PASIGHAT, 29 May: Academics and media professionals from across India are participating in a two-day national e-conference on ‘200 Years of Hindi Journalism: Indian Knowledge Systems, Vernacular Media, and Cultural Renaissance’, which began here in East Siang district on Friday.
Jointly organised by the University of Ladakh’s (UoL) mass communication and journalism department and the Arunachal Pradesh University’s (APU) mass communication department, the two-day conference has brought together voices from some of India’s leading universities to examine what two centuries of vernacular journalism mean in an age of digital disruption, misinformation, and eroding media credibility.
Speaking at the inauguration, Delhi-based Indian Institute of Mass Communication’s MA Strategic Communication Head Prof Pramod Kumar said that Hindi journalism was born out of a civilisational necessity – to give a colonised people a language of resistance and self-understanding. “That necessity has not disappeared; it had only changed its form. The challenge today is not the absence of information but the erosion of credibility. Artificial intelligence and algorithmic platforms are reshaping how news is produced and consumed, but technology alone cannot substitute for the journalist’s fundamental obligation to truth. The Hindi press must harness these tools without surrendering to them,” he said, calling on scholars and practitioners alike to reclaim the ethical foundations that had made the vernacular press a force of consequence in Indian public life.
Former head of Jaipur-based University of Rajasthan’s mass communication department, Prof Sanjeev Bhanawat, who is also the editor of Communication Today, provided the conference its historical anchor. Beginning with Udant Martand, the first Hindi newspaper published in 1826, Prof Bhanawat traced a two-hundred-year arc that ran through the freedom movement, the nation-building decades, the liberalisation of the press, and into the turbulent present of social media and algorithmic news distribution.
“The vernacular press,” he argued, “has never been merely a medium of communication – it has been a movement, carrying within it the aspirations of communities that have no other public platform.” He called for a serious and sustained integration of Indian Knowledge Systems into journalism education, warning that a Hindi press untethered from its cultural and intellectual roots would be ill-equipped to resist the pressures of commercialisation and misinformation.
University of Ladakh Vice-Chancellor Prof Saket Kushwaha, who chaired the session, offered reflections that lent the occasion its broader significance. Two centuries of Hindi journalism, he observed, are not simply a record of newspapers and journalists but a mirror held up to Indian society itself – its conflicts, its aspirations, its failures, and its resilience. “We stand at a moment when artificial intelligence is not merely a tool but a disruption, rewriting the economics of newsrooms, generating content at scale, and raising questions about authorship, accountability, and authenticity that journalism education has barely begun to address. The Hindi press, with its deep civilisational roots, has a unique responsibility to lead this conversation from an Indian standpoint, rather than simply inherit frameworks designed elsewhere,” he said.
Prof Kushwaha urged the participants not to approach this legacy with nostalgia but with the kind of critical engagement that could actually serve the press going forward, emphasising that Indian Knowledge Systems must be understood as living intellectual traditions capable of offering journalism a vocabulary and a value system that purely Western frameworks of media practice have failed to provide.
Earlier, APU Mass Communication HoD Dr Prem Taba framed the conference’s purpose. Noting that the history of Hindi journalism is inseparable from the history of communities finding their voice against power, Dr Taba argued that the questions the conference is asking – about credibility, cultural identity, digital transformation, and the future of regional media – are not academic abstractions but live concerns shaping how millions of Indians receive and make sense of information every day.
UoL Kargil Campus Administration In-charge Dr Mehboob Ali reflected on the particular meaning of anchoring such a conversation in Ladakh – a region of extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, situated at the intersection of multiple civilisational influences.
Dr Jaffar Ali Khan, dean, faculty of arts, Kargil campus, urged researchers to resist the tendency to write journalism history from the centre outward, arguing that the vernacular press has done much of its most important work in precisely those spaces that mainstream media histories tend to overlook.
APU Vice-Chancellor (i/c) Dr Milorai Modiconveyed his best wishes to the participants and organisers through a message; he was unable to attend owing to health reasons.
The inauguration was followed by two substantive plenary sessions featuring panel discussions on the transformation of Hindi journalism in the digital era, its relationship with regional cultural identity, and the ethical challenges facing contemporary vernacular media.
Senior scholars participating include Prof Durgesh Tripathi, dean, School of Mass Communication, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi; Prof Amitabh Srivastava, Central University of Rajasthan; Dr Nawaz Khan Thouba, head, department of mass communication, Rajiv Gandhi University, Rono Hills; and Dr Shailesh Shukla, global group editor, Srijan Sansar Group of International Journals.
The conference is being coordinated by the faculty of both UoL and APU, convened by Dr Shriprakash Pal (UoL) and Dr Prem Taba (APU), with Dr Zakir Hussain (UoL) and Dr Kombong Darang (APU) serving as co-conveners.
