled to every month. “Why waste a page on the government’s voice and sacrifice a slum dweller’s voice?” asks Mr. Selva.
