Every day, The Hindu publishes a small section called From the Archives on the op-ed page. This gives our readers a peek into the issues that were preoccupying minds 50 years ago and 100 years ago. The task of choosing snippets is fun and informative, the eye strain notwithstanding. Scanning the pages feels like a hurried visit to the past, to historic events that took place when I wasn’t even born, yet also strangely gives me a sense of déjà vu. That is because news is always broadly the same, yet news is always a product of the times we live in.
A hundred years ago, the newspaper was vastly different. There were very few advertisements; fonts were designed, it seems, only to serve as an eye test a century later; and little effort was made to keep space between lines. News naturally focused on the nationalist movement. But there were always reports on robbery and murder, sometimes with gruesome details. The writing was archaic and sometimes tedious. Reports were stingy with the use of punctuation and sometimes contained details that would be considered politically incorrect today.
In choosing snippets from 100 years ago, the most important factor to consider is the legibility of the report. Though well preserved, the pages are yellowed and some words have faded, so it is often hard to decipher portions of an article, even if the snippet is interesting. Then, of course, is relevance. For instance, I found an interesting piece on fake news, referred to as “yellow journalism”, on how the ‘Hare Street Journal’ was “concocting” stories about a conference that never took place.
While choosing reports from 100 years ago is to choose news from an altogether different era, snippets from 50 years ago seem like they’re out of today’s newspaper. Much like how Prime Minister Narendra Modi is often asked where he gets his energy from, in 1969, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was asked in Kabul by an Afghan correspondent about the secret of her “astounding freshness” despite the fact that she had to “carry the heavy burdens of a country like India”. Reports on demonetisation five decades ago in Sri Lanka narrated how lines of anxious people waited at banks to get their cash exchanged. A BBC correspondent was asked to leave India for his “anti-national coverage”. An editorial on the importance of student participation in political movements was published half a century before 2019, the year when many in India complained that students were getting “too political” in some universities. It read: “The... attempts to coerce the student population to avoid politics as though it were poison can only have the effect... of driving them to the other extreme, and it is only by allowing them to discuss political questions, conduct debates… and utilise facilities for training them in citizenship that their minds could be directed in healthy channels...”
Sometimes I choose snippets only for their headlines or humour. For instance, when a Minister was told in Parliament during a discussion on film censorship that he, as a bachelor, was not competent to offer any suggestions on the subject of kissing in films, the report was published with the brilliant headline: “Minister tight-lipped on kissing”.
A remark we often hear from our oldest readers is that the newspaper has changed, that more errors have crept in. But the archives show that The Hindu’s understated style of reporting, language, its commitment to truth telling as well as the occasional errors have all persisted through the decades.
