Does everybody know what it is to be poor?
Shankar: How important to your work do you think it is to tell lives?
Sainath: It is very important in many ways. See, it is also happening in a
context of what has happened to journalism, when you are talking about the
challenges of telling lives. The fi rst challenge is that the bulk of media are not
interested in publishing your telling of lives. Today we have multiple schools
of thought in journalism. You have broadly two kinds of journalism: journalism and stenography. Much of what is called journalism, or what passes
for journalism today, is essentially stenography to power, to the powerful,
increasingly to corporate power. So, in fact, if you look at the UK edition of
Everyone Loves a Good Drought, in my introduction to it, I have written the
title “Not What the Readers Want” because when I tried doing that project,
I was turned down by many editors who had known me for years, and I was
306 Biography 37.1 (Winter 2014)
so confi dent that they would be interested in my project. But, they told me,
“that’s not what our readers want.” So, what that means is it is not what the
media establishment wants, it is not what the advertisers want. My experience
has been that other people, human beings, the middle classes who read newspapers, are very interested in such stories. Otherwise I would not be sitting
here having this discussion.
Shankar: And by such stories, you mean stories of the rural poor, of any kind of
poor?
Sainath: Of any kind, but also those stories and lives become telling and
important only under particular issues, particular contexts. The challenge is
maintaining the uniqueness of that individual, but also that the individual’s
story is a window to a larger community, to a larger process, to a juxtaposition
of many things that are happening. If you look at the stories on the farmer
suicides, it may start with a guy’s story and the story can be entirely about
debt. It may start with that farmer individually and 80 percent of the story
may be about the diffi culties of obtaining agricultural credit from banks. It
may start with the life of that individual which keeps coming back, threading the story right through, but it could be entirely about inability to access
inputs for the farm. So these lives are entry points. Telling it through the lives
of people to me means authenticity. I also do it because I feel something about
that individual.
Shankar: Actually, I really like that phrase stenography to power, which seems
to me the opposite of another phrase, which is sometimes ascribed to Edward Said
and others . . .
Sainath: Talking the truth to power? I dislike the phrase: talking the truth to
power. Okay, fi ne. It has its role. It has its place. I won’t deny that. But here is
my problem with it. When you say “let’s talk the truth to power,” there is an
innocent assumption that power doesn’t know the truth. “All that you have
to do is tell the truth to power and power will set things right.” The power
that I know knows exactly what is happening and gets concerned about how
to suppress your truth.
Cynthia: That’s interesting in relation to the stories you tell, because you often
do tell stories that people know. You tell stories about things people, at least in a
general sense, know are happening. So it is not just speaking truth to power, but
it is also addressing people who do not necessarily have all the power, but who are
complicit in this power structure. How do you get people to care about what they
already know—so that you are not just speaking truth to power, but you are getting people to care about the power that is ruining people’s lives?
Sainath, Franklin, and Shankar, Against Stenography for the Powerful 307
Sainath: Two things: One is, I wanted to add a corollary to the “truth to
power.” I say that it is extremely important to speak the truth about power. I
am saying that these are starting points. You know how people say journalism is about accuracy. I think journalism is about a hell of a lot more. I think
accuracy is a beginning point; it is a given. And by the way, that “stenography
to power” came about when I started equating “journalism and stenography.”
Then one day an old guy in Chennai got up and ticked me off. He said “Sir,
I have been stenographer in court for thirty-eight years, and you are demeaning me because we are better than you.” I said, “Yes?” He said, “You see, as a
stenographer in the court, I reported everybody, I recorded everybody faithfully. Prosecution, witness, defense, judge. You fellows only report what the
minister and chief minister and prime minster tell you.” So, that is when it
struck me he is right: we are not even stenographers. We are stenographers to
the powerful.
I do not ever assume that everybody knows everything. That is why you
fi nd good news agency style always repeats two paragraphs. Like for instance,
why do we say at least once in every article that we write which mentions the
US President, “US President Barack Obama.” Now, everybody knows he is
president, so should we just say “Barack” or should we just say “Obama”?
No, you say “US President Barack Obama,” because there are lots of people
who do not know. That is one.
Second, there are things that people might know, without knowing the
depth and detail and intensity of it. Today, and I will say that this is one of
the few successes we can claim, whatever the nonsense that Jagdish Bhagwati
talks, there is no Indian I will vouch for today who does not know that farmers are having a bad time and committing suicide. That has got done. It required bashing away at that same subject endlessly. It’s destroyed my health.
Because I have gone to too many households, I have been to 850 households
where there have been suicides, in some there have been two suicides, in a
few three suicides. But, I know that to back off means that the story will sink
again. I also believe, apart from speaking the truth to power, that you speak
the truth to your reader, to your fellow citizens, and keep shoving it in their
face. What is it that we are going to do about this? Do you think it is important that we worry about this? My experience is that readers and our public
are far more idealistic than we give them credit for. The average reader is far
more sensitive and idealistic than the average editor of a newspaper. In that I
have great faith. Second, there are a number of stories which we think everybody knows. Everybody knows there are poor people. Does everybody know
what it is to be poor?
