BEFORE Partition, the present Pakistan areas had some 556 dailies, weeklies and periodicals, with East Pakistan possessing only a fraction of them.
Since most of these were owned by non-Muslims, their migration to India, specially from West Pakistan, led to the closure or transfer to India of some of the leading papers and presses, and a large number of other publications. Thus, the present Pakistani press was, for the most part, developed only after 1947.
It is tempting to explain the somewhat nebulous state of the Pakistan press in 1947-48, as well as its slow but steady growth throughout the 1950s in terms of Daniel Lerners ‘Model of Modernization’ (The Passing of Traditional Society, 1967). On the basis of his analysis of societal attributers and historical sequence of Western growth, Lerner found that modernization has exhibited “certain components and sequences whose relevance is global. Everywhere, for example, urbanization (to which he subsumes industrialization) has tended to increase literacy; rising literacy has tended to increase media exposure; increasing media exposure has ‘gone with’ wider economic participation (per capita income) and political participation (voting).”
Both East and West Pakistan areas were essentially primary producers for markets outside their borders. These areas claimed only 9.6pc of all the factories in undivided India, and a meagre 6.9pc industrial labour force on all-India basis.
Kingsley Davis has shown how in (undivided) India literacy ‘went’ with urbanization. The areas that fell to Pakistan’s share were those where the Muslims were not only more rural, but also more illiterate. The general 1941 literacy figure for these areas was approximately 8.6pc for ages 10 and above, and these included the more literate Hindus and Sikhs whose en masse migration from West Pakistan, joined by a considerable portion from East Pakistan, should have resulted in a decline of the literacy figure during 1947.
Thus, Pakistani society in 1947 was pre-industrial, feudal, rural and illiterate, and lacked physical infrastructure and the financial resources to launch upon any sizable development plan soon after her birth. These were compounded by communal rioting and the greatest migration in history, specially the en masse migration of Hindus and Sikhs from West Pakistan — the communities that provided it with the financial and entrepreneurial clout in the pre-partition era. Hence, the slack growth of the press in Pakistan’s early years.
In Lerner’s model, the “critical minimum” of urbanization ranges between 7-17pc of the total population. In Pakistan, the minimum of this “minimum” was reached by the middle-1950s. In 1951, the Pakistani-defined “urban” population — that is, those living in towns and cities over 5,000 — rose to 10.4pc, chiefly as a result of refugee influx into existing towns and cities, but with little expansion in their infrastructure and the availability of basic amenities. But those living in 50,000-plus cities — which is Lerner’s definition of urbanization — were only 5.9pc of the population, and there were only 20 cities in this category. The Pakistani-defined urban population rose to 13.1pc in 1961, and that falling in Lerner’s urban category to 8.4pc.
This rise in urbanization during the first decade of Pakistan’s statehood may be seen as one of the crucial factors in the trend toward partial industrialization. Literacy rose to 13.8pc in 1951, and to 15.9pc in 1961, but only 9.4pc of those 10 years or older qualified in 1961 a more rigorous test of functional literacy requiring a minimum of five years of formal schooling. However, there were about 998,000 high school and college graduates.
Media growth during the next two decades is discernible in the rise of new publications, circulations of most publications, and of advertising volume, and the technological improvement of the press as a whole. Advertising volume, among the more important indices of the economic stability of media and of media growth, has consistently shown an upward trend. The quantum of advertising in the two leading dailies in the early 1950s was: Dawn (Karachi) 15.7pc columns (28.1%) for July 1951 and Pakistan Times (Lahore) 9.8 columns (17.3%) for September 1951.
For a week in January 1956, Dawn carried a daily average of 25.7 columns (36.7%); Pakistan Times 12.1 columns (16.9%); Pakistan Observer (Dacca) 6.5 columns (13.7%); Morning News (Karachi edition) 2.9 columns (4.9%); Jang (Karachi) 10.6 columns (24.2%).
In comparison, for a two-week period in June 1963, the figures were: Dawn 39.8 columns (38.9%); Pakistan Times 32.8 columns (30.4%); Pakistan Observer 12.1 columns (16.8%); Morning News 14.3 columns (15.2%); and Jang 20 columns (27.2%).
In subsequent years, the number of dailies rose from 33 in 1947 to 88 in 1952, after which further growth became subjected to a ceiling effect. In 1965, the number of dailies was 102 (East 24; West 78), and of all other publications 1,694 (East 499; West 1,195). The total daily circulation which in 1951 stood at 120,000 sprang to 156,000 in 1955. By 1959, nine dailies alone commanded a combined circulation of 227,155, eight of these had further increased their circulations to a total of 399,250 by 1965.
The trend throughout the 1960s was one of rising circulations, specially for the leading Urdu and Bengali dailies. Imroz (Lahore), for instance, had trebled its circulation between 1965 and 1968; Nawa-i-Waqt’s circulation rose to some 80,000 copies during the presidential elections (1964-65); Jang today sells over 150,000 copies. A more reliable index was provided by Outlook (1962-64), the outspoken Karachi weekly, edited by I.H. Burney. Though launched under treacherous circumstances, denied advertising by government departments and semi-government bodies, and catering only to what American editor E.L. Godkin (Nation’s founder) called “the remnant”, or the (dissident) elitist minority, this highly sophisticated, nonconformist, but brilliantly edited, “journal of opinion” was yet able to pay its way within less than 18 months after its launching, and well before it was obliged to close down in August 1964, for want of a printer.
