‘People would not think of me as a journalist’
The eldest of six children – four sisters and two brothers — Kavita Devi is the editor in chief of Khabar Lahariya, a news website that focuses on rural news told from a feminist perspective. Started in 2002 as a Bundeli newspaper, KL employs Dalit, Muslim, adivasi and Other Backward Class women as reporters and editors. At one point, the paper had eight editions in five languages, and sold in eight districts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Devi, who has been associated with KL since its early days, speaks to
Dhamini Ratnam about the immense change KL has brought, not only in the lives of its journalists, but the people it reaches. Edited excerpts:
Tell us a bit about your childhood
I was born in a village called Kunjan Purwa in Chitrakoot district. My parents were farmers, both were unlettered. There is a saying in Bundeli: “Pade likhe se kucchh na hoi, hal jothe se berra hoi” (Nothing comes of studying, grains only grow through ploughing the field). At that time, there wasn’t even a primary school in my village. No one in my family went to school. The main thing was to get married, so I too was married off at 12. I only went to my in-laws’ home when I was 15.
In Bundelkhand, the oldest girl takes care of all the housework. When my father would go to plough the field, I would accompany him. When it was time for harvesting the grain, I would help in that. I never thought about studying.
How did you come to journalism? Wasn’t it an unusual choice for women in rural and small-town India?
An NGO that ran the Mahila Samakhya [a government of India programme launched in 1989 in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Gujarat] opened a centre in my village to teach girls. When I told my family that I wished to go, they said, ‘Why? You’re not going to become the DM [district magistrate]’. Nevertheless, I would finish all my work by afternoon and then go to the centre. That’s where I learnt many things.
I got an opportunity to attend a residential camp. I was 13 around this time. Though I have studied till my Masters now, I have never had a similar experience to the learning I received in those six months.
During my intermediary year, I worked in a brick kiln in Punjab to pay off a debt that I had taken for my husband’s surgery. When I returned, I took my exams and joined Khabar Lahariya, a newspaper that Nirantar, an NGO, had started. This was in 2002. I had no idea what journalism was. We were given basic training — how to write, how to click photos.
What was your first story about?
My first story was about the ‘Moohnochwa’ rumour. Like the recent rumours of child-lifters, where innocent, poor and vulnerable people were beaten up on suspicion that they may be a kidnapper, at that time, there was a rumour of a beast that would take a person’s face or arm away while they were asleep. So I wrote about how it wasn’t possible for something to just take away a person’s arm, or face.
What sort of pieces do you do now?
We’re trying to be an independent media business, so we now sell a subscription for our exclusive reporting on rural youth. I have a show called The Kavita Show, where I share my views about various issues. I recently did a story about how the healthy fat grains like bajra (sorghum), sawa, jowar, kakun, kodo (types of millets) are fast disappearing from the diets of farmers today. When I visited Delhi recently, I saw that people here were eating sawa and other millets and it was being sold in expensive packages. I grew up eating this, and today, the rich are eating it, but the farmers have stopped doing that.
What were the challenges that you faced as a woman journalist?
People would not think of me as a journalist — how can women become journalists? They should be home, taking care of children, doing what the man of the house asks them to do. Being a Dalit and a woman journalist, that was an even greater crime! The officials wouldn’t talk to us. We would keep going back to them for comments/ quotes. And if they refused, we’d write that they refused.
We had to shut down the paper, because it was getting too expensive to publish. We began to turn to the web. Now we are able to reach out to crores of people. Every village has smartphones, and people sit in groups and watch.