Book Extract | Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper by Chander Mohan and Jyotsna Mohan

Our passage to freedom is also the journey of Urdu literature, where poets, journalists and revolutionaries mobilized their angst into powerful words.

Book Extract

Excerpted with permission from Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper by Chander Mohan and Jyotsna Mohan, published by HarperCollins India.

By the late 1800s and first two decades of the twentieth century, several periodicals and newspapers came out in undivided India. They had a distinct nationalist tenor and stood out in their role of political awakening. In Punjab, if a report was not published in the Urdu press, it was not credible enough from an Indian nationalistic perspective. With Persian having transitioned to Urdu for administration during the Raj, the language itself was a composite cultural bridge of a people oppressed.
As Mahatma Gandhi extolled the press to express their opinion freely, Urdu journalists and editors did not disappoint him. The landscape of the Urdu press was divided between Hindu and Muslim owners when Pratap was born. Despite public perception – and more so now for vested reasons – Urdu as a language of Muslims alone has been a grandstanding fallacy.

Our passage to freedom is also the journey of Urdu literature, where poets, journalists and revolutionaries mobilized their angst into powerful words. Urdu became the voice; its poetic activism burying the romantic prose as it not only called out atrocities but also invigorated the masses. The batwara was not kind to the language; it flickers, and, despite its cultural generosity, it burns predominantly in Muslim homes in India where Urdu adds to an identity already under question.

In pre-independent India, Urdu was a distinctly inclusive language – uniting Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs under its umbrella. Subhas Chandra Bose inscribed ‘Ittehad, Itmad, Qurbani’ as his army’s motto, and from Bengal Renaissance writers to the Arya Samaj, Urdu’s influence was far-flung. ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, ‘long live the revolution’, coined by poet Hasrat Mohani became the battle cry for freedom, and, as Virendra himself was to witness it, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev shouted the slogan while being taken to the gallows at Lahore Central Jail. A firsthand account of that evening forms a part of this book.

An American scholar of the Urdu language, C.M. Naim, says:

So much of Urdu prose writing was done by non-Muslims, essentially Hindus. There were Kashmiri Brahmins, Kayasthas, Hindus, Rajputs and those who belonged to the Arya Samaj, who were all integral to the language. The British replaced Persian with Urdu and it was a joke that Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs speak Punjabi when they met, but, in offices, they were all communicating in Urdu. Your great-grandfather and grandfather were writing and speaking Urdu not just from their hearts but also from their minds. The sad fact is that Urdu is no longer a language equally shared, with an equal commitment of emotion and talent by both communities. It is a Muslim enterprise, and that has its consequences, both linguistic and non-linguistic.

It was not just the Urdu press that showed a mirror to the Raj, the pens of revolutionaries were cutting, outspoken and uncaring. Bismil Azimabadi’s 1921 ghazal was a brazen ode to men with a singular calling: India’s freedom. There was one slogan on everyone’s lips after poet Ramprasad Bismil recited it audaciously before his hanging in the Kakori Conspiracy Case.

Sarfaroshi ki tammana ab hamare dil mein hai,

dekhna hai zor kitna bazu-e-qatil mein hai

The desire for sacrifice is in our hearts,

let us see how much strength there is in the arms of our killer

The words continue to have a life of their own.

Professor Mrinal Chatterjee, academic and author, says:

If you look at phases of Urdu literature, there are three to four distinct phases and we have to look at undivided India to find those phases. There was a romantic phase, and, gradually, a social consciousness came [into being], along with it came the idea of revolt through poetry and literature. The beauty of this language was used for the movement and rebellion was spoken about poetically, remember when Akbar Allahabadi says, ‘Jab top mukabil ho toh akhbar nikalo (When facing a gun bring out a newspaper).’

Pakistani scholar and poet Abdul Majeed Salik’s biography notes that not long after Lala Lajpat Rai took out the Urdu newspaper Bande Mataram, Krishan launched the daily, Pratap. ‘Zamindar, Inqilab and Siyasat, though each other’s rivals in many respects, forged a common front against Hindu hierarchy,’ says a Pakistani report on the layers of pre-partition Urdu press, while singling out Pratap, Bande Mataram, Kesari and Milap as Hindu contemporaries.
***

Former Prime Minister I.K. Gujral’s first acquaintance with Lahore was as a young boy, when his parents took him to witness the historic Congress session of 1929–30. He writes in a foreword for Virendra’s autobiography, Veh Inquilabi Din, that Lahore was a premier centre of media; radio was still in its infancy and TV unheard of.

The Urdu press was large and diverse. Most of them were anti-imperialist though their outlooks divided them on Hindu-Muslim lines that determined their affiliations, Pratap and Milap were supportive of the national surge. My childhood and later years were influenced a great deal by first hearing from my mother and later reading the editorials written by Mahashay Krishan.

Pratap’s first lifespan lasted a full twelve days. Its support for the freedom movement led by Mahatma Gandhi made it a pariah in the eyes of the British and, less than two weeks later, on 11 April 1919, censorship laws were imposed on the paper. Its owner was ordered to submit content for pre-censorship, which he refused to do, and the next day Pratap’s proprietor was thrown into Lahore Prison.

Professor Mrinal Chatterjee says:

Pratap was a subject of attack by the British administration as well as harassment by the government. Its publications were suspended several times, but it continued to have a profound influence among Urdu-reading Hindus of Punjab and Delhi.’

C.M. Naim writes:

The large cohort of sharanarthi [refugee] journalists, forced in 1947 to abandon lives and careers in Lahore, Sialkot, Rawalpindi, or Sargodha, lost little time in building new lives and careers in Delhi, Amritsar, Ludhiana, and Jalandhar … The famous triad of Pratap, Milap and Tej probably never lost a publication day.

It wasn’t quite as simple as that!

In The Politics of Self-Expression, Markus Daechsel explores the Urdu middle-class milieu in the mid-twentieth century and comes to a similar conclusion: ‘… even after the partition Urdu titles previously published from Lahore, but now relocated to India, easily outstripped the Hindi Press of Uttar Pradesh in terms of readership [sic],’ with Punjab ‘boasting of some of the most advanced Urdu newspapers of the period’, including, he says, Pratap.****

Chander Mohan and Jyotsna Mohan Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper, published by HarperCollins India, 2025. Pb. 385

The Urdu newspaper Pratap - and its Hindi counterpart Vir Pratap - had a long and eventful history. Launched by Mahashay Krishan on 30 March 1919 and ably carried on by his son Virendra and later his grandson Chander, it was a torchbearer against the British Raj that covered all the major events during India's struggle for independence and after, until it wound up in 2017.

This book chronicles the exciting lives of the newspapers, their founder and editors, as well as landmark events of Indian history, from Independence to the Emergency and Operation Blue Star. Pratap was known for its bold stance, which lead to it being shut down for a year by the British administration within twelve days of its launch, the arrest of its founder and editors-in-chief multiple times, and even a parcel bomb being delivered to its office in 1983. An icon of Indian journalism, Pratap is a reminder of the importance of speaking truth to power. Its story deserves to be read by all.

A veteran journalist and columnist, Chander Mohan was the distinguished editor of the Hindi daily Vir Pratap for forty years. Born in Lahore in pre-partition Punjab, he has been a leading voice in Hindi journalism in North India, writing searing and uncompromising editorials. From travelling in Rajiv Gandhi's press entourage to Lahore with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, he is privileged to have witnessed several eras of politics and media. Semi-retired, he pens ‘Maryadain', a weekly column for a national newspaper while managing several educational institutions in his hometown, Jalandhar. Journalism and education are his two passions, and he finds a way for both to complement each other.

As a journalist with nearly three decades of experience across TV, print and digital media, Jyotsna Mohan has always sought to hold up a mirror to society. Her journey led her to pen her debut book Stoned, Shamed, Depressed, an Amazon bestseller that dives deep into the secret lives of India's teens and reveals challenges that resonate with young people globally. A columnist for publications in India and abroad, her writings reflect societal issues and challenge the status quo, which she says is her family legacy! She brings this outlook to her online talk show Table Talk with Jo. Born in Jalandhar, Jyotsna now lives with her husband and two children in Abu Dhabi.