LITERARY NOTES: Munshi Mahboob Alam and Paisa Akhbar.

Byline: Rauf Parekh

NEWSPAPERS do not merely report events. They reflect civilisation and culture. Much of human struggle in modern times, political or otherwise, is recorded in newspapers. With the abolition of taxes on British newspapers in 1855, availability of cheap newsprint and inexpensive postal services made British newspapers available to the masses at low price. This paved the way for revolutions in many fields of human endeavour.

Some of the ideas copied from the British journalism in the Pakistan-India subcontinent include low-priced newspapers. Two of such Urdu newspapers launched in the subcontinent proved to be harbingers of modern journalism in the subcontinent: Akhbar-i-A'am and Paisa Akhbar. Both were weeklies, later on became dailies and both were priced at paisa one. Akhbar-i-A'am was launched on Jan 1, 1871 from Lahore and, passing through ups and downs, closed down in 1930. It was the first newspaper in the subcontinent that was priced at paisa one, showing the other newspapers how to popularise the habit of reading newspapers among commoners: simply...