BOMBAY (PTI): [t has been a chronicle of a death foretold over “several months.

Displaced from its preeminent position as the premier pictorial newsmagazine of the country, ‘the illustrated weekly of India’ suspended publication on Saturday Nov. 13, after an almost uninterrupted run of 113 years, reports daily “Indian Express.”

The end of the illustrious career of the weekly was inevitable.

The advertisements thinned, Change of editors saw a change in the mood of the magazine from gimmicky packaging to boredom.

And the health suffered as Swathed from broadsheet to tabloid format. “We are suspending publication for the time being. Hopefully, things will change, at least for the sake of the weekly. It is very old institution,” lamented the magazine’s editor, Anil Dharker.

| The magazine’s oldest staffer, typist N.R.Mohileé, is in a shock, “Thad got so attached to it. Now it is living with me,” said Mohile, due to retire after a 36year stint with the magazine. Ironically, the magazine had doubled circulation from 40,000 Copies Over the last eight months, Dharker said.

Anil Darkaer puts the blame on the total lack of advertisement support as he points out that it is still the cheapest newsmagazine at Rs 5 a copy.

“The illustrated weekly of India’ is the oldest among them any other Bennet, Coleman and Co Ltd publication to retire into oblivion.

Since 1985, the retirement list is long for the company: “The Evening News of India,’ Indrajit Comics,’ ‘Madhuri,’ ‘Science Today 2001’ (all published from: Bombay): *Vama”, Khelbharati,” ‘Sarika, ’Career and Competition Times’ (All published from Delhi): ‘The Times of India’ (Gujarati) from Ahmedabad and the English edition of “The Paper’ from Patna.

Staffers and expeditors privately admit that save for the ‘cash cow,” the Bombay edition of the Times of India and lately the Economic Times, ail other publications of the Times group never managed to make a profit thanks to managerial neglect of the editorial department. As the magazine’s best-known editor, Khushwant Singh puts it, “it’s like the death of one’s child. I was pained to see it slowly withering away, and now dying. The management has a lot to answer for; they never bothered to pick the right people.”

Singh regrets that the weekly “never gained a perspective of its own.” The advertisement support would come, he felt, given the personality and a message, adding that even if former editor Pritish Nandy “did a heroic job” with the contents, the shift to broadsheet size was a “total disaster.” On his party Nandy felt, “there are two ways a publishing house like BCCL treats its publications either like institutions or as brands.”” “If a brand doesn’t sell, it is dropped. That’s sheer economic sense and nothing to do with commitment to the fourth estate.”

Though Nandy brought in a staggering visual sense to the magazine many see him as being responsible for its loss of readership.

From 1850 till 1901, the magazine was merely an appendage of the daily newspaper, called the illustrated weekly of the Times of India.

 In 1934 its former editor Stanley Jepson is quoted to have said the weekly was 4 misnomers. It had neither illustration nor did it carry ‘Indian’ topics.

In 1948, CJR Mandy embellished the family magazine formula with crosswords, agony ‘aunty column,’ children’s pages and matrimonials, the contents remained much the same under the tenure of its first Indian editor, A.S: Raman appointed in 1959. Bur it was left to Khushwant Singh to bring in politics, religion and sex all topics taboo under the British. His years as editor (196578) correspond with the emergence of the articulate, post-independence albeit pre yuppie middle class.

‘The circulation stagnated at 3.2 lakh when I took charge in 1978 and hit an all-time high of 4.2 lakhs with 4 cover story on cricket by Raju Bharatan,” said former editor M.V.Kamath. He felt the cumbersome printing schedules and taken their toll. Critical of attempts to make the magazine a sexy scandal sheet with a huge antiestablishment chip on its front cover, Kamath advocates a return to an apolitical mix of art and culture, even nonsexual, “Nudity doesn’t sell. Now people want stability,” he asserted.

In the battle between the sale ability of the conservative and the radical image, the weekly has been reduced to a memorabilia.

 

Article extracted from this publication >>  November 19, 1993