[Reader-list] Locally produced media in Jamia and satellite colonies. Indpnt Rsrch Fllw - 04

[shakeb ahmed]

Zahne Jadid (The Modern Mind), an Urdu  journal of
World and Indian literature, Performing Arts and other
Sociocultural issues. 
After a conversation with publisher, Janab Zuber
Rizvi.

My first question to Zuber sahib was regarding the
memory of any one defining moment in his personal
history that led him to materially formulate some
patterns of his social and cultural thinking into the
shape of the journal Zahne Jadid.
Zuber sahib used to work with All India Radio, and
once he was asked to be on the panel of a UPSC
recruiting team that was to appoint program-executives
for Urdu language programs. It was in that encounter
that it impressed on him how minimal can be the
knowledge of Muslim youth educated primarily through
curriculums in Urdu language regarding the happenings
in world and domestic literature or disciplines of
performing and other fine arts. Most of the
individuals that were to appear for the interview were
holding PhD in the language and their canvas was
limited to their taught curriculum only. ‘Now we were
recruiting them for producing Urdu language programs
in radio, and not asking them to take up some kind of
classroom teaching; and the heterogeneity of the
information and knowledge that you require for
producing programs on a range of themes and issues
then exposed the urgent need in Muslim youth to be
made privy to a spectrum of literary and other events
happening contemporarily all around the world. It was
then that he started thinking of what if he can bring
out an Urdu magazine that talks about ‘our cultural
heritage linking Hindustani adab (literature) with
Aalmi adab (World literature) and the arena of other
arts as well as issues of urgent sociological and
political scope. Initially ‘I thought at least this
could help some of the Muslim youth in preparing for
their UPSC Civil services exams, or might make them
comfortable when sitting amidst a party of educated
individuals talking of world literature…what V.S
Naipaul writes, what is there in the latest novel of
Gunter Grass, or what Brechts plays are all about.
Thus that was how I started on the very basic thinking
that went behind the Zahne Jadid’. 

And hence in September 1990 the first issue of Zahne
Jadid came out. This Urdu quarterly has been thirteen
years in publication till the date, and altogether 37
issues have come out each of about 200-250 pages of
content.

What makes Zahne Jadid (The Modern Mind) a different
kind of Urdu publication is easy to see once you go
through the content page of any of its back issues. 
‘Sept. 2003 to Nov. 2003’ issue is a commemorative one
of Munshi Premchands work, thus the cover carries a
portrait of him; cutting immediately into the
contemporary reality the inner leaf of the book-cover
carries a photograph of participants of World Social
Forum, Mumbai, marshaled around a slogan banner,
raised hands, shouting slogans somewhere near the
Mumbai Municipal Building. In its section,
Photography, we are given to see Kim Phuo, a nine year
old girl partially burnt and completely naked fleeing
the remains of her charred Vietnamese village having
just suffered a decimating American attack in 1972; we
see a hand brushing dust off the stoned eyes of a
little girl who’s bloated tiny head down in a rubble
grave became a harsh representative of Bhopal gas
tragedy in 1984; we see a picture of a set of confused
and shocked men running off for some safe corner as
WTC crumbles in the background…there are other
pictures as well, and Zahne Jadid, through these
photographs serves double purpose of  talking about a
modern art form, photography, as constitutive of a
documentary repository of our human history; and at
the same time the journal hints at the urgency of
learning through the events freezed by these pictures
and developing a discipline of critical thought that
should ensure that such historical mistakes be
prevented as best as possible.  Further in the journal
a piece by Anand Patwardhan takes off from Karachi
film festival, exposes Urdu language readers to the
exciting world of oppositional documentary film
making, makes them know the works of individuals like
Rakesh Sharma (Final Solutions), Sanjay Kak (Words on
Water), Sandi Dubowsky (Trembling before God), Michel
Moore (Bowling for Columbine) which are somewhat not
so unfamiliar for English press readers but might be
new to the Urdu audience and of who’s work there can
be a lasting significance in these readers’ lives.
Another of the article in the same vein was by Kalpana
Sharma, Sach Dikhanewali Filmein (Films about Truth).
True to its tradition, this issue of Zahne Jadid
carries a review of Nanad Kishore Acharyas play Zille
Subhani…the journal keeps a special place for
perfoming arts like theatre and classical music and
instills in its readers a curiousty to explore more in
these fields. 
Responding to one of my questions, Zuber Rizvi sahib
confirms that his journal Zahne Jadid (The Modern
Mind) is modern in the sense of being informed from
the sensibility of Modernist movement as it begin in
twentieth century Europe, and strives to carry forward
the ideas of people who came together in India under
the banner of Progressive Writers and likewise. True
to it’s liking this issues builds a bridge to world
literature, this time by including a piece on the
works of Franz Kafka, Kafka ki Yaadgaar. An
obituary-piece for Safdar Hashmi and Hasan Nasir
attests to the journals effort at propagating values
which Zuber Sahib terms central to the publication,
‘secularism’ and ‘democratization’. Future, a site of
an intense contest for defining the way we would live
and would like to read and write about that, is
dwelled upon in the piece Mustaqbil ka Maashra-o-Adab
(The Cultures and Literatures of Tomorrow) that winds
its ways through the concepts of Virtual Reality and
Mass Media, Nano Physics and Miniaturisation,
BioEthics and Cloning, PostCapitalism and Market
Economy and through the array of individuals writing
about them as like Baudrillard, Richard Feynman,
Stephen Hawkins, Michel Foucault and more. Returning
to belle-lettre, there are individual sections for
genres poetry and short story showcasing contemporary
talent about the writings in Urdu language…And then we
return to from where the issue took off, a separate
section rediscovering and reappraising the work of
legendry Prem Chand.

Readership of Zahne Jadid is limited but has grown
over the years. Janab Zuber Rizvi does not feel
strange or worried. When he started publishing the
journal, he was working in radio and hence had clear
enough thoughts regarding the concept of ‘niche
audience’. For his journal he wanted to target anybody
and everybody reading primarily in Urdu that would
have preferred reading a newspaper like Hindu compared
to a Hindustan Times, or would have wanted to pick up
India Today some or other time. A ‘Pop concert
featuring film artistes can draw upto a lakh or more
people, a cricket match can get 50,000, but if it is
Aalami Kitab Mela (World Book Fair) you should not
expect too many visitors’. And that’s fine with him
since he never wanted to bring out ‘a magazine that
would give kitchen recipes, articles on toddlers’
health, writing on women’s clothing and fashion all
cobbled together…for that would be a family-magazine’
whereas he wanted to produce a journal that would act
as a Adab, Arts, Culture ka Tarjumaan (translator of
literature, arts, culture) for an Urdu reader with an
interest and taste for diversity of human expression. 
The raging debate about the contest between the
Popular and High art doesn’t bother him because for
him definitions are transient and what starts of as a
rowdy street art expression can tomorrow become
refined and canonized object of academic reverence,
while the opposite holds the truth likewise. ‘And was
that not what happened with Shakespeare?’…. 

SARAI Independent Research Fellow 04
Shakeb Ahmed


	
		
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