Blitz

Overview

Blitz was a popular investigative weekly tabloid newspaper published and edited by Russi Karanjia from Bombay, now Mumbai. It was first published on 1 February 1941 and was India's first weekly tabloid. It focused on investigative journalism and political news, and it appeared in English with editions in Hindi, Urdu and Marathi. At its height it claimed a readership of a million, and its masthead proclaimed it free, frank and fearless.

The paper was a pioneer of investigative journalism in India. It revelled in its self-proclaimed role as a racket-buster, exposing truths concealed by the powerful, and it thrived on controversy for more than five decades. Blitz ceased publication in the mid-1990s, several years before its founder's death, but its style, its campaigns and the careers it launched left a permanent mark on Indian journalism.

Russi Karanjia and the Founding

Rustom Khurshedji Karanjia, who signed his reports as R. K. Karanjia, was born on 15 September 1912 to a Parsi family in Quetta. He began writing while still in college, and during the 1930s he was employed as an assistant editor at The Times of India. He also briefly edited The Sunday Standard and the short-lived Morning Standard. In 1941 he left The Times of India to launch Blitz, and he ran the paper for the next four decades and beyond.

Sudheendra Kulkarni, a journalist and politician who worked with Blitz, recalled that the decision to launch the paper was taken over a cup of tea. Three patriotic journalists, B. V. Nadkarni, Benjamin Horniman and Karanjia himself, sat at the Wayside Inn, a restaurant near the historic Kala Ghoda area of Mumbai, to conceptualise the paper. On Karanjia's four-man founding team were Dinkar V. Nadkarni, who had earned a reputation by penning sensational crime stories in the Bombay Sentinel, which Horniman edited; Zahir Babar Kureishi, who wrote a popular column under the pen name ZABAK; and Nadir Boman-Behram, who looked after the advertising and business side.

Launch, Growth and the Tabloid Form

The paper was launched from an old Apollo Street building in the Fort locality of Bombay. Its inaugural issue introduced the tabloid as Our BLITZ, India's BLITZ against Hitler, a declaration that joined the paper's birth to the crisis of the Second World War. It claimed a circulation of 20,000 within four months of its launch, and it later said it had a readership of one million some twenty-five years later.

Part of the paper's self-representation as a radical people's paper was its tabloid form itself. Blitz was described as featuring sensational accounts of national and international skulduggery, with a spunky tabloid's loud and screaming captions and telling photographs. It called itself Asia's foremost news magazine. Its brash tone was set to orchestrate a relentlessly nationalist line strongly inflected by leftist themes, and its pages mixed political scoops, crime stories, exposures of corruption and irreverent comment in a combination that no Indian newspaper had previously offered its readers every week.

Investigative Journalism and Racket-Busting

Blitz was a pioneer of investigative journalism in India, and exposure was its speciality. The historian Gyan Prakash, in his study of the paper, recorded its staples: the embezzlement of public funds, prostitution rackets, sordid stories of seduction and sex in the name of spiritualism, dark political designs behind high-sounding rhetoric, and the fleecing of the poor by rich industrialists and property developers. Even the sports column, called Knock Out and written by A. F. S. Talyarkhan, took on the racket-busting posture and charged sports authorities with malfeasance.

That posture made the paper feared as well as read. It indulged in muckraking, in over-the-top stories calculated to provoke and enrage, and Karanjia was frequently embroiled in defamation suits. P. Sainath, who worked as the paper's deputy editor for over a decade, later recalled that the paper was not always fearless and was sometimes too free for its own good and often obnoxiously frank, but that it was always readable, thanks to an editor with an unrivalled instinct for what would make news to an incredibly diverse readership.

The Nanavati Case and Bombay's Imagination

Blitz was credited with doing more than any other publication to make a routine murder trial into a classic story of Bombay's bourgeois life, in the Nanavati murder case of 1959. The case, in which a naval officer shot the man who had become involved with his wife, gripped the city, and the paper headlined its coverage with an account of three shots that shook the nation. Its treatment of the trial became the most famous example of its method, in which a court proceeding was turned into a serial drama of love, honour and class that the whole city followed.

The Nanavati coverage showed how completely the paper had fused crime reporting with political and social commentary. The same instincts that exposed municipal rackets were applied to a sensational trial, and the result fixed Blitz in the memory of Bombay as the paper that had told the city's own story back to it in its boldest type. Karanjia also served as a war correspondent during the Japanese Burma offensive in the Second World War, reporting on the action in Burma and Assam, and that early experience of front-line reporting fed the paper's appetite for the dramatic first-hand story.

Politics: Nehru, Secularism and the Left

Blitz was an unapologetic supporter of Jawaharlal Nehru. It vigorously championed secularism, supported socialism and planning, denounced capitalism, and poured scorn on right-wing and communal politicians. Karanjia was considered close to Nehru and counted many foreign heads of state as his friends. The paper supported leftist internationalism, lauded Afro-Asian solidarity against the capitalist West, treated Egypt's President Nasser as a hero, and loudly and regularly unveiled what it presented as dark CIA plots against India and Third World leaders.

It was one of the few Indian newspapers to carry interviews with the high and mighty, including Fidel Castro and Zhou Enlai. Karanjia himself authored ten books, which included works on contemporary figures such as the Shah of Iran, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan, and a book on Kundalini Yoga for which Mulk Raj Anand wrote the afterword. Among the prominent left-wing columnists of Blitz were Ramesh Sanghvi, A. Raghavan and K. A. Abbas, and the paper's politics gave its racket-busting a consistent direction: the powerful it pursued were, most often, the wealthy, the communal and the agents of foreign interests.

Writers, Cartoonists and the Last Page

The paper was an incubator for Indian journalism. Cartoonist R. K. Laxman's early cartoons were published in Blitz, and so were Abu Abraham's. The cartoonist and architect Cecil Lancelot Dawes contributed heavily, and his daughter Shirley Dawes worked for Karanjia for many years. The Daily and Blitz were incubators for R. K. Laxman, Haroon Rashid, P. Sainath and Teesta Setalvad, all of whom started their journalistic careers there.

Its most famous feature was the Last Page column of K. A. Abbas, the noted writer and filmmaker, which ran for over forty years, a span almost without parallel in Indian journalism. Around that column and the paper's campaigns stood a newsroom that former staff remembered with a mixture of awe and amusement. A sign outside Karanjia's office warned that you did not have to be crazy to work there, but it helped, and Sainath recalled the masthead's boast of being free, frank and fearless as the paper's creed, honoured in a style that was always readable and frequently outrageous.

Editions, Sister Publications and Public Ventures

Blitz was published in English, and with editions in Hindi, Urdu and Marathi, a multilingual reach that carried its campaigns far beyond Bombay's English-reading public. In 1974 the group also started a film magazine, Cine Blitz, with Karanjia's daughter Rita Mehta as its editor, and Rita Mehta was remembered as the founder and first editor-in-chief of the title that became a fixture of film journalism. Karanjia also founded a morning tabloid called The Daily, which was run for some years.

The paper's public energy extended beyond print. Blitz was associated with organising India's longest cycle race on the occasion of Nehru's hundredth birth anniversary, the Blitz-Nehru Integration Tour of India, modelled on the Tour de France, the Giro and La Vuelta. The ten-day, nine-stage race of 1,442 kilometres, held in 1989 from Mumbai to New Delhi with a top prize of one hundred thousand rupees, was claimed to remain India's greatest, longest and toughest stage cycle race. The venture captured the paper's character: nationalist in theme, spectacular in scale and inseparable from its founder's enthusiasms.

Violence, Decline and Closure

The paper's world could be dangerous. In 1983, the criminal-politicians Gopal Rajwani and Pappu Kalani carried out the brutal knife murder of A. V. Narayan, a sub-editor of Blitz, an episode that underlined the risks that attended a newsroom devoted to exposing rackets. After reaching its zenith in the 1980s, when it was a major Indian tabloid with a circulation reported at six hundred thousand, sales declined in the 1990s.

In 1996 Karl Mehta, then managing director and publisher and Karanjia's son-in-law, reached an agreement with the Daily Mirror to publish news from the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror, The Independent and People magazine, in an attempt to renew the title. Vijay Mallya, chairman of United Spirits, owned an eight per cent stake in Blitz at the time. The revival did not restore the paper. Blitz ceased publication in the mid-1990s, although there were some attempts to revive it, and Karanjia retired from public life as his newspaper business crumbled around him.

Karanjia's Death and the Paper's Legacy

Karanjia died at his home, a seafront flat along Marine Drive in Mumbai, at the age of ninety-five on 1 February 2008, exactly sixty-seven years after he had founded the paper and, as obituaries noted, on the same day of the year on which Blitz had rolled out of the press. In a departure from Parsi tradition, as per his wishes, his funeral was held at the Chandanvadi crematorium in south Mumbai. He was survived by his daughter Rita Mehta, and his brother Burjor had also been a journalist, as editor of Filmfare.

Obituaries called Karanjia the father of Indian tabloid journalism and the last of the buccaneer editors. Blitz left behind the template of the Indian investigative weekly: the screaming headline, the exposure of the racket, the campaign against the powerful and the columnist given a permanent page of his own. It had begun in a Fort office in wartime Bombay with a circulation of twenty thousand, and it had grown into a paper read from the jawan on the border to striking textile workers in Mumbai. Its half-century of noise, courage and controversy secured its place as one of the most distinctive newspapers independent India produced.