Indomitable Spirit

Gauri Lankesh worked tirelessly to keep her father’s legacy, “Lankesh Patrike”, alive, but she went beyond journalism and entered the realm of activism with the rise of Hindutva in Karnataka, most notably in the State’s coastal region.

- Bageshree S

GAURI LANKESH MARRIED HER CRAFT OF journalism to social and political activism in a manner few have done in recent memory, and paid the ultimate price. Journalism for her was a calling, not a mere job.

There were many sceptics when Gauri Lankesh took over Lankesh Patrike after her illustrious father, P. Lankesh’s death in 2000. They sniggered at her for her “lack of experience”, her “political naivete” and what they claimed was her “poor hold on Kannada”. Evidently, she was stepping into the big shoes of her father, a leading light of the Navya movement of literature in Kannada, film-maker, playwright and a journalist who shaped a generation through his writings in the 1980s and 1990s.And anyone less gutsy than Gauri Lankesh would have shrivelled under the intense heat of such expectations.

The distinct path Gauri Lankesh chartered from then on until her brutal killing on the night of September 5, 2017, was all her own as much in journalism as it was in political activism. In fact, the two roles melded into each other and lent her a trademark style. Her indefatigable confidence and hard work soon silenced the sniggers. Gauri Lankesh doggedly kept the magazine going during the most trying times. Money to run it was always hard to come by, and she brought it out almost single-handedly, right down to proofreading the pages, with little or virtually no help.

The transformation of the weekly tabloid’s masthead from Lankesh Patrike to Gauri Lankesh in 2005, though not by choice but because of a dispute with her brother, Indrajit Lankesh, who claimed proprietorship, could well be seen as symbolic of the shaping of her distinct identity.

JOURNALISM FROM THE TRENCHES