Prantik

About Prantik

Prantik is a multi-topic Assamese-language fortnightly magazine published from Guwahati, Assam, since 1981. Founded with the eminent writer and filmmaker Dr. Bhabendra Nath Saikia as chief editor and the journalist Pradip Baruah as founding editor, it has appeared every fortnight for more than four decades and is widely regarded as the most influential Assamese fortnightly of recent times. Covering politics, culture, literature, economics and social affairs, Prantik has played a vital role in the socio-political life of Assam, serialising some of the most popular novels and autobiographies of modern Assamese literature and sustaining a roster of columns and features that readers have followed for generations. Its editorial office stands at Kharguli, near Chandmari in Guwahati, and Pradip Baruah remains its editor more than three decades after the magazine's founding.

Assam in 1981: the founding moment

Prantik was born in a turbulent Assam. The year 1981 fell squarely in the middle of the Assam Movement (1979–1985), the mass agitation against illegal immigration that convulsed the state's politics, shut its institutions and radicalised its public life. It was a moment when Assamese society was arguing with itself about identity, language, demography and the future — exactly the kind of moment that demands a serious, independent-minded periodical. Launching a fortnightly magazine in such conditions was an act of considerable nerve: paper was scarce, the political atmosphere was volatile, and the reading public was preoccupied with the movement. That Prantik not only survived its founding years but established itself permanently is a measure of how well its founders read the moment. Assam needed a forum; Prantik set out to be one.

The two founders

The magazine's founding team paired two very different kinds of authority. Dr. Bhabendra Nath Saikia — novelist, short-story writer, playwright and filmmaker, later a Sahitya Akademi Award winner — became the founding chief editor, lending the magazine instant literary prestige. Saikia was one of the most respected intellectual figures in Assam, and his name on the masthead told readers and writers alike that Prantik intended to be taken seriously. The founding editor, handling the day-to-day work of putting out a fortnightly, was the journalist Pradip Baruah. It was Baruah who did the unglamorous labour of commissioning, editing, printing and distributing — the "struggling period," as he later described it, of launching the magazine in 1981 — and it is Baruah who has remained with the magazine ever since, still serving as its editor more than three decades later, one of the longest editorial tenures in Indian magazine publishing.

Bhabendra Nath Saikia's chief-editorship

Saikia's association gave Prantik its intellectual character. As a writer, he was known for the moral seriousness and formal control of his fiction; as a filmmaker, he had brought Assamese cinema to national attention; as a public intellectual, he commanded unusual respect across Assam's fractured political landscape. His presence as chief editor signalled that Prantik would be a magazine of ideas as well as of news — a place where literature and public affairs shared the same pages. Even after his active involvement ended, his imprint on the magazine endured: pages from Saikia's diary are published on the last page of each issue of Prantik, a quiet, continuing memorial that keeps the founding chief editor's voice inside the magazine he helped create.

Pradip Baruah's four-decade stewardship

If Saikia gave Prantik its prestige, Pradip Baruah gave it its persistence. Founding editor in 1981, publisher of the magazine, and still its editor after more than three decades, Baruah's tenure is the institutional backbone of Prantik. Fortnightly publishing is a punishing rhythm — twenty-four deadlines a year, every year, through political upheavals, economic crises and the transformation of the media economy — and sustaining it for over forty years requires an unusual combination of editorial judgement and sheer stamina. Baruah, described by the Guwahati Press Club as a conscious editor and sincere observer of Assamese society, built the magazine's networks of writers, its distribution and its relationship with readers. In 2010 his autobiography was released to public notice in The Assam Tribune, a reminder of how closely his personal story is woven into the magazine's.

A multi-topic fortnightly

Prantik has always resisted being only one kind of magazine. Its pages carry politics, culture, literature, economics, art and social commentary — the full range of subjects that a serious general-interest fortnightly is expected to cover. This multi-topic character is central to its influence: because it is not a specialist journal, its political reporting reaches literary readers, its fiction reaches political readers, and its cultural commentary reaches everyone. In a state where public debate has often been polarised and episodic, Prantik offered something rarer — a regular, fortnightly space in which Assam could conduct an ongoing conversation with itself, in its own language, about the things that mattered most to it.

Serialised novels and autobiographies

One of Prantik's most significant contributions to Assamese literature has been as a venue for serialised long-form writing. Some of the most popular novels and autobiographies of modern Assamese literature were first published in Prantik's pages, appearing instalment by instalment across successive fortnightly issues. The serial format — the same engine that drove the great Bengali and Hindi periodicals — gave Assamese writers the space to develop book-length works with a guaranteed readership, and gave readers the pleasure of following a narrative across months. For a literature the size of Assamese, a single magazine willing to serialise major work functions almost as a publishing house, and Prantik has played that role for decades.

Columns and recurring features

Like all successful fortnightlies, Prantik built loyalty through recurring features that readers could count on. Among its noted columns have been "Buddhi Jukti" and "Letters from Canada," the latter offering Assamese readers a regular window onto the diaspora's perspective. The most distinctive recurring feature, however, is the last page of each issue, which carries pages from the diary of Bhabendra Nath Saikia — a posthumous column, in effect, that keeps the founding chief editor present in every fortnight's reading. These standing features gave the magazine its rhythm and its personality: readers knew what to expect, and the expectation itself became part of the pleasure of the magazine.

Prantik and Assam's public life

Over the decades, Prantik has established itself as one of the most influential literary and informative magazines in Assam, and commentators routinely describe it as playing a vital role in the socio-political lives of the people of the state. This is not an empty claim. Through the later years of the Assam Movement, the ULFA insurgency, the Bodoland agitations, the debates over the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act, Assam has lived through a continuous series of political crises, and Prantik has been one of the steady Assamese-language forums in which those crises were discussed, analysed and argued over. A fortnightly cannot compete with dailies or television on speed, but it can do what Prantik has done: provide the reflective, essay-length treatment that daily journalism cannot.

Readership and the Kharguli office

Prantik's readers have sustained it through the transformation of Assam's media landscape. The magazine's office at Krishna Nagar, Chandmari, on Navagiri Road in Kharguli, Guwahati, has become a minor landmark for the state's literary culture — the place readers write to, visit and subscribe through, year after year. Reviewers and subscribers describe the magazine as providing a great deal of knowledge and as suitable for every reader, and its working environment is spoken of with affection. In an age of digital fragmentation, the continued existence of a print fortnightly with a loyal subscription base is itself a statement about the durability of the reading cultures that magazines like Prantik created.

Prantik today

More than four decades after its founding in 1981, Prantik is still being published fortnightly from Guwahati, still edited by Pradip Baruah, and still regarded as the most influential Assamese fortnightly of recent times. It has outlived the political movement that formed the backdrop to its birth, outlasted many of the magazines founded alongside it, and adapted to a media environment utterly different from the one in which it began. Its achievement is institutional as much as editorial: to have kept a serious Assamese-language fortnightly alive, issue after issue, for over forty years. For Assam's readers and writers, Prantik remains what its founders intended it to be — the state's fortnightly mirror, held up every two weeks without fail.