Sunaparant
Overview
Sunaparant was a Konkani-language daily newspaper in the Devanagari script, based in Goa and owned by the Salgaocar group. It was founded by Chandrakant Keni and launched on 13 May 1987, weeks after Konkani became the official language of Goa, and for most of its life it was Goa's only Konkani daily. It published from 1987 until 2015, closing after twenty-eight years when its management attributed the decision to the escalating cost of bringing out the newspaper. Its special magazine published during the annual Ganesh Chaturthi festival was among its best-known features.
The paper's story was inseparable from the language movement that preceded it. Konkani is widely spoken in Goa but was historically far less widely read, particularly in the officially recognised Devanagari script, and the proposition of a daily newspaper in it was always more cultural cause than commercial calculation. Sunaparant was founded to prove that the official language of the new state could sustain a daily paper, and for nearly three decades — at a loss its owner said he bore for the cause — it did.
The Language Moment of 1987
Sunaparant was started on 13 May 1987, after Konkani was made the official language of Goa on 4 February that year, following a prolonged struggle by Goans. Goa's language agitation had been one of the defining movements of the state's modern history, bound up with the earlier Opinion Poll that had kept Goa separate from Maharashtra and with the demand that Konkani, in Devanagari, be recognised as the language of Goan identity. Statehood and official-language status arrived together in 1987, and the newspaper was a direct child of that settlement: recognition created the need, and the readership, for Konkani print journalism of record.
The timing gave the paper a symbolic burden unusual for a four-page start-up. Every issue was evidence in an ongoing argument — that Konkani could do the work of a modern language: report politics, carry commerce, host literature and record a society's daily life. The paper's founder and its owner both understood the enterprise in those terms, and said so publicly at its end.
Chandrakant Keni, Founder Editor
Chandrakant Keni, who was also editing the Marathi daily Rashtramat, was the founder editor of Sunaparant. Keni had been born around 1934 in Cuncolim, in what was then Portuguese Goa, had made his first public speech as a teenager at the immersion of Gandhi's ashes at Colva, and had worked in Delhi with Kakasaheb Kalelkar before returning to shape opinion in Goa — first against merger in the Opinion Poll movement as editor of Rashtramat, and then as the founding editor of the Konkani daily. He was a Konkani writer of standing, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award for his Konkani book Ashadh Pavali, and editor at different times of the Konkani monthly Kulagar and the trilingual monthly Triveni. He died on 3 February 2009.
Under Keni the paper began from Margao, described as the fort of the Konkani movement, as a four-page black-and-white newspaper. The choice of Margao, in the heartland of the language agitation, placed the paper at its movement's source before it aspired to the capital. Keni was succeeded as editor by Uday Bhembre, the lawyer and language activist, and then by Raju Nayak.
From Margao to Panaji
After its Margao years, the black-and-white newspaper was shifted to the capital, Panaji. In 2004 it was relaunched in expanded form, with ten pages and colour. In Panaji its editors included Sandesh Prabhudesai, Anant Salkar and Babali Naik. The move and the modernisation represented the owner's attempt to make Sunaparant a full-fledged daily on the model of the chain newspapers from Maharashtra and other states that dominated Goa's media market.
The owner, Dattaraj Salgaocar of the Salgaocar mining house, later explained that he bore further losses in 2004 by making the paper more modern, with more colour pages, in the hope that the response would increase. The hoped-for response — from Konkani readership or from advertisers — did not arrive at the scale required. Goa supported a crowded media field for its size, with multiple English and Marathi dailies competing for advertising, and a Konkani daily in Devanagari competed for readers in a language that many Goans spoke but comparatively few were schooled to read in that script.
What the Paper Did
For twenty-eight years Sunaparant served as the Konkani paper of record: Goa's lone daily in the state's official language and script. Its owner, in his closing statement, said the paper had done very well in touching the hearts of Goans and in developing Konkani in the field of journalism as well as literature, carrying forward ideas of unity, free thought, secularism and scientific temper. Its Ganesh Chaturthi magazine was a fixture of the festival season, the kind of special publication through which a small daily asserted cultural presence beyond the news pages.
The paper's existence also had a standardising effect on journalistic Konkani. A daily newspaper must find Konkani words, day after day, for administration, sport, finance, technology and national politics; in doing that work for nearly three decades, Sunaparant built a vocabulary and a prose practice for the language that later Konkani media inherited. That, as much as any single story, was its contribution: it treated Konkani as a complete language of public life, in print, every morning.
The Decision to Close
Nearly twenty-eight years after its first edition, the paper's end was announced at the end of July 2015, with publication ceasing that August. Dattaraj Salgaocar announced the decision in a statement, saying it was taken with a very heavy heart. He stated that he had never counted the huge losses borne over twenty-eight years because the paper was for a cause, and that after the 2004 modernisation he had hoped in vain for a stronger response from readers and advertisers as the Konkani movement itself grew stronger. Management attributed the closure to the escalating cost of bringing out the newspaper.
The closure put twenty-seven employees at risk of losing their jobs, according to the Goa Union of Journalists, whose delegation, led by its president Sadguru Patil, met Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar to seek government intervention. The Chief Minister assured the delegation he would look into the matter. No rescue followed, and Goa's only Konkani daily ended. Contemporary reporting marked the moment as the end of an era — the phrase used in headlines announcing the shutdown of the state's lone Konkani newspaper after twenty-eight years.
Goa's Media Landscape After Sunaparant
The paper's absence was felt structurally. Goa, a small state of roughly a million and a half people, supported a strikingly large number of dailies in English and Marathi, but after 2015 it again had no daily in Konkani in the Devanagari script for a time, until a later Devanagari Konkani daily, Bhangar Bhuim, emerged under different ownership. Media commentary on Goa noted that Konkani remained a widely spoken but little-read language in its official script, and that the economics which had defeated Sunaparant — high costs, thin advertising, a small schooled readership — awaited any successor.
The Sunaparant story thus became the standard cautionary case in discussions of language policy and media economics in Goa: official status could create a newspaper, sustain its legitimacy and supply its cause, but it could not by itself guarantee the readers and advertisers a daily required to survive.
Legacy
Sunaparant's legacy was the proof of possibility it provided between 1987 and 2015. For twenty-eight years, through black-and-white Margao beginnings, a capital-city relaunch and a colour modernisation, Goa had a Konkani daily — founded by a Sahitya Akademi-winning editor who had campaigned for the language all his life, sustained by an owner who publicly counted its losses as the price of a cause, and closed, in the end, by arithmetic. It developed Konkani journalism and literature, chronicled the first decades of Goan statehood in the state's own language, and left behind the standing question its career had posed: whether a language spoken by a people will also be read by them, daily, in print. Few small newspapers carried so large a question for so long.
