About Chhattisgarh Mitra

Chhattisgarh Mitra

Chhattisgarh Mitra was a Hindi monthly literary magazine founded in 1900 by Madhavrao Sapre and published from Pendra, in present-day Chhattisgarh. Produced with the help of Vamanrao Lakhe and Ramrao Chincholkar at a time when the region had no printing press of its own, it was one of the earliest Hindi magazines and is credited with laying the foundation of Hindi journalism in Chhattisgarh. Although the magazine itself had a short run, its historical weight is considerable: in its pages Sapre published "Ek Tokri Bhar Mitti", the story widely regarded as the first original short story in Hindi.

The magazine's name announced its purpose — "Mitra" means friend, and Chhattisgarh Mitra presented itself as the friend of a region that had no journalistic voice of its own. Written not in the regional dialect but in Khariboli, the standard Hindi then gaining prominence across north India, it deliberately connected a small town in the Central Provinces to the national literary and freedom movements.

Founding at Pendra in 1900

Madhavrao Sapre founded Chhattisgarh Mitra in 1900 from Pendra, a small place in the Bilaspur district of the then Central Provinces. Official tributes by the Government of Chhattisgarh record the circumstances plainly: in 1900, when there were not enough facilities and modern technology for publication, Sapre started editing and publishing the monthly Hindi magazine Chhattisgarh Mitra at Pendra with the help of Vamanrao Lakhe and Ramrao Chincholkar.

Pendra had no printing press. As the scholarly literature on Sapre notes, Pendra Road in Sapre's time was too small a place to have a printing press, and the production of a monthly magazine from there was an act of organisational persistence: copy had to be gathered, edited and sent out for printing, and the finished journal distributed, from a village base. Vamanrao Lakhe, a practising advocate from Raipur, helped with the publishing of the journal, and Ramrao Chincholkar, an advocate from Bilaspur, became a co-editor and helped commission pieces from national writers.

Madhavrao Sapre

Madhavrao Sapre (1871-1926) was a freedom fighter, journalist, writer and social reformer, remembered in Chhattisgarh as the father of journalism and literature in the state. He had initially worked as a tehsildar before leaving government service to devote himself to the independence movement and to Hindi literary development. A Maharashtrian by birth who championed Hindi, he is quoted in tributes declaring his pride in Hindi equal to that of any native Hindi speaker.

Sapre's career after Chhattisgarh Mitra shows the breadth of the project of which the magazine was the first step. He edited several Hindi journals, including the Hindi edition of Kesari. He translated notable Marathi works into Hindi, including Bal Gangadhar Tilak's Geeta Rahasya and Samarth Ramdas's Dasbodh. He worked to standardise Hindi economic terminology and compiled a science dictionary, the Vigyan Shabdkosh, for the Kashi Nagari Pracharini Sabha. In 1906 he started a Hindi magazine in Nagpur to support Hindi literary writers, which the British government shut down in 1908 for its nationalist content. In 1920 he founded the Hindi Mandir in Jabalpur, in 1921 he founded a national school and established the first girls' school, the Janaki Devi Mahila Pathshala, in Raipur, and in 1924 he chaired the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan session at Dehradun. He died on 23 April 1926 at Tatipara, Raipur.

Language: Khariboli by choice

One of the magazine's most consequential decisions was linguistic. Despite being named after, and catering to, a regional audience in Central India, Chhattisgarh Mitra was written in Khariboli rather than in the regional dialect. Scholarly analysis of Sapre's writing explains the choice: Khariboli was gaining prominence in North India and in the national freedom movement, and by choosing it Sapre worked with an idea of linguistic unity that could integrate far-off provinces such as the erstwhile regions of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh into the national struggle.

The journal took its model in part from Durgaprasad Mishra's Bharat Mitra of 1878, the pioneering Hindi journal of Calcutta. Naming his magazine Chhattisgarh Mitra placed the Pendra venture in that lineage while asserting that a small Central Indian town could sustain the same kind of journal.

"Ek Tokri Bhar Mitti" and the first Hindi short story

Chhattisgarh Mitra's most famous single publication was Sapre's own story "Ek Tokri Bhar Mitti" — "A Basketful of Earth", also rendered "Tokri Bhar Mitti". Published in the journal, it has the distinction, in the assessment repeated in official Chhattisgarh tributes and literary histories, of being the first original Hindi story in Indian literature. Many scholars hold it to be the first story published and acknowledged in the Hindi language.

The story's freshness of form has been much discussed. Written in a simple style with intense social sentiment, it has been read in relation to the history of Hindi print journals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to Sapre's editorial philosophy: literature governed by ideas of morality, idealism and decorum, but founded on the conviction that literature could communicate to a larger public sphere. The story, and the journal that carried it, thus stand at the head of the modern Hindi short story tradition.

Contents and purpose

The magazine focused on social, political and cultural issues of the time and aimed to create awareness among its readers about the freedom movement and other contemporary questions. It is described in assessments of Sapre's career as a landmark in Hindi journalism for its progressive and reformist approach, instrumental in raising awareness of Indian culture and heritage and of the freedom struggle.

Through his writings in and around the journal, Sapre developed a national and literary consciousness in Chhattisgarh. During the freedom struggle, his writing guided hundreds of satyagrahis and inspired patriotism — the context in which the Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh, paying tribute on Sapre's birth anniversary, declared that the journalism of Chhattisgarh is prospering today only on the foundation laid by him.

Foundation of journalism in Chhattisgarh

Chhattisgarh Mitra's founding is treated in the region's official memory as the beginning of its journalism. Successive chief ministers of Chhattisgarh, paying tribute to Sapre on his birth anniversary on 19 June, have repeated the formulation that Sapre gave a new direction to journalism in Chhattisgarh and that the state's journalism prospers on the foundation he laid. The assessment is repeated in educational material on Hindi journalism, which identifies Sapre as the publisher of the Hindi literary magazine Chhattisgarh Mitra in 1900 and credits the magazine with a remarkable contribution to Hindi journalism and literature, focused on the social, political and cultural issues of its time and on creating awareness of the freedom movement. A monthly produced from Pendra in 1900 thus functions, in Chhattisgarh's public history, as the founding act of the state's press.

Short run, long shadow

Chhattisgarh Mitra itself did not last. Its run was short — the standard biographical accounts say so plainly — squeezed by the same conditions that had made its launch remarkable: no local press, a small readership, and the economics of a monthly sustained by goodwill. Sapre's later journals met political limits too, as the 1908 closure of his Nagpur magazine by the British government showed.

But the magazine's influence outlasted its issues. It inspired writers and intellectuals to contribute to the Hindi literary movement, established a model for regional Hindi journalism, and demonstrated that literary Hindi could be produced from the Central Provinces and not only from the established centres of the north.

Legacy and commemoration

Madhavrao Sapre is commemorated in Chhattisgarh as the father of journalism in the state, and Chhattisgarh Mitra is the centrepiece of that commemoration. State tributes on his birth anniversary return each year to the 1900 magazine: to its improbable production from Pendra, to its editors Lakhe and Chincholkar, and to its story "Ek Tokri Bhar Mitti". Makhanlal Chaturvedi, writing in Karmveer in September 1926 after Sapre's death, summed up the quarter-century of work that had begun with the magazine: Sapre had been a cornerstone of Hindi, travelling across the villages of the region, using his pen to voice the needs of the nation and the suffering of the poor under foreign rule.

For the history of Indian magazines, Chhattisgarh Mitra marks the moment Hindi literary journalism reached Chhattisgarh. A monthly founded in 1900 in a village without a printing press, written in the emerging national standard language, and carrying the first original Hindi short story, it remains the founding document of the region's print culture.