Every August, Chennai celebrates its lifetime through heritage walks, lectures, exhibitions and nostalgia-soaked talks. Along with that, this Madras Week, the city’s story was not only told on its streets, but through gazettes. At the Roja Muthiah Research Library’s ‘Print Culture - Magazines Exhibition’, journals that people had only encountered in their textbooks appeared in their original, fragile form. For the first time, history’s headlines were no longer just a memorising two-mark answer in textbooks, but real pages that once passed from hand to hand. Manikodi gleamed with the brilliance of modernist writing, Murasoli throbbed with the thunder of Dravidian politics, Mangai flared with women’s voices, and Gandhi’s Harijan carried a nation’s moral conscience. Together, these issues — some once sold for as little as 25-50 paisa — reminded visitors that Chennai has always been as much a city of print as of temples, trade and cinema.
The exhibition, held between August 16 and 23, drew nearly 400 visitors. S Arun Prasad, an assistant professor in the Publishing Department of the library, said, “Since the Roja Muthiah Library is a house for the Tamil Print Industry, Tamil newspapers printed in the past 200 years by various categories like Islam, Buddhism, Left movement, Dravidan movement, Self-Respect movement, are exhibited. We aim to establish the history of socio-political landscape and the revolution of print in Tamil.”
The visitors peeked into glass cases, pointing excitedly at covers of classic literary works, one such being the front page of Dinamani’s special edition ‘Suthanthira Thina Malar’ with an artwork of freedom fighters riding a boat with a fluttering Indian flag. Among the treasured displays was one of the five original printed copies of Thirukkural from 1812, its verses transferred from palm-leaf manuscripts. Next to it lay Udhayatharigai (1841), an early Tamil newspaper whose ornate typeface hinted at the typeface of its era. Periyar’s Kudiyarasu (1925) stood as reminders of how print once carried ideology into everyday life, provoking debates and fuelling reform.
For the literary-buffs, Manikodi (1933) was the star. That slender but revolutionary magazine, which reshaped modern Tamil writing, looked unassuming behind glass, yet glowed with the aura of a classic. Sahitya Akademi award-winning writer S Ramakrishnan, who spoke at the closing ceremony, admitted that this was the first time he had seen an original copy. “It is like travelling in a time machine,” he said.
If the exhibits offered a glimpse of history, the closing ceremony on Friday turned the exhibition into a conversation about the present and future of Tamil print. Three speakers, each rooted in different corners of the media world, mapped the arc of print from its initial days to its uncertain tomorrow.
Ramakrishnan brought the discussion back to the exhibition’s emotional core. Seeing originals of Manikodi, he said, was not merely a literary experience but a reminder of how magazines carried “ideology, poetry, politics and protest” into homes. For him, the Roja Muthiah Research Library itself was proof of what one person’s passion could achieve.
That passion belonged to Roja Muthiah, a signboard artist from Kottaiyur in Chettinad, who spent his life collecting books, journals and posters. After his death in 1993, the University of Chicago and other partners helped establish the library, which has grown from one lakh documents to more than five lakh today. And while the exhibition itself was limited by space, the library hopes to create a permanent display as part of its upcoming Tamil Knowledge Campus.