'Writing With Fire': Shedding Light on Justice in the Media
In 2002, a group of lower caste women in Uttar Pradesh, a state in Northern India, created a newspaper called Khabar Lahariya, meaning “Waves of News”. It is still the only female-run newspaper in India. These women are a strong force fighting for justice and creating real change. The documentary Writing With Fire (dir. Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh) beautifully illustrates the courageous work they’re doing in journalism and their unique inner lives.
One of the main women the documentary follows, Meera is chief reporter at Khabar Lahariya. She has a strong sense of right and wrong, and feels she has a duty to do this work. “This is how one fights for justice in a democracy and journalists must use this power responsibly,” she says. And they do fight for justice. In a video on the newspaper’s YouTube page, one journalist states, “I reported on this road a month ago. Within a month of publishing this story, the administration is fixing the road.” In the same video, a village woman thanks the women at Khabar Lahariya, saying, “We got electricity connections. This happened only because of your news.”
It’s inspiring to see them fighting for change on the ground, tooth and nail. It’s especially incredible because this work comes at a great personal risk to these women. Female journalists are practically unheard of in India, as are low caste journalists, and it’s difficult for them to be taken seriously. India is also statistically one of most dangerous places to be a journalist, with a shockingly high murder rate. “Sometimes I feel anxious that someone might attack me,” Suneeta, a talented journalist at Khabar Lahariya, confesses. “Especially when I report on illegal mining.” Despite all this risk, not only of outside violence but also of shaming their families and husbands by being a woman with a job, they keep coming back to work every day to trudge forward through the muck and find the truth.
Khabar Lahariya is making waves in India, with their views on YouTube skyrocketing in recent years, especially after their coverage of the keystone 2019 Indian election. The structures that inhibit them are different from ours— namely, caste, which is a completely foreign concept in the U.S.— but at the same time, they’re going through the same struggle we are. It’s a struggle for truth in the media, for justice. Below one of their YouTube videos, Khabar Lahariya received comments that are strikingly similar to those you could find under any American left-wing news outlet: “Fake news”, “You slut”, “These feminists”. We can’t let ourselves forget that while the United States has been undergoing a slow-moving catastrophe of democracy in recent years, we’re not the only ones feeling it. We’re fighting this together.
“Our future generations will ask us, when our country was changing and the media was silenced, what were you doing?” Meera muses in the film. “Khabar Lahariya can confidently say we’ve been holding the powerful to account. We made our journalism the voice of democracy.” We must all follow in their footsteps. Writing With Fire is invigorating and reassuring in equal measure, a guiding light in the darkness.
- Written by Gemma Feltovich
