Fully Loaded Magazine

In its 13 years, Outlook has honed a peculiarly Indian take on secular fair play that opens its pages to diversity and dissent

MUKUL KESAVAN
Outlook is now 13 years old. For a Jewish boy, his thirteenth birthday is the time he comes of age; an English-speaking Indian child is likely to be told that she (or he) is now a teenager, an otherwise alien time of life for most Indian children. What 13 means in the life-cycle of a magazine is less obvious because the average life expectancy of an English magazine in India is hard to reckon.

If we were to use the Illustrated Weekly of India as a precedent (which began life in 1880 as the weekly edition of the Times of India and kept going up to 1993 by which time it was a hundred and thirteen years old), Outlook would be a child with a century of vigorous life ahead of it. On the other hand, if we take as our guide one of India's most promising newsmagazines, Sunday, which began publishing in 1973 and died (along with the twentieth century) in 1999, Outlook would be in the middle of its mid-life crisis, with just another 13 years to look forward to.

On the whole, though, there's reason to take the long view. Successful magazines of news and opinion tend to keep going for a while. Time, the prototype for most modern newsmagazines, opened shop in 1923, and while it isn't quite the behemoth it was in its prime, its paid circulation adds up to around 3.5 million copies each week.

TIME Jan 6, 1936 cover

And Time is a child compared to The Economist, which started life in 1843 and successfully sells three-quarters of a million copies of every issue. Closer home, India Today, which, along with Sunday, transformed magazine journalism in India in the mid-'70s, continues to flourish. So the outlook, for Outlook at 13, is good.

But the jinx of 13 seems to have created a run of bad luck for the country Outlook reports on. The troubles in Kashmir, the explosions that seem to randomly and regularly terrorise Indian cities, the unending attacks on Christians in Orissa and Karnataka, the worldwide recession that seems to be upon us, are enough to make a rational Outlook reader triskaidekaphobic (bet you didn't know the word!).

But a little perspective will show us that the world was ever the same. Around Time's 13th anniversary, 1936, the news was considerably more ominous. Hitler's Germany tore up the Treaty of Versailles by reoccupying the Rhineland; a violently militarist politician, Koki Hirota, became the prime minister of Japan; and as if these portents of the Second World War weren't bad enough, this was also the year that the Arab revolt against British policy in Palestine and Arab resistance to Jewish migration into the region began, a conflict that festers to this day.


Bin-laden terror: The 9/13 blast at Barakhamba Road in Delhi

The Economist's 13th year wasn't much better; in 1856, it editorialised on the Crimean War that had just come to an end but the massive Taiping Rebellion in China continued, and the Second Opium War had just begun. Closer home, Britain declared war on Persia, and Wajid Ali Shah, once the Nawab of Oudh, was sent into internal exile on the eve of the great revolt of 1857.

So Outlook's 13th anniversary doesn't fall in a specially blighted year: in this world of ours, there's always enough bad news to keep newsmagazines going. What's much more interesting is the way in which a newsmagazine slants and summarises the world.


Outlook 13th anniversary

Ever since Time invented the template for the modern newsmagazine—the world summarised in dozens of short articles arranged in departments that deal with politics, religion, the arts, sport, cinema, the news told through personalities and celebrities, the weirdly uniform house style in which the news was processed—every imitator from Der Spiegel to India Today has tried to claim the mantle of objectivity. This claim is not, of course, true, which is just as well: these magazines would be unreadable if it were.

Every successful newsmagazine has had a broad ideological position. In the 35 years that Henry Luce edited Time, from 1929 to 1964, the magazine hewed closely to his conservative politics. In more recent times, Time has been accused of a liberal bias. The Economist was an ideological paper from its inception: James Wilson, its founder, was committed to laissez faire economics and the immediate provocation for setting it up was to argue against the British government's proposal to impose levies on grain import. More than a century-and-a-half later, The Economist is still busily (and profitably) arguing for low taxes and less government intervention (except in the matter of war: it supported the American invasion of Iraq as it does nearly every Western military adventure) in an anonymous house style which delights as many people as it infuriates.

Indian newsmagazines are, like their Western counterparts, ideological. It's possible, of course, to argue that all newsmagazines are the same newsmagazine, in that they all accept the mainstream presumptions of the societies in which they operate. But for the moderately alert reader, the differences in point of view are apparent too.

One of Outlook's distinguishing features is the lack of a house style. This isn't an accident: more than most other newsmagazines, Outlook carries columns, reviews and even reportage by outsiders, people who don't work for the magazine. There isn't even an attempt to tidy up the prose of its inhouse writers into a uniform idiom. As a long-time reader, this seems intentional, an attempt to create, within the constraints of a newsmagazine format, a forum for diverse and lively writing. The travel diary with which every issue ends is a remarkable and successful innovation in a genre of journalism that has traditionally shunned idiosyncratic, impressionistic writing the better to cultivate an authoritative impersonality.


From the archives, May 1846 Economist front page

But the most interesting part of Outlook's persona (or its brand identity, as marketing mavens might have it) is its commitment to a liberal and pluralist politics. Just as The Economist reports the world through a laissez faire lens, Outlook's sense of what's newsworthy in India is shaped by a peculiarly Indian take on secular fair play. Critics write that the magazine is politically skewed towards the Congress and against the BJP; if this is true, it's true only to the extent that the Congress conforms to the principles of a plural liberalism more closely than the BJP does or can. Is this unhealthy? Only if Outlook was the one newsmagazine on the stands.


Sepia tint: Roger Fenton's 1855 photo of the Crimean war

But it isn't.There are other magazines that report the news differently, that give the State the benefit of the doubt, that try, in their reportage and their comment, to explain the logic of majoritarian politics, that report India in the language of 'realism' and realpolitik. Which leaves Outlook free to open its pages to diversity and dissent. For a newsmagazine to do a cover emblazoned with a Hindu swastika and a cover story exploring majoritarian bias, as Outlook did recently, is unusual. These first years of its life have seen the idea of a plural India contested, in office and out of it, as never before, by the Hindu right. What is remarkable is that in this uncongenial political climate, Outlook has built a large mainstream readership, thrived, and is now 13.

Outlook's longevity will depend not on how it weathers ideological hostility, but how it copes with the threat of online browsing. Salman Rushdie, in a recent interview, declared that he no longer subscribed to newspapers and magazines because they were all available online. Every deadwood periodical in the world faces the danger of a young generation that has fallen out of the habit of paying for 'content', whether it be music, films or journalism. In a world where peer-to-peer sharing is eroding notions of copyright and ownership and theft, newsmagazines will have to find new ways of making money out of opinion and news. Outlook's achievement on its 13th birthday is that in this relatively short span it has found many readers who are desperate for it to succeed.