About Doot

Doot

Doot, also known by its fuller title Paavan Hriday Doot, is a Gujarati-language Catholic monthly magazine published from Anand, Gujarat, India. It has been published continuously since January 1911, which makes it one of the longest-lived magazines in the Gujarati language: when it published its centenary issue in December 2010, it was only the second Gujarati magazine, after Buddhiprakash, to complete a hundred years of publication. It is published by the Gujarat Sahitya Prakash Society and has a readership built on around 5,000 subscribers, concentrated in the Catholic community of Gujarat but reaching Gujarati Christian readers far beyond the state.

The name Doot means a messenger, and the magazine began life with a longer devotional title. India Post's account of the magazine, issued with its centenary stamp, records that it started as Ati Pavitra Antakaranno Doot, a title shortened to Doot in 2000. Through a century of monthly issues it has reflected the life and culture of Gujarat's Christian community and documented its integration, growth and development.

Founding in Bombay in 1911

The first issue of Doot was published in January 1911 by Father Hermanus Zurhausen, a German Jesuit missionary, and was printed at the Examiner Press in Bombay, now Mumbai. The first issue had only twelve pages, and its price was two paisa. By the time of the centenary, the annual subscription had risen to one hundred rupees — a small statistic that traces, in one magazine's pricing, a century of Indian economic history. The founding by a German Jesuit working in western India also reflects the international character of the early Catholic press in Gujarat, where European missionaries worked in the Gujarati language rather than in their own.

The Move to Anand in 1926

In 1926 the publication moved from Bombay to Anand in central Gujarat, where it has been published ever since by the Gujarat Sahitya Prakash Society. Anand and the surrounding Kheda district formed the heartland of the Gujarati Catholic community the magazine served. Its early readership was centred on central Gujarat and on families who had migrated from the Anand and Kheda area to other parts of Gujarat and to Mumbai. Over the years its reach extended across the state: to Saurashtra, to Kutch-Bhuj, and to the tribal belts of Banaskantha, Sabarkantha, Panchmahal, Dahod, Narmada and the Dangs.

A Magazine and the Gujarati Language

India Post's centenary account credits Doot with a distinctive contribution to the Gujarati language itself. The magazine brought many words spoken in central Gujarat into the mainstream, words which subsequently found their way into the Gujarati dictionary, and its editors were described as being in the forefront of enriching Gujarati by introducing new words. For a community magazine, that is an unusually scholarly legacy: a monthly written for ordinary Catholic households became, over a hundred years, one of the channels through which regional spoken Gujarati entered the standard written language.

Editors Over a Century

The magazine's recorded editors span its whole modern history. Its founder Hermanus Zurhausen launched it in 1911. In a later era, Father Varghese Paul, a Jesuit priest and Gujarati writer, edited Doot for fourteen years. The magazine's editor in its centenary period is listed as Jaswant Macwan. Long editorial tenures are typical of community periodicals, where the editor is often also a pastor, teacher and community figure, and Doot's history follows that pattern.

Varghese Paul, Editor for Fourteen Years

Varghese Paul Chollamadam was born on 31 May 1943 at Enanalloor, in what is now Kerala's Ernakulam district, a Malayalam speaker who made Gujarati his literary language. He joined the Jesuits of Gujarat on 8 June 1964, studied theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and was ordained a priest in Rome on 21 June 1977. He graduated in Gujarati literature and studied journalism at the London School of Journalism. Beyond Doot, he founded the South Asia Religious News agency in 1981 and the Catholic Information Service Society, which he directed from 1984 to 2018, and he wrote dozens of essay books, almost all in Gujarati. His fourteen years editing Doot were part of a career that made him one of the most prolific Catholic communicators in the language. He died at Vadodara on 10 April 2021, after prolonged illness and COVID-19, and was mourned by the Indian Catholic Press Association as a veteran of Christian communication.

The Centenary of 2010–2011

The monthly published its centenary issue in December 2010, marking one hundred years of uninterrupted publication — a distinction it shares, among Gujarati periodicals, only with Buddhiprakash, the journal of the Gujarat Vidyasabha. The achievement was reported nationally: the magazine's hundredth edition was launched at an event in Ahmedabad in January 2010 in the run-up to the centenary year, and the milestone was covered by the national press as a publishing event, not merely a church one.

The Centenary Postage Stamp

On 15 January 2011 India Post issued a commemorative postage stamp for the centenary of Doot. The stamp, of five hundred paisa denomination, was printed in multicolour by wet-offset at the India Security Press, Nashik Road, in a printing of 0.3 million, with the stamp and first-day cover credited to Alka Sharma. A national postage stamp is a rare honour for a regional-language community monthly, and the issue placed Doot in the official philatelic record of Indian publishing history alongside much larger newspapers and magazines.

What the Centenary Distinction Means

The company Doot keeps in the record is itself instructive. The only Gujarati magazine ahead of it is Buddhiprakash, the journal associated with the Gujarat Vidyasabha, which India Post's centenary account described, at the time of Doot's hundredth year, as a magazine already some 155 years old. For Doot to be the second title in the entire Gujarati periodical tradition to complete a century of uninterrupted publication — ahead of every Gujarati literary, political and general magazine founded in the intervening hundred years — underlines how exceptional its survival is, and how much of that survival rests on the steady, subscription-paying community readership described above rather than on newsstand sales or advertising.

The 2012 Controversy

The magazine's century of quiet publication was interrupted in 2012. Its February 2012 issue published an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus holding a can of beer and a cigarette, which provoked outrage among Christians in Gujarat and national press coverage. The publisher apologised for the image. The episode, reported by The Times of India and by the Catholic news agency UCA News, was a reminder that even a devotional community magazine operates in a public arena, where a single ill-judged image can draw scrutiny far beyond its subscriber base. The apology closed the matter, and the magazine continued its monthly publication.

Readership and Community Role

Doot has around 5,000 subscribers, a modest figure by the standards of mass magazines but a durable one: a paid, renewing readership sustained across generations of Gujarati Catholic families, including migrants who carried the magazine from Anand and Kheda to Mumbai and beyond. At the time of its centenary the magazine was described as poised to reach 10,000 paid subscribers. Its longevity rests on that community function. It is at once a religious monthly, a Gujarati literary platform and a family record for a small community spread across Gujarat and the wider Indian diaspora within the country — and, on the evidence of its dictionary contribution, a small but real force in the history of the Gujarati language itself.