The Hindu & me   

The wealth in the archives

By Ramachandra Guha

Novelists and historians have written insightfully and at length about Indians living overseas. Less well known are the stories of those Indians who live (or lived) in part of India not originally their own.

One of the finest accounts of this `internal diaspora' is Asokamitran's novel The Eighteenth Parallel, whose main character is Chandru, a Tamil boy growing up in Nizam-ruled Hyderabad. To keep in touch with `home', Chandru's family subscribers to weeklies such as Kalki and Ananda Vikatan, and listens to the songs of Subramania Bharati on the Tiruchi station of All India Radio.

The boy himself is cricket-mad; an obsession that too can be satisfied only by periodic infusions from the Tamil country. As he puts it, `only The Hindu, which came from Madras, covered cricket news well.'

My own family is Tamil, but it was exiled much further than Asokamitran's. I grew up in a sub-Himalayan town 2,000 miles from Madras. In the 1940s, The Hindu arrived in Hyderabad a day late; but in the 1970s (when I came of age), it never came to Dehradun at all. And I, like Chandru, was cricket-mad. To make up for what I could not get, I persuaded my father to subscribe to Sport and Pastime, that magnificent (and still mourned) weekly; and I made him buy me Indian Cricket, our swadeshi answer to Wisden.

I did, of course, read The Hindu on annual visits south. In time the paper started — not a day too soon — an edition printed in Delhi which also serviced Dehradun and beyond. Speaking of the family of publications rather than only of the flagship newspaper, I too can say: `Only The Hindu, which came from Madras, covered cricket news well'. The attention it pays to our favourite sport is always more extensive than other papers. These send a single correspondent on tours overseas; The Hindu usually sends two. Its cricket photographs are among the best in the world. And it has brought us the most knowledgeable of foreign cricket writers, from Jack Fingleton down to Ted Corbett.

In time, I graduated from The Hindu's back pages to the front. I came to see that while the paper is slow, it is also sure. It is stolid, but also reliable. And, alone among its peers, it has a sense of history. Its archive section, printed daily in the inside pages, is a delight. And The Hindu's penchant for keeping pictorial images its rivals would discard is something its readers cherish. But its columnists cherish this quality even more. When I write for the paper the words are my own, but the accompanying illustrations, which are always superb, come from Kasturi Buildings. Only The Hindu could come up with pictures like these.

(The writer is a Bangalore-based historian.)

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Stories in this Section

• An early lesson at a concert
• 'It belongs to all of us'
• Growing up with it
• Those shattering editorials
• The wealth in the archives
• Striking the right note on reform process
• Presentation always fair and full
• Correcting Churchill
• A 'born fighter' and his close ties
• A case of love at forty
• 'I have one grievance'

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