Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] News by Hand by Tim Brooks. One of the world's most remarkable newspapers is published from a tiny office on a back street in Chennai in eastern India. The Musalman, that is the Muslim, is a four page Urdu paper that covers news, sports and local events. And ever since it was founded in 1927, it has been entirely written every day by hand. Three full time Katima, or calligraphers work in an 800 square foot room, writing in the traditional nasty leak style using the Callum or reed pen. I've seen them only on video, but it's an astonishing, vertiginous sight, especially for someone who has worked in a newsroom in the United States watching such careful, concentrated lettering in a business founded on haste, on getting the story and getting it written and out on the streets before your competitor. Why on earth would you want to handwrite a newspaper? Wouldn't using a digital keyboard be quicker, cheaper, easier to edit, easier to print from and once printed, easier to read? And the question of legibility masks other issues. If you handwrite a newspaper, won't it look unsophisticated, unprofessional, old fashioned? Let's start with the pen. The kalam may be more than 3,000 years old. It is so central to Arabic calligraphy that different calligraphers prefer reeds from different regions. The kalam is specifically revered as a symbol of wisdom and education in the Quran. It's not just a writing instrument, it's an instrument of the divine word. As with all calligraphies, writing implement and writing style.
[00:01:44] Ahem. Hand in hand. The nasty calligraphy style is central to the Arabic aesthetic, blurring the western line between writing and art. It doesn't have the consistency we expect of printing or even of well schooled handwriting. It has strong expressive ascenders and descenders running below, above and through a cosmos of diacritics, expressive, defying economic use of page space, defying time itself. To the modern eye, it looks old. Nasiliq has a right to look ancient. One of the world's great calligraphies emerging more than 600 years ago, Nasrliq is one of the main styles used to write the Perso Arabic script, as well as classical Persian, Kashmiri, Punjabi and as with the Muselman Urdu, in a geographic sweep from Iran throughout South Asia for written poetry and as a form of art in itself. In the face of such a pedigree, questions of cost and legibility start to seem, well, petty, shallow. The choice of nastalique is dictated by those close cousins, religion and tradition.
[00:02:57] Christianity has been associated with printing for so long. It's harder for those of us brought up in the Christian tradition to grasp the importance of the handwritten word than it is for, say, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims. All four are religions of the book. But most mainstream Christians have not encountered their religion through devoted sacred calligraphy for centuries. To Muslims, on the other hand, it's commonly believed that disrespect of calligraphy as a tradition reveals a person as being uneducated and unwise. Historically, the physical presence of the written letters of the Quran functioned the way icons did to the Byzantines as a blessing and protection. In Christian terms, the phrase sacred text generally refers to the content. In other faiths, it refers to both the content and the writing. For many Muslims, the written Arabic word is considered sacred. And long after the advent of printing, even after the development of Arabic typefaces, it was considered sacrilegious to reproduce it mechanically. In that sense, the muselman is perhaps the last survivor of another tradition, the traditional belief that even in such a secular arena as the news, writing itself is a vehicle of spirit. Not only is the act of writing an act of devotion that blurs any distinctions between art, craft and faith, but the act of reading is likewise an act of devotion. To read, say, the Indian cricket scores in a print newspaper and to read them handwritten in the muselman are two different acts. The phrase community newspaper takes on new levels of meaning, especially for minority communities. About 10% of Chennai's population is Muslim, but only about a fifth of them speak Urdu. What does it mean to be a Muslim in India or a Cherokee in the United States or an Amazigh in Algeria? What keeps a people together? What gives them a sense of traditional, a value of self respect, especially when so many members of minority communities are forced to find work abroad. In part, it may be such traditional practices as art, music, clothing, ceremonies. It may be the ancestral language, especially within a diaspora, it may be the traditional script. What interests me especially about the muselman, is that in addition to these powerful forces, the newspaper's survival highlights the vitality and importance of writing by hand. Calligraphy is the heart of the muselman, says Syed Arafullah, the paper's editor and publisher. If you remove the heart, there will be nothing there. And yet it's a sign of the times that even in the Muslim world, Nasty League is yielding ground to a simpler, clearer style called nazk, common in the Middle east, which is much simpler to compose, uses a simpler orthography that facilitates reading and provides clearer delineation. Of the grammar. More than a decade ago, the author Ali Ataroz lamented the decline of nasty leak in an article in Medium, pointing out BBC Ordu and Urdu Voice of America both use nasc. In fact, NASC is so dominant now that when the appropriately named dity, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology of the Government of India, released an Ordoo keyboard app for Windows and Android, they released 12 NASC fonts and only one NASDAQ font. What interests me about this example is the nature of writing itself and its future. The calligraphy in the Muselman, like all calligraphies, suggests that the act of writing by hand and its sister act, the act of reading handwriting, incorporates far more than the mere transmission of information. Pakistani American poet Shadab Zeest Hashmi, quoted by Etteras, describes the experience of learning to write Nastalik I was learning to extend myself, to make imprints of my inner life onto the outer reality of the page. Words had created visual fields for me, allowing endless possibilities for expressing meaning. Before we discard handwriting, we need to understand every dimension of what we are giving up.
[00:07:18] This article was written by Tim Brooks, the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project, which aims to create a list of the world's writing systems, identifying every script currently in use and assessing its degree of health or vulnerability. Originally published in Multilingual Magazine, Issue 237, February 2025.
