Rustom Khurshedji Karanjia (15 September 1912 – 1 February 2008) was an Indian journalist and editor. He typically signed his reports as "R. K. Karanjia". He founded the Blitz, a weekly tabloid with focus on investigative journalism in 1941, and ran it for the next four decades. He also founded The Daily, a daily tabloid which was run by his daughter.
Early life and background
Karanjia was born to a
Parsi family in
Quetta, now in
Balochistan in the Northern part of
Pakistan.
Career
Karanjia began writing while still in college,
[.] and during the 1930s Karanjia was employed an assistant editor at
The Times of India.
[.][.] He left
The Times of India in 1941 to launch
Blitz (newspaper), a weekly tabloid with a focus on investigative journalism. It was one of the few Indian newspapers to have carried out interviews with the high and mighty, including the likes of
Fidel Castro and
Zhou Enlai.
The Daily and
The Blitz were also incubators for the likes of R.K. Laxman, Haroon Rashid, P. Sainath and
Teesta Setalvad, all of whom started their journalistic careers there.
Karanjia served as a war correspondent during the Japanese Burma offensive in World War II, reporting on the action in
Myanmar and
Assam.
folded during the mid-1990s and Karanjia retired from public life.
Karanjia died at his home, a seafront flat along Marine Drive, in Mumbai at the age of 95 on 1 February 2008.
Notable Interviews
In a 1958 interview, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of the United Arab Republic recommended Karanjia to read the Antisemitic hoax, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
as Karanjia reported the next day.
Leanings as owner-editor of Blitz
Karanjia was the founder and the owner-editor of
Blitz, a weekly tabloid published out of Mumbai. The columnist Sudheendra Kulkarni wrote about how the decision to launch
Blitz was taken over a cup of tea between three patriotic journalists, ie, BV Nadkarni,
BG Horniman, and Karanjia, at the Wayside Inn, a restaurant near
Kala Ghoda, Mumbai. The first issue of
Blitz was published on 1 February 1941 (the same day that Karanjia died in 2008). Kulkarni calls his journalism "irreverent, investigative, courageous and a little titillating". Filmmaker Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Magsaysay-award-winning journalist P. Sainath were associated with
Blitz.
Blitz was radical and idealist, left-leaning, and pro-Soviet.
Karanjia remained a staunch critic of the Congress party while continuing to remain friendly with Congress leaders Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. However, Karanjia later became disillusioned with communism and its anti-Hinduism secularism. He became a strong sympathiser of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Ayodhya dispute. Initially a fierce critic of the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba, Karanjia later became his devotee in 1976.
Books
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1952: China stands up and wolves of the Wild West
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1956: SEATO: Security or Menace?
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1958: Arab Dawn
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1960: The Mind of Mr. Nehru
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1961: Castro: Storm Over Latin America
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1966: The Philosophy Of Mr. Nehru
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1970: Round Germany with Hitler
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1977: Kundalini Yoga
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1977: Mind of a Monarch: Biography of the Shah of Iran
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1997: God Lives In India
