Rural resolve | Collective biography of Khabar Lahariya
The Good Reporter is a collective biography of Khabar Lahariya, India's only women-run brand of independent rural news
What does it take for a rural, Dalit woman to walk into a police station and question a superintendent of police? A slow accumulation of courage through two decades of being a reporter with Khabar Lahariya. “I am a journalist,” she says when repeatedly asked who she is to be asking questions. The force of that sentence adds up across the book.
What does it take for a rural, Dalit woman to walk into a police station and question a superintendent of police? A slow accumulation of courage through two decades of being a reporter with Khabar Lahariya. “I am a journalist,” she says when repeatedly asked who she is to be asking questions. The force of that sentence adds up across the book.
Many others have told the story of Khabar Lahariya, India’s only women-run brand of independent rural news, reaching five million people every month. What started off as an NGO project to train neo-literate rural women to become reporters went on to become a multi edition newspaper for rural audiences, and then a digital media business.
In this book, 10 journalists from the organisation decide which story they want to tell. Using a feminist methodology of ‘collective biography’, the book weaves together individual journeys with the audacious growth of Khabar Lahariya to Chambal Media. Instead of delivering a neat narrative of ‘empowerment’, they insist on the messier truth: how this journey transformed them, but also endangered, humiliated, frustrated and delighted them; held them in times of violence and sickness; and often broke their hearts.
There is no hiding the contradictions between personal feelings and the professional self. There is no holding back on what the experience has meant for their bodies—the physical danger and risk-taking, sexual harassment, the domestic violence, the bodily reactions to witnessing horrific violence. There is no flinching from reflecting on the prickly bits, the tensions of an intentional multi-caste newsroom with a Dalit woman editor, where even giving and taking feedback on a story, or who should lead a story, becomes a minefield. As the organisation grows larger and more professionalised, difficult questions emerge. Khabar Lahariya is not simply a workplace but a feminist experiment that makes mistakes, learns and pivots as it charts its path.
The Good Reporter is a rare book that has something to offer a wide range of readers. Journalists and media organisations would do well to study its portrait of a genuinely multi-caste newsroom and the difficult questions it raises about who gets to produce knowledge. Others will find equally powerful accounts of caste, gender, aspiration, political change in Uttar Pradesh, and the emotional realities of entering professional life for the first time. It is a timely reminder of the power a good reporter wields, however powerless they might feel.
