DEATH of REPORTAGE

THE DISMANTLING OF OUTLOOK'S LEGACY

- SHAHID TANTRAY

ON 21 JANUARY 2024, Outlook published an issue called “Poetry as evidence.” It was right up the alley of Chinki Sinha, who had taken over the magazine’s reins two-and-a-half years earlier. The issue was pitched as a kind of literary dissent, exemplifying the cultural turn the magazine has taken under Sinha’s editorship. “This issue of Outlook is to stand against the dangerous silencing of voices,” Sinha wrote in an introductory article. “As a news magazine, we are expected to be reasonable and pretend that poetry doesn’t form a part of what we do. But as journalists, we must read and publish poetry because it makes us uncomfortable, it shows that there is that moral power of the individual voice that must be protected. Poetry expands the scope of storytelling. It is evidence. Of other lives. Of our times.” For those not paying much attention to Outlook in recent years, this would have seemed an unorthodox direction for a news magazine with a reputation for hard-nosed investigative journalism.

The issue was guest edited by the filmmaker Amar Kanwar, who had made a documentary called A Night of Prophecy on protest poetry and songs. An excerpt from a poem by the Marathi poet Wamandada featured in the collection:

In the fields, our sweat drips,

The thief steals and runs, with what isn’t hisThe path through which these plunderersescape, where is it?

Law, forever, is hung to dry on a clotheslineWhose wealth has swollen, theirs or mineDecide now, fetch the scale of justice

But its needle, where is it?

But the first few lines of the poem, the most politically pointed ones, went missing: “Tell us—Birla, Bata, Tata—where is it? Tell us in your pile of wealth, our share, where is it?”