IN late 2000s, when I started working on The Caravan, the digital media revolution was well under way and it seemed that the era of magazines with a literary bent was already past its prime. In an age of 24x7, sound bite driven television and digital journalism, the idea itself seemed anachronistic – a ghost from the golden days of great magazines of fine writing from the yesteryears. And there were more than a dozen of these magazines that people fondly reminisced about – Illustrated Weekly of India, Quest, Thought, India Magazine, Bombay, Blitz in English, and amongst non-English magazines, the likes of Hans, Desh, Anadamela, Saptahik Hindustan, and Dharamyuga (Hans and Desh are still in print, but most would agree that they are well past their golden age). The Caravan, which was originally started by my grandfather in 1940, and was subsequently discontinued in 1988, and Sarita, in Hindi, which was also started by him in 1945 and which remains a well circulated magazine even now, may also be a part of this list. Economic and Political Weekly, and Seminar are two other notable magazines that have continued to hold on to their niche.

Not all these were magazines that could be truly labelled as literary magazines. Quite a few of these publications belonged to the genre of general interest magazines that commanded huge circulation. However, they were all read by an urban intellectual audience and were generally considered magazines of fine writing.

That was the time, through the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, when newspapers were largely city specific. With the exception of Times of India and Indian Express, which were printed from multiple centres across the country, most newspapers had either a city, or a state as their primary market. And unlike newspapers these days that are accompanied by supplements on entertainment, lifestyle and even arts and literature, news was then the primary offering of the daily press. And that too was heavily accented towards reporting briefings and releases from the government.

In the midst of this rather mundane editorial landscape of newspapers, magazines lent a degree of vivacity to public discourse. They were not bound by the drudgery of routine news. They could be bold, opinionated, investigative and colourful, quite literally. At a time when newspapers were all black and white, quite a few magazines were produced in all colour, which complemented their vivid editorial make-up.

These magazines could be classified into three broad categories – little magazines, opinion journals, and general interest feature magazines. All three genres played an indispensable role in facilitating intellectual discourse.

 

In the words of poet and writer Ashok Vajpeyi, it was in the ‘little magazines’, ‘that the literary movements in India for the modern and the new found their first assertions and fora for expression. In the ’60s, little magazines like Kalpana, Kriti, Vasudha, Yug Chetana, etc. played a big role in promotion and projection of young talent in Hindi.’

With respect to opinion journals, the most prominent of them has been the Economic and Political Weekly. The historian Ramachandra Guha, in his essay on the legacy of EPW’s former editor Krishna Raj, which he wrote for The Caravan, points out that ‘like other such journals around the world, the EPW commands an influence far out of proportion to its circulation. It has shaped intellectual discussion in India, and had a profound impact on policy debates.’ Guha further quotes the historian Christopher Lasch who, while referring to the dumbing down of the mass media in an age of television news, remarks that these journals had become ‘the only surviving media in which scholars can talk to each other. They give the intellectual community what little unity and coherence it retains.’

Beyond the little magazines that gave space for experimentation in new writing, and the opinion journals that allowed a forum for meaningful debates on policy and society, there were the more mainstream and larger circulated general interest magazines. They went beyond the news cycle and covered current affairs, society, and politics in ways newspapers were constrained to do so, given their daily cycle. At the same time, many of these magazines published some very fine literary writing and essays. The Illustrated Weekly of India under Khushwant Singh and later Pritish Nandy, and Blitz, under its irreverent editor and publisher Russi Karanjia, were two such feisty magazines that took up bold stories that appealed to a larger, sophisticated, urban intelligentsia.

Reminiscing about the Illustrated Weekly of India, or the Weekly as it was popularly known, Nandy says that after he joined Times of India to revive the magazine (it had been shut down briefly in the ’80s), ‘The first issue, where we published a critique on Gandhi on his birthday, by Tariq Ali, was sold out. We took on one controversial subject after another and the circulation rose. We were publishing the finest poets, artists, thinkers, film makers and fiction writers in its pages. We had Satyajit Ray writing short stories, Salman Rushdie, M.F. Husain doing his autobiography in a comic book format, Jayant Narlikar and Isaac Asimov writing science fiction for us, Arthur C. Clarke, you name it and we had it. The best stuff ever. And at the same time, we did strong, brutal investigative stories that toppled governments and embarrassed the mighty.’

 

These magazines, whether literary magazines, opinion journals, or general interest magazines, fulfilled a void for intellectual discourse, which newspapers were ill-equipped to do. As the writer Siddharth Deb remembers, ‘When I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, magazines held the promise of an entirely different world, or of many other worlds. There were many in Bengali – I recall Shuktara and Anandamela – and in English I remember a magazine called Children’s World. I think it was the quality of fiction that was particularly appealing, opening up worlds that were far away for me in Shillong – Calcutta, Palestine, and the USSR as well as Britain and the United States.’

 

For various reasons, these magazines started floundering in the ’90s. Illustrated Weekly of India was shut down in 1993, Blitz lost much of its circulation, and magazines like Sunday and Bombay anyway had a short life. In Hindi, Dharmyug and Saptahik Hindustan were shut down by the owners of the Times of India and Hindustan Times respectively. Perhaps one of the main reasons behind this collapse was the paradigm shift in the way newspapers began to be published. Led by the Times of India, from mid ’90s onwards, newspapers across the country have adopted the strategy of maintaining atrociously low cover prices and publishing multiple editions from different cities. This increased circulation because of low cover price, and quicker last mile delivery with the expansion of their footprint, has been financed by an exponential rise in advertising, a large proportion of which now comes from various government departments and agencies. As a result, general interest and literary magazines are no longer in the radar of large newspaper publishers, which perhaps explains the closure in the case of the Times of India and Hindustan Times.

Independent magazines, which are more dependent on circulation revenue as compared to advertising, have found themselves on the wrong side of pricing for the end consumer. As newspaper prices plummeted in the ’90s, and have remained largely stagnant since then, these magazines have become an extravagant affair, comparatively. Their price disparity aside, logistical costs of distribution have also become prohibitively expensive for magazines that command a smaller circulation.

The few exceptions in magazine publishing that have remained viable, (including Delhi Press, the publishing house run by my family) have managed to do so because they are operationally run in a manner similar to large newspapers. In our case, we publish more than two dozen magazines. Many of these magazines command a fairly large circulation, which enables a sizeable publishing machinery that in turn allows the necessary support that a niche magazine requires.

 

What are therefore the implications for magazines that try to appeal to an intellectual readership? Can the contemporary media landscape in the digital age, where content is largely served free, and where the overwhelming focus is on producing high decibel content in large volumes and in the shortest possible turnaround time, support magazines that allow nuanced writing and thoughtful debate. What about Chrisopher Lasch’s concern – a dumbing down of mass media – and what seems to have become an ever-worsening trend.

If the newspaper dominated mass media in the 1980s and ’90s was dull and insipid, the social media obsessed digital media is marred by frivolity and sensationalism that allows little space for nuance and careful investigation. The need for protecting a space which allows new experimentation in creative writing, intellectual discussion on politics and society, and bold investigative journalism is, therefore, ever more acute.

This invariably means that the institution of editor and publisher needs to become far stronger in the face of page views driven newsroom management. I have always believed that the most compelling force behind any successful magazine is the conviction and belief of the publisher, who is wedded to the editorial foundation of the magazine, and who throws his weight and resources behind this publication on the conviction of his or her intuitive understanding of what the magazine needs to be.

Of course, it needs to make a sound business case, for in the end good journalism is always profitable journalism. But an approach where business plans and market research inform the genesis of editorial offerings, and where a quest for profitability (or in digital age a fixation on page views) take precedence over a publisher’s or an editor’s intuition, is prone to failure.

 

The idea of the Caravan was quite simply a result of personal fascination with the great American magazines of narrative non-fiction writing, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Harper’s, and the Mother Jones. In 2004, while studying politics at Columbia, I fell in love with The New Yorker. Its prose, so effortless and elegant, its choice of stories so varied and fascinating, and its detailing so deeply enriching. And so was the case with The Atlantic, The Harper’s, Mother Jones and The New Republic. But The New Yorker, above all others, was the real bundle of joy.

It was years later that I really understood the technicalities of producing these magazines, and what really narrative non-fiction writing was. At that time what simply mattered was the end product, the delicious bundle of stories, oblivious to the huge editorial machinery and painstaking work that underlay each issue of the magazine.

So after two years of acquainting myself with the business side of magazine publishing (I returned to New Delhi in end 2005 to join the family enterprise), and after I had filled many a shelf in my study with past issues of all the above magazines which I had been subscribing to from India, I couldn’t help but think of starting my own version of The New Yorker in India.

 

It was a blind plunge, not knowing what lay ahead. The few things that gave some assurance was the financial security that a well established publishing house lent; and the legacy of the name Caravan, which was the magazine that my grandfather had started in 1940, and which was a highly popular name through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, until the time he closed it in 1988. Even though the older Caravan, in the spirit of general interest magazines of its time, was very different from the narrative non-fiction magazine that I was trying to create, it was only natural to borrow the name given its legacy.

Over the last seven years, the Caravan has published some of the finest writing on politics and culture from within the country. The hallmark of narrative non-fiction writing is the storyteller’s voice, which gives life to characters and creates a sensory experience for readers. As Tom Wolfe wrote, describing this style when it was still the ‘new’ journalism, it ‘derived its extraordinary power from four devices: scene-by-scene construction; dialogues in full; third person point of view; and recording everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of travelling, eating, keeping house, servants, superiors, inferiors…’ This has been the guiding credo for the magazine, both in style and in form.

Beyond style, the Caravan is a magazine wedded to liberal values and in pursuit of questioning authoritarianism and obscurantism. In these seven years, we have published several ambitious stories, taking on powerful national leaders and corporate giants, and investigating the workings of the government, parties, state machinery and the private sector. Many of these stories have carried legal and pecuniary risks for the publishing house, and in some cases, physical risks for the writers. At present, we have two defamation cases against us in the courts – one in response to our profile of the self-styled management guru, Arindam Chaudhuri, who had created a ponzi scheme of an educational empire called IIPM (2011), and the other in response to our story on how Essar Corp bought influence with the government (2015).

 

Besides these two cases, The Caravan has published more than a couple of dozen stories that have carried fairly high political and business risks. In one case, we were served three anticipatory notices within a week of our closing by one of the most powerful business houses in the country, urging us to be cautious of the story we were about to carry. In 2015, when we were working on a long profile of one of the top leaders of the current government, the political leader sent words of caution through various channels that we back off. The stakes were very high as this was the first time that someone very high up in government was actively trying to pressure us into killing, or at least tempering down, the story. In both cases we went ahead with the stories.

Through the years, The Caravan has come to enjoy a reputation of a punchy investigative magazine. But beyond the adventurous stories that feed into such a perception, the magazine is also an eclectic mix of some very fine writing on art, culture, literature, and most importantly, human interest stories. This softer side of Caravan is sometimes overlooked.

It might be a bit presumptuous to say that in same ways, the Caravan is a confluence of the three traditions of literary magazines – the little magazines, the opinion journals, and the general interest magazines with a penchant for following bold investigative pieces. But whether by design or by accident, this is what the magazine has become.

I know for sure that we could not have managed this if we had started out with a purely business outlook for the magazine. Independent and public-spirited journalism entails risks, which corporatized media has become increasingly wary of. This is not to say that publishers and editors don’t need to be mindful of the business dynamics of their publications. On the contrary, if magazines of fine writing are to survive, it is imperative that publishers develop an innovative business model around these publications. In this digital age, publishers around the world have for long given their valuable content for free. This needs to change, not least because advertising as the primary revenue source in the digital world is proving to be an ineffective strategy. Therefore whether in print or for digital, publishers need to figure out ways to have readers pay for their content. In a country as vast as India, there is no reason why an independent publication should not be able to do that.

 

It is not that people don’t have the yearning and patience to read nuanced writing. As Ashok Vajpeyi points out, ‘In Hindi alone today there are about 500 little magazines, prominent among them are Pahal, Samas, Tadbhav, Vasudha, Sadaneera to name just a few.’ The problem is of business logistics rather than anything else. The modern magazine needs to emerge beyond the linear business model of producing good content.

Sound bite journalism curtails intelligence and nuance for instant gratification and no democracy can long survive such assaults of sensationalism and induced hysteria. Magazines that allow space for nuanced writing and adventurous journalism will therefore always find a viable space.