Though ‘Writing With Fire’ failed to win the Oscar today, it catapulted a grassroots news organisation to the global stage. But what is Khabar Lahariya, how do its reporters work—and why are they unhappy with the film that brought them international fame?
Researched by: Sara Varghese & Nivedita Bobal
First, some history:
The big jump to digital: In 2016, Khabar Lahariya went entirely online—to take advantage of the smartphone revolution that lowered the costs of publishing, and hugely extended its reach. The online shift paid off in terms of their audience, as well. The percentage of women readers jumped from 2-3% to 33%. As a newspaper, KL printed 8,000 copies each week which were read by 80,000 people. Its digital reach is now 10 million per month. Its YouTube videos have received over 150 million views—and its channel has 550,000 subscribers.
Their work: Khabar Lahariya is hyper-local journalism at its best. The 20 reporters cover everything from stalled ration programmes, local corruption to gender- and caste-violence—focused on telling stories that matter most to the people they cover. According to its CEO Kavita Devi:
“Communities are still marginalised, whether that’s caste-based or Indigenous tribal communities. These are groups who don’t get the spotlight in mainstream media. One of our core objectives was that these people get their voices heard and that their issues come to the forefront.”
Or as co-founder Disha Mullick describes it: “We’re sort of like a local watch-dog with a feminist lens.”
Plus this: The organisation also runs a training programme for young women with 270 students. The emphasis is both to “build a gender lens” and new-gathering skills:
“Establishing an identity as a woman journalist and a journalist in rural areas is something we take very seriously. For a woman who’s in a rural area to take up a camera and start reporting, it’s quite a leap.”
Making money: The enterprise makes revenues primarily as a news agency—feeding stories to national newspapers who don’t have feet on the ground. KL also creates and sells video content to NGOs, foundations and institutions on rural issues. The next move is a paywalled bulk subscription program.
One point of confusion: While researching this lead, we couldn’t figure out whether Khabar Lahariya is a private company or a non-profit—just for clarification not because it would matter. KL is described as part of an umbrella company called Chambal Media. But recent articles suggest KL still relies primarily on philanthropy to fund its reporting.
What we know: According to this 2016 Factor Daily piece, two of KL’s founding members—Disha Mullick and Shalini Joshi—set up Chambal Media as a private company. The two had a content distribution relationship—where Chambal kept 80% of revenues from the content. At the time, Mullick said:
“‘It is possible for an NGO to have a strong marketing arm,’ says Mullick, referring to Khabar Lahariya, which has so far relied completely on grants for funding. ‘So we are separating content creation from marketing and distribution. Opening a for-profit enterprise like Chambal Media opens up the potential for scale, and the kind of talent you can access is very different from a non-profit organisation.’”
As of today, co-founder Disha Mullick’s bio on the website states, “Chambal Media hosts the iconic rural news brand, Khabar Lahariya.” But the head of both Khabar Lahariya and Chambal Media are now the same: Kavita Devi. So we can only presume the structure has changed.
The filmmakers: Are a couple, Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh—and this is their first feature documentary film. They had only done shorts before. They met as students at the Jamia Milia University—and soon after set up their own company Black Ticket Films.
About the project: Thomas discovered KL via a Facebook photo—and the two were invited to attend a team meeting. Thomas says:
“We got invited to a meeting in which the whole team was discussing the shift [to digital], and just being in that room convinced us this was the right moment for an outside filmmaking team to enter the story…Personally, I wanted to spend more time with the women—they were so intelligent, so witty.”
They began filming in 2016—and stayed embedded with the organisation for five years, all the way up to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
The protagonists: The film focuses specifically on three Dalit women reporters—Meera Devi, Shyamkali Devi, and Suneeta Prajapati—and follows them as they work. The film also maps the time when Khabar Lahariya made the transition from print to digital—learning how to film on smartphones. The women cover everything from a local rape to the mining mafia—and the camera follows them from political rallies to police stations, capturing the very palpable sense of ever-present danger. You can see the trailer here:
The funding: Thomas and Ghosh initially bootstrapped the funds but eventually got support from a variety of international organisations—including Sundance, Chicken & Egg Pictures, IDFA, Tribeca and San Francisco’s SFFilm.
Path to success: Before being nominated for an Oscar, the film won the Audience Award and the Special Jury Award: Impact for Change at the Sundance festival in 2021. But despite that, the film has never been screened in India.
The objection: is fairly straightforward. Khabar Lahariya views its mission as giving voice to the marginalised and demanding accountability from those in power—and that’s what it has been focused on for 20 years. According to the organisation’s statement, the film frames their work within an anti-BJP narrative which doesn’t do justice either to their vision or work:
“The film is a moving and powerful document, but its presentation of Khabar Lahariya as an organisation with a particular and consuming focus of reporting on one party and the mobilisation around this, is inaccurate. We recognise the prerogative of independent filmmakers to present the story that they choose to, but we would like to say that this eclipses the kind of work and the kind of local journalism we have done for twenty years, the reason we are different from other mainstream media of our times. It is a story which captures a part of ours, and part stories have a way of distorting the whole sometimes.”
The filmmakers: have always been clear about their intent—even before KL released their statement:
“The power equation is never equal between a filmmaker and their protagonists…They needed to hear from us very clearly that we were not interested in framing this as a victim story. Neither was it going to be some patronising super-heroine narrative. We didn’t know what our story was going to be but we knew that we were interested in them as relatable, ordinary women with an extraordinary spirit.”
And in response: to KL’s criticism, Thomas and Ghosh insist the anti-BJP frame is solely a consequence of timing:
“We filmed Khabar Lahariya’s role as an independent watchdog in a dynamically changing political landscape from 2016-2019. During this period, the ruling party was the most important party at that time and so editorially, we focused on that aspect of their reporting. It was never our intention to create any other impression.”
Also this: They point out that “journalists at Khabar Lahariya have through all of 2021, joined the filmmakers virtually at several festivals and panel discussions representing the film and talking about their work”—and have responded to screenings of the film with joy rather than disappointment.
Other defenders: of the film have speculated whether KL is under political pressure to distance itself from the film:
“It seems as if its management is upset because the film-makers showed it doing what it was doing—holding the government to account. The timing of the press release too is peculiar, coming as it does a week before the awards ceremony and two weeks after the state assembly election results in Uttar Pradesh (UP).”
To be fair: In the US media at least, KL is being framed as a group of women challenging Hindutva and Yogi Adityanath. For example, this New York Times column, which also includes a quote from Ghosh that seems to encourage the interpretation:
“Some high-caste journalists expressed shock at how quickly the political culture in India turned. In a matter of just a few years, people once considered extremists were suddenly running large swaths of the country. But reporters at Khabar Lahariya saw it coming. ‘They seem to know how to respond to the times we are in,’ Mr. Ghosh said.”
KL’s comeback: In an interview with Barkha Dutt, CEO Kavitha Devi and Meera Devi—who was one of the three main protagonists—more clearly and angrily lay out their objections. They insist that they were only able to see the film in February after repeatedly demanding to do so. And after seeing the rough cut, they communicated their objections: “We have been raising these questions right from the beginning and have been emailing them.” There are also allegations that the film splices its own footage with KL’s videos in a misleading way.
You can watch the interview below (fluency in Hindi required but there are summary captions included):
The bottomline: This is really about who you think owns these stories—the narrators or the subjects. Add the caste and class equation in the mix, and the answer becomes even more complicated. But here’s something everyone agrees on: ‘Writing With Fire’ bears powerful testimony to the astonishing courage of these women—as it should.
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