Last Calligraphers Goes Live on WIRED

The age of Urdu calligraphy isn't over. It's just close to it. For the last couple months I've been fascinated by a small hand written newspaper here in Chennai and have written several posts about it. It even helped inspire my tattoo. I planned a feature story on the paper however after being kicked around the Smithsonian for a few months the story got killed and a somewhat shrunken version of it is now on the front door of WIRED News. Still the story is great and the photos make you wonder how this small paper continues to chug forward in the modern world.

See the WIRED News story here. And the gallery here.

In other news, I just got back from a whirlwind tour of West Bengal on a story about the legacies of colonial medicine in India. This will be a magazine feature in the coming months and you will hear more about it soon.

The Last Calligraphers

The age of calligraphy died when British soldiers toppled the Mughal courts. It's hard to remember that there was a time before the age of computers when penmanship was considered one of the highest art forms. Outside of a some particularly ornate wedding invitations and hand-written copies of the Koran there is little need for formally trained Urdu calligraphers. That is, except for one small ink-stained corner of Chennai where the world's last hand written newspaper still churns out 20,000 broad sheets a day.

I was walking through Tripplicane late last week looking for someone who might be able to teach me the Urdu script when a local fakir led me into a small gully off a main road and introduced me to Syed Fazlulla who has edited "The Musalman" for the last 18 years.

The newspaper employees three full-time calligraphers who painstakingly handwrite and manually typeset the paper the same way they have since 1927. Fazlulla says that they have never switched to computers because he wants to keep the art of calligraphy alive in the secular world. The news room only has three computers--none of which are used for editing or typesetting, and for all intents and purposes are little more than e-mail terminals for the one computer-savvy employee.
I spent a day with the staff and took a few photos of the process. I'm pitching the story to a few magazines to see if anyone is interested in reading more about the paper's struggle to survive in the modern world.

Every page of the newspaper is a work of art.

The off-set printing press is an artifact of the 1920s and has been in continuous operation since the paper's inception.Syed Fazlulla, editor of The Muslaman sits at his desk.