Pratap: The Defiant Urdu Newspaper That Challenged Empire And Survived Partition

A moving account of Pratap, a fearless Urdu newspaper launched in 1919 Lahore, and the family behind it—caught between freedom, exile, and a legacy that still echoes across divided Punjab

Pratap: The Defiant Urdu Newspaper That Challenged Empire And Survived Partition

Circa 1919. Spring was flirting with Lahore, but the city was preoccupied. Its eyes were on the British Raj; the infamous Rowlatt Act curtailing civil liberties had been imposed. One citizen, a respected name, however, wasn’t content to accept things from the sidelines. Mahashay Krishan gave March a sendoff to remember. He launched the Urdu evening newspaper, Pratap. It not only took on the colonialists fearlessly but also transformed and dominated vernacular journalism for decades.

Pratap was sold out immediately, ironically becoming the news itself. The British patience with it lasted twelve days before they imposed censorship laws and suspended Pratap’s publication. The colonialists, however, underestimated the newspaper’s influence; the reputation built in that brief spell lingered. A year later, when Pratap finally resumed, it flew off the shelves again. Occasionally, old and frayed pages are required to be dusted to encapsulate a journey that ends in our present. In Pratap, A Defiant Newspaper, we have attempted just that by revisiting editions of Pratap from yesteryears. 

It is not often that the protagonists of a story become the story themselves. This happened with Pratap and Krishan’s elder son, Virendra. In colonial India and the succeeding years, Pratap and Vir Ji, as he is fondly remembered, were pushed and pulled between two roles, living and sharing a slice of history that we were privileged to know firsthand. As we learnt, history is not only in the books.

Krishan was a resident of 41 Nisbet Road, a house with twenty-two rooms and a sprawling lawn that was surrounded by a central courtyard, and, in the days when Lahore belonged to one and all, hawkers made their way to the enclosure where they haggled with ladies on the upper storeys of the house. Once a price was fixed, a basket was lowered with money and then raised back with the goods. Stationed outside the house was a German-made Adler car, which played its own role in history.

If Krishan was a fiery editor, his son Virendra had only one mantra: freedom. At 17, he was arrested by the British for the first time. In place of Superintendent of Police James Scott, whom Bhagat Singh and his comrades held responsible for the lathi charge during the Simon Commission’s visit to Lahore, the group mistakenly shot and killed his junior, John Saunders. While the freedom fighters escaped, Virendra, who was at the periphery of their revolutionary group, was taken into custody and tortured. Mahashay Krishan had only one worry, and it was not that his child could be hanged. He didn’t want to lose face if his young son gave in and turned approver!  

Pratap is an account of a newspaper and its family whose steps have long been erased from the city of their origin, Lahore

As time went on, Virendra was more in jail than at home. On this journey, he became a link in a shared history that even a physical border cannot wipe out. During one of his nine incarcerations, in March 1931, he joined Bhagat Singh at the Lahore Central jail. While the legendary freedom fighter did not come out alive, Virendra lived to tell the historic tale of his martyrdom. Hours before his execution, Bhagat Singh sent him a memento, a comb inscribed with his name from a blunt stone.   

When his revolutionary past was behind him, Virendra was elected to the undivided Punjab Assembly from the Muzaffargarh constituency on a Congress ticket. A time came when he, voluntarily or inadvertently, accompanied Jawaharlal Nehru in Lahore and on occasion, even beyond. The first time a plane was hired for political campaigning, its passengers were Nehru and Virendra. It was left to the latter to convince the pilot to glide over the venue of the leader’s next meeting, Mori Darwaza, where a huge gathering was waiting for Nehru.

It was baptism by fire for Virendra, not just over his revolutionary activities. A newly acquired driving license was put to the test when Pandit Nehru asked to be driven around Lahore in the family’s open convertible. Streets were lined with people throwing flowers and garlands, and, in the chaos, Virendra silently prayed there was no accident! He and his famous passenger reached back safely. Virendra, who was referred to as Punjab da Nehru, drove the same car from Lahore to Amritsar to eat poori at the famous Thandi Khooi shop. Among those who accompanied him were the progeny of rival newspapers in Lahore. After the Partition, the newspapers shifted to Jalandhar.

The line was drawn. Yet, Virendra and his family never imagined that there was no coming back. His wife Raj, who had studied at Kinnaird College, and two young children were holidaying in the hill station of Subathu. Overnight, Nisbet Road, a thriving office in Gwalmandi, and their belongings became the property of another country. Public imagination notwithstanding, Lahore did not empty at the stroke of midnight on 14 August 1947. Freedom was a fluid August date, staggered. Many of its residents, who knew no other land, clung to it for as long as they could.

The book Pratap, A Defiant Newspaper, describes this.

‘It was the morning of a new dawn – and everyone imagined it would come with a generous sprinkling of fairy dust. Instead, the city’s face was raw with bloodshot eyes and a visceral repugnance for lifelong neighbours and childhood friends. It was a moment, one straggling moment, culled from a raging cry of insanity. And yet it was poignant, for Lahore was a city that had promised the most. Was the parting shot by the British the most lethal? In any case, Virendra found he was still in Lahore. 

Down the road, the majestic brick building of the Dyal Singh Public Library, which the Punjabi philanthropist Dayal Singh Majithia had willed, stood stark against the sky with all its lights off. Nisbet Road was like a muslin curtain incinerated by fire. August had wiped out Lahore; it had made the city, that once blossomed with its petals of pluralism, unrecognisable.’ 

Lahore changed. It's people who had always identified as one with the city left in a deluge of violence. Refugees, equally traumatised and broken from East Punjab, replaced them. On both sides, silence reigned, a defining trait of a generation that lost. A tragedy’s narrative is often brushed with a composite sweep. What is overlooked is the disappearance of communities and how loss is personal, not just collective. Virendra and the family were no different.

The house in Jalandhar was 136 kilometres away and yet, an iron curtain had come down. Sometimes the shortest distance makes for the longest journeys. The bungalow that was to be their new home belonged to Mian Ehsan Ul Haq before Punjab was split. The Dewan of Bikaner state, a cricketer of some repute, was among the foremost Indians to play in first-class cricket for Middlesex in 1902. The Haq family abandoned their home overnight, leaving behind estates in Jalandhar and Dalhousie. Married daughters stayed behind to become part of families, divided. 

In the early 1950s, Virendra saw a gentleman standing in front of the house in Jalandhar. He was Justice Haq. Virendra took him inside what was once his own home and, as he was leaving, asked him to return. Haq replied honestly: ‘Even though I want to, my sons don’t.’ The fate of people from a timeless land continues to evoke emotion on both sides of Punjab. Some readers of the book have responded with tears in their eyes.   

In 1956, for the first time since Partition, Virendra, Raj, and their ten-year-old son Chander drove across in their Vauxhall car to Lahore. Seven or eight families were living in their old house, and they followed a woman up to a room on the upper floor, where she opened a wooden cupboard to show Raj’s old photo, tucked inside. 

Pratap is an account of a newspaper and its family whose steps have long been erased from the city of their origin, Lahore. The house on Nisbet Road is now broken into nondescript markets with exposed overhanging wires as though hammering home the point of its irrelevance. But perhaps, somewhere in a street corner or a home, there is a little hint of its story. Of a time when Punjab was composite without a batwara. Where memories stopped searching for closure. 

Politics doesn’t have a hidden soft corner, even for shared histories. My father, Chander Mohan, who co-authored the book, travelled to Lahore once as part of Prime Minister Vajpayee’s entourage. He did not get the opportunity to retrace the family’s steps. The next time, his visa was denied. But hope springs eternal. We await the day when we bring Pratap, A Defiant Newspaper, back to where it all started.   

Jyotsna Mohan is an author and journalist. She is former Senior Editor, NDTV

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