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“Tell the Truth.”
“Is it Interesting?”
These are words on newspaper-office boards in two 1950s Hollywood films, Ace in the Hole and The Tarnished Angels respectively. In both films, especially the former (which is still among the most caustic narratives about unethical journalism), the words carry an ironic charge – a warning that the reporters will play fast and loose with the truth, or make things extra “interesting”.
Mirroring life, cinema has never lacked for stories about compromised or corrupt media; if you watch a current Indian film or web series with a scene involving journalists, you’ll almost certainly see parasitic reporters or shrieking TV anchors. Only rarely does one find movies that show journalists doing their jobs in a principled, straightforward manner. It comes as a relief, then, and a reminder that such possibilities exist, to watch the Oscar-nominated 2021 documentary Writing with Fire. Directed by Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas, this film chronicles the ground-breaking work of the Khabar Lahariya newspaper started by Dalit women in Uttar Pradesh in 2002.
For these journalists from unprivileged spaces, uncovering the truth – and speaking it to power – is paramount, and the film follows chief reporter Meera and members of her team, including the likable, outspoken Suneeta and the initially diffident Shyamkali. It chronicles their reporting on everyday issues facing the poor, including relatively common crimes and miscarriages of justice – an old woman weeps that for decades the girls in her family haven’t had a toilet; a raped woman’s complaint is ignored by the police; a TB-ridden village has no doctors or medicines – before moving on to larger political developments in the state, around the time that the right-wing Adityanath government comes to power.
Even the most rigorous documentaries have their own lenses – they aren’t “objective” depictions of reality (as if such a thing were possible). Writing with Fire makes its political stance clear, stressing Khabar Lahariya’s attempts to look the BJP’s paternalistic nationalism in the eye. One striking scene has Meera interviewing a Hindu Yuva Vahini leader who, when asked about his vision for governance, pauses and says solemnly, “Dekhiye, gau-raksha, gau-seva toh meri pehli prathmikta hai” (“Cow protection and cow service are my first priorities”) before segueing to an explanation of why he always carries a sword around (his “Muslim bhai” are praying for his death). It is both a comical moment and a scary one. Another scene set in Srinagar, where some of the journalists go for a fun trip – posing for photos in the snow, feeling independent and in control – becomes the setting for a discussion about the UP elections, and the fear that women’s rights will be curtailed in the name of “keeping them safe”.
At a more intimate level, though, what’s compelling about this film is its depiction of the individual journeys and struggles of these women. In one scene, involving reportage on illegal mining that resulted in workers being trapped and killed, Suneeta recalls the competitive spirit of her childhood when she tried to fill a tractor with pebbles (to help with the mining) as fast as possible, so as to not fall behind the other girls. We see that this same competitive spirit has now been transmitted to her journalistic work, as she goes forth to report in the same area. 
Most of these reporters have not led lives that have equipped them to do what they are doing here; they have to learn on the job, often in dire circumstances. How to negotiate the complicated world of smart-phones, as the shift to digital news begins? (At a meeting, a young woman says she doesn’t even touch the mobile phone in her house, and is afraid of damaging it.) How to keep a phone charged when there is hardly any electricity at home? On a personal note, I remember what it was like, even as an urbanite who was very conversant with the internet, to begin self-publishing on a blog for the first time 20 years ago – choosing templates, figuring out HTML tags. How much more daunting it must be for someone who hasn’t learnt how to decipher written letters, to press a series of keys on a device to generate meaning. 
But it had to be done, and the Khabar Lahariya story is, apart from anything else, about self-empowerment in the social-media age. One is always aware of the constraints and pressures in these lives – whether it is through a scene where Meera’s husband talks pleasantly but patronisingly about the newspaper (“we didn’t expect it to do well but it has, which is good – now let’s see how long it will run!”) while she peels vegetables, or a glimpse of the ambitious Suneeta yielding to societal pressure to get married. But in the end, it is our knowledge of these constraints that makes the hard-earned triumphs sweeter and more satisfying… and a universe removed from the media world that so many of us take for granted, the eight little windows full of yelling faces that might amuse gurgling two-year-olds at dinner-time, but achieve almost nothing of news value.
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