Revenge of the Scribes — by Amir Sultan

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the Bollywood film Mashaal (1984), Vinod Kumar (played by Dilip Kumar) is a journalist who trusts that voice, appeal, and persistence can shake institutions awake. His principled reporting exposes the local mafia’s grip on society, but this honesty draws the fury of those with power. In one of the film’s most haunting moments, he races through streets and corridors with his wife in his arms, pleading for help. His voice is sharp, urgent, and almost bureaucratic, as if sheer desperation could conjure authority. Faces turn, pause, and drift away. He shouts again. Words unravel. Only raw sound remains—bare, desperate. His cry escapes language, suspended in the air, unanswered. Help is not delayed; it simply never comes. For me, and for many, this is not a scene of death, but of transformation: a shattering of worldview that forces the surrender of an ethical past and an impossible present for a future that promises power and survival.

Up to this point, Vinod Kumar adheres to the belief that between suffering and response lays a process—flawed, slow, but tangible. The silence that greets his plea signals the end of that faith. His journalism has been dismissed, his integrity weaponized against him, his trust in institutions eroded grain by grain. When the process fails, the moral code built upon it crumbles too. What follows is not defiance, but substitution: he does not fight the mafia, he becomes it. His downfall is tragic because he feels the weight of what he has lost.

The decline of Indian journalism follows the same logic. It is usually explained through censorship, coercion, or fear – explanations that preserve the image of the journalist as a victim and place responsibility entirely elsewhere. They avoid a harder question: what if the collapse is also voluntary? The present moment suggests a different story—one not of silencing, but of revenge.

Contemporary Indian journalism offers a less tragic, more cynical variation of Mashaal. Many of its loudest practitioners were once marginal—kept outside elite newsrooms, dismissed as unsophisticated, excluded by language, class, or ideology. Their grievance was real. Journalism was never considered real work. It paid poorly, offered few jobs, little security, and almost no esteem. The scribe’s life revolved around kagaz, kapda, karkhana—paper, modest living, and the press. Cinema repeatedly portrayed the journalist as a struggler, ethically upright and materially defeated. Today, it seems uncertain, perhaps afraid, of how to represent him.

What followed this long humiliation was not reform, but alignment. Power did not silence these scribes; it absorbed them. Regimes that once censored and neglected journalists now appear to embrace them—selectively, instrumentally, idiosyncratically. The embrace is not moral; it is functional. This embrace can be observed through specific markers: increased access to political leaders that was previously denied, a notable rise in remuneration and benefits aligning with government agendas, and the subtle imposition of editorial vetoes that direct the narrative in favorable ways. The scribe is no longer needed as a witness, but as an amplifier.

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is the Revenge of the Scribes: not against the state, but against the norms that once denied them legitimacy. Verification becomes expendable. Ethical restraint is rebranded as liberal prejudice. In other words, when concerns are raised about civil liberties, dissent, minority rights, surveillance, or media freedom, they are frequently framed as ideological obstruction rather than ethical concern. Truth is not rejected; it is strategically diluted.

What now passes as journalism rarely fabricates outright. It performs something more sophisticated and more dangerous: the careful mixing of fact with insinuation, accuracy with distortion, evidence with moral certainty. Truth is not eliminated; it is instrumentalized.

This shift is inseparable from the changing nature of information itself. Complexity does not circulate well. It slows consumption. It resists vitality. In the contemporary media economy, being “smart” increasingly means being reducible. Information behaves less like knowledge and more like a unit—a cluster, a blob, a meme—fast, viral, mind-tethering. Its power lies not in truth, but in replication. Control, therefore, is no longer achieved only through censorship, but through managing which units replicate and which disappear.

The business of information has become brutally efficient. An idea can be sold without being lost by the seller. What changes is not possession, but purpose. Journalism no longer sells information to inform. It sells information to entertain, mobilize, and monetize. Editorial policy prefers clichés over context, speed over verification and outrage over consequence. The other side of the story is not denied; it is postponed indefinitely.

Revenue models accelerate this conversion. When income flows not from reporting but from attention—when journalists are rewarded not for filling copy, but for generating percentages—reporters are turned into travelling salesmen. Silence becomes a strategy. Not speaking to a group, not covering an event, not asking a question becomes a communicative act in itself. Silence, in this sense, is learned. It is intentional. It carries meaning.

In a landscape of nine hundred television channels, with more awaiting approval, scarcity is no longer of platforms but of restraint. Stories of consequence lose their value. What remains murky is not whether the state controls the media, but how willingly the media practices discretion on its behalf.

There is a deeper irony here. Indian intellectual culture has long privileged commentary—slow reading, layered interpretation, contextual judgment. The Bhashyakara was never a performer; he was a mediator. Today, mediation itself is treated as a weakness. Noise is mistaken for conviction, speed for courage.

In this climate, the revenge is complete. The scribe no longer resists power; he settles old scores through it. Journalism becomes an arena where past humiliations are avenged in the language of nationalism and moral outrage. The advocacy of a prejudiced, pseudo-democratic order is not always ideological. Often, it is compensatory. Unlike Mashaal, there is no sense of loss. No recognition of ethical crossing. The fall is normalized, even celebrated. That, perhaps, is the most serious rupture—not the death of journalism, but the disappearance of shame.