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As
a Muslim woman journalist working in the newsrooms of English
dailies in the 1990s, I was always aware that there were few
Muslims working in the English press in Mumbai. But how few we
were in real numbers came home to me one day in 1996 in a very
mundane sort of way.
I was then working as a senior editor at a leading newspaper in
Mumbai. Ramzan Eid was coming up and I wanted to clarify on what
day it was being observed in the office and whether we had that
day off. By ‘we’, I meant the Muslims in the organisation,
since the general office policy was that each religious group got
two religious holidays off in the year. As I wandered across the
office looking for a Muslim colleague to confer with on the issue,
I quickly realised that there were none to be found. None on the
desk, none in reporting and the only one I did locate was a
half-Muslim who took the Parsi holidays off. Was there any Muslim
on the staff at all? Almost none, I discovered.
Thinking back, I realised that at an earlier job too, there had
been hardly any Muslim reporters/sub-editors, though some peons
and layout artists had been Muslim.
All this got me thinking about the need for Muslims, as also other
groups which were not well-represented, in the newsroom. A good
newsroom, I believe, needs a good mix of people – of different
backgrounds, classes, castes, religions, and of both genders. To
offer its readers/viewers/listeners a multifaceted perspective on
any issue or event, a media organisation needs to be fairly
representative of all sections of society.
Was it a case of organisational bias or just a lack of properly
trained Muslim journalists being available? I wasn’t quite sure
but when I was offered the chance to devise a syllabus for a
journalism-training programme targeted towards Muslim women, and
then also asked to teach it, I jumped at the opportunity.
Thus, in 1997, I helped set up the department of journalism at
Anjuman-I-Islam’s Saboo Siddik Polytechnic (Ladies’
Department) in Byculla, Mumbai. On offer was a six-month part-time
journalism course for Muslim women. When I started the course I
had no specific pedagogic practice in mind. The idea was simply to
offer Muslim women the same sort of journalism training – in a
shorter form – as was available at any other conventional
journalism education programme in the city. And to encourage them
to get jobs in mainstream media, especially the English-language
press, which was patronised by opinion-makers and leaders, and
where they were represented in abysmal numbers. (Later, as we
faced the problem of poor English-language skills of several
students, including those who had studied in the English-medium in
school/college, the department also started Urdu-medium journalism
classes side-by-side.)
The first batch consisted of about ten Muslim women and one man
(later batches included some more male students). Some of the
women who attended the course had other professional
qualifications – one was a doctor, another two were teachers –
and some others were housewives and mothers. Several observed hijab
or purdah. The men were all working – at a telephone
booth, a family business and at private companies.
Though the course was designed for post-graduate students who
could then consider journalism as a full-time career, few
applicants fitted that criterion. A majority of the class was
older and curious about the media and journalism. Most did not
plan to be full-time journalists (and the main reason for that was
that they did not perceive journalism to be a stable career choice
nor did they think it to be financially lucrative), though they
wished to report and write on a freelance basis.
As I started teaching them the basic craft of journalism –
putting together a news report, interview techniques, news
selection, etc. – I began to realise that underlying the
curiosity they exhibited about the media was their concern that
Muslims were not being covered positively in the media,
particularly the mainstream English press. “Why are Muslims only
viewed as terrorists or criminals?” they queried often. “Why
are only negative characteristics ascribed to us?” Gradually, as
we began to re-read the newspapers together, they would ask:
“Where are the voices of the common Muslim in the paper?”
Given that the media had often sidelined or misrepresented their
community, these were valid concerns. It was also understandable
that to right those wrongs, many attending the course felt that it
was their duty as Muslim journalists to put across the
“Muslim” point of view.
It was quite clear that issues of locality, identity and community
were most important to them. Often, these dominated class
discussion. They also lead to some great reportage for class
assignments – on Muslim boys forfeiting education in favour of
low-level jobs even as more Muslim girls accessed higher
education; on the increased dowry menace among Muslims; on new
community settlements in Mumbra and Mira Road; on the renewed
interest in the hijab among women, etc.
But the overwhelming preoccupation with community and religion
also coloured their perspective on several issues. I remember a
mock press conference I conducted in class on a fictitious
‘Bachelors’ Club of Mumbai’ celebrating its silver jubilee.
As suggested by the name, this club was supposedly made up of
single men who got together for sporting activities and social
interaction. The idea of the exercise was to explain the nuances
of covering a press conference to students. I’d been part of a
similar mock press conference at another journalism institute in
the city – and there students asked questions relating to how
the ‘club was observing its silver jubilee’, ‘what
activities the members participated in’ and other similar
matter. But here, the students had a totally different response to
the same press conference – they raised questions on the
“immorality” of remaining single, of “sinning” and going
against the laws of nature and religion by rejecting marriage,
progeny and so forth. Eventually, the press conference exercise
became a free-for-all discussion on Islam, marriage, individual
desires versus religious duties, etc.
It was from such experiences that the main thrust of my pedagogic
practices emerged. While I was emphatic about encouraging my
students to explore issues relating to their locality and
community as well as to negotiate questions of identity, at the
same time I was certain that I didn’t want them totally bogged
down or limited by issues of locality and identity. As
professional journalists, they needed to learn to operate on a
broader canvas and to be open to inquiry about the world around
and outside of them.
Often, the students were so seeped with Muslim issues and Islamic
practices that to separate those concerns from the ‘secular’
practice of journalism was tough. I quickly realised that besides
teaching them the craft of journalism, my real challenge as a
journalism educator was to broaden their world-view by introducing
them to a palette of issues and concerns and to encourage them to
be open-minded about things they didn’t know enough about. This
meant helping them confront their biases and prejudices about the
world outside their Muslim quarter and even to interrogate some of
their own belief systems.
This is not to say that one was entirely successful in
implementing such a vast agenda. But I do have the satisfaction of
knowing that we did manage to break some ground, such as
introducing the idea of reading Salman Rushdie in the classroom,
without coming to blows! And raising the confidence of the women
in purdah so that they could tackle street reporting; some
were very good at it and even managed to practice journalism
professionally. Also, bringing to the fore gender issues and
concerns – including discussions on women’s dress, women’s
work, etc. Best of all was imbibing them with a sensitivity with
relation to mass media, so that they could better critique it and
use it to advantage for themselves and their communities – such
as using ‘Letters to the Editor’ as a potent tool – even if
they did not all become full-time journalists.
But I have to admit that our finest hour came at the end of
training our first batch of journalism students. Even though we
had engaged with several outside stories and concerns, at the end
we came back to issues relating to the community and self. It was
five years since the Bombay riots and almost everyone in the class
had been touched by the riots in some way or the other. Many had
suffered in those riots and their lives had been transformed –
someone’s house had been burnt to cinders with every memory of
her childhood stored in photographs destroyed, another had started
to learn and teach martial arts as self-defence for girls since
the riots, some women traced back their wearing of the hijab to
the riots, others linked their sense of powerlessness as a
community to that grisly event. So the class came together and
worked as a team to produce a body of journalistic work that best
portrayed their impressions of life in Bombay since the riots.
Together, they discussed ideas for stories, interviewed subjects,
read aloud and critiqued each others work, and then even managed
to sell some of their articles to mainstream English and Urdu
dailies.
Reading the by-lined stories in print was gratifying but not as
gratifying as the comment made by one of the women students to me
at the end. “Finally, the media is not some big monster that I
can’t deal with,” she said to me. “I feel I can read the
newspaper intelligently, even read between the lines and know what
they are not telling me. And I can ask a question that will not be
considered stupid.”
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