Hot off the press

EVERY August, Chennai celebrates its lifetime through heritage walks, lectures, exhibitions and nostalgia-soaked talks.

- RAKSHITHA PRIYA G

Along with that, this Madras Week, the city's story was not only told on its streets, but through gazettes. At the Roja Muthiah Research Library's 'Print Culture - Magazines Exhibition', journals that people had only encountered in their textbooks appeared in their original, fragile form. For the first time, history's headlines were no longer just a memorising two-mark answer in textbooks, but real pages that once passed from hand to hand.

Manikodi gleamed with the brilliance of modernist writing, Murasoli throbbed with the thunder of Dravidian politics, Mangai flared with women's voices, and Gandhi's Harijan carried a nation's moral conscience. Together, these issues some once sold for as little as 25-50 paisa-reminded visitors that Chennai has always been as much a city of print as of temples, trade and cinema.