Naanu Gauri
Overview
Naanu Gauri is a Kannada digital news portal based in Bengaluru, Karnataka, publishing news, analysis and commentary at naanugauri.com. Its name means "I am Gauri", a declaration of solidarity that links the outlet directly to Gauri Lankesh, the Bengaluru journalist and editor who was shot dead outside her home on 5 September 2017. The portal was created by her colleagues, friends and fellow activists to carry forward the fearless, progressive journalism she practised through her Kannada weekly, Gauri Lankesh Patrike. Run under the Gauri Media Trust, also referred to as the Gauri Memorial Trust, it combines news reporting with fact-checking aimed at countering disinformation, and it occupies a distinctive place in Karnataka's media landscape as a newsroom built explicitly around the legacy of an assassinated journalist.
Background: Gauri Lankesh and Her Journalism
To understand Naanu Gauri, it is necessary to understand the journalist whose name it bears. Gauri Lankesh (1962–2017) was a journalist-turned-activist from Bengaluru. She worked as an editor at Lankesh Patrike, the Kannada weekly founded by her father, the poet-journalist P. Lankesh, and later ran her own weekly, Gauri Lankesh Patrike. She began her career with The Times of India in Bangalore, worked as a correspondent for Sunday magazine for nine years, and by the time of her father's death in 2000 had been a journalist for some sixteen years. She was an outspoken critic of Hindutva politics and of caste-based discrimination, and her weekly was independent and free of sponsorship and advertising.
Gauri Lankesh was murdered outside her home in Rajarajeshwari Nagar, Bengaluru, on 5 September 2017, shot at close range by assailants who escaped on a motorcycle. The killing drew widespread condemnation in India and internationally, prompted the Karnataka government to form a Special Investigation Team, and became a symbol of the dangers facing dissenting journalists in India. Posthumously, she received the Anna Politkovskaya Award, which honours women human-rights defenders, for campaigning for women's rights and opposing caste-based discrimination. In the protests that followed her death, "I am Gauri" became a rallying cry — the phrase the portal later took as its name.
History and Founding
Gauri Lankesh Patrike came to a halt on the day of her assassination. Her colleagues responded by forming the Gauri Memorial Trust with the objective of reviving her paper. From April 2018, the trust brought out experimental editions for private circulation under the title Naanu Gauri; more than 105 people wrote for the magazine across its first 21 issues, a broadening of participation that colleagues said reflected how many veterans and young, social-media-active writers wanted to contribute after her death. The team included colleagues such as Sridhara V. S. and Dr Vasu.
On Gauri Lankesh's first death anniversary in September 2018, the trust relaunched the print weekly under a new name, Nyaya Patha — "path of justice" — after the Registrar of Newspapers for India did not permit the title Naanu Gauri for the print publication. The name Naanu Gauri instead lived on in digital form: naanugauri.com, the Kannada news website of Gauri Lankesh Media, launched a year after her death to continue her brand of journalism online. Reporting in 2022 described a small newsroom in central Bengaluru where around ten journalists worked beneath a large photograph of the assassinated editor, producing news analysis and reporting and fact-checking several items of fake news a day.
Coverage and Beats
Naanu Gauri publishes news and commentary in Kannada on Karnataka politics, social justice, caste, communalism and democratic rights, alongside analysis of national developments as they affect the state. Its journalism is openly progressive: it positions itself as an alternative to mainstream media narratives and gives space to voices critical of majoritarian politics. Activists, scholars and journalists of repute have regularly contributed to it; named contributors have included the freedom fighter H. S. Doreswamy, the writer Devanuru Mahadeva, the political leader and academic Yogendra Yadav, the lawyer Prashant Bhushan, A. Narayana and Amit Basule.
Fact-checking is a core part of its work, continuing a project Gauri Lankesh herself pursued in her final days, when she compulsively shared fact-checks and, in her last editorial, publicly admitted and corrected an error of her own involving a doctored image. The Naanu Gauri team has described its own practice in similar terms, stating that its content is verified and checked and that it follows journalistic ethics.
Language and Audience
The portal publishes in Kannada and is widely read in Karnataka. Its audience includes readers of the progressive and activist press, academics, lawyers and civil-society groups, as well as younger Kannada readers who encounter its work through social media. By publishing serious political commentary in Kannada rather than English, it addresses a readership that English-language national media often overlooks.
Digital Presence and the Facebook Block
Naanu Gauri's digital presence centres on naanugauri.com, with social media as a key distribution channel — which made an episode around 2020 especially damaging. The team reported that Facebook had blocked the website completely: its links could no longer be shared, previously shared links were hidden, and the platform gave no specific reason beyond a community-standards message. The team said it believed the site's links had been mass reported and flagged. The incident was reported by civil-liberties media as an example of the vulnerability of small independent outlets to platform moderation and coordinated reporting campaigns, and the team publicly described it as a dark day for the publication.
Business Model
Naanu Gauri operates under a trust rather than as a conventional commercial media company, in keeping with the advertising-free ethos of Gauri Lankesh's weekly. Its small newsroom — about ten journalists at the time of the 2022 reporting — produces reporting, analysis and fact-checks with limited resources, and its team has acknowledged struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of disinformation it sets out to counter. The model depends on the commitment of contributors, many of them established writers and activists who write for the platform as part of a shared political and journalistic project.
Community Role
Within Karnataka's civil society, Naanu Gauri functions as both a news source and a memorial institution. The Gauri Memorial Trust organises commemorative events, including the conference held in Bengaluru on the first anniversary of her death, and the wider ecosystem around her legacy includes the Gauri Lankesh Award for Democratic Idealism, instituted by PEN to recognise Indian-language journalists committed to democratic culture. During the 2023 Karnataka election campaign, civil-society accounts listed Naanu Gauri among the new-generation media outlets whose work helped shape public discussion alongside portals such as Eedina and Vartha Bharati.
Recognition
The portal's significance is recognised less through industry awards than through its place in accounts of India's independent and resistance media. It is cited in national and international reporting on press freedom, on the Gauri Lankesh case and on the fact-checking movement in India, and its contributors include some of Karnataka's most respected public intellectuals. Its continued existence is itself treated by supporters as a statement: the revival of a silenced editor's journalism under a name that declares every reader and writer to be Gauri.
Availability
Naanu Gauri is available online at naanugauri.com, publishing in Kannada from Bengaluru, Karnataka. It remains an active digital successor to the print tradition of Gauri Lankesh Patrike, whose relaunch in print form as Nyaya Patha was organised by the same trust.
