West Sonatala, Bangladesh – An ordinary day for Andharmanik, a small community newspaper, begins in a crowded fish market. Walking down the steps from the road to the fish landing point in Mohipur, a town in the district of Patuakhali bordering the Bay of Bengal, the smell of salt and fish hangs heavy in the air. Next to the main landing platform, colorful fishing boats, painted in faded reds, blues, and greens, are moored. At this busy market in late July, larger fishing depots and much smaller shanty-style stalls stand side by side. At one of the small, tin-roofed stalls, Hasan Parvez, 44, with black cotton trousers rolled up to his knees, shovels ice into plastic crates piled high with silvery hilsa – Bangladesh’s prized national fish – which is transported each day to cities including the capital Dhaka and Barisal.
Hasan works surrounded by plastic barrels and crates glistening with the fresh catch of the day, and there is a constant background thrum of diesel-powered trawlers humming as boats pull in and out of the dock.
“It’s a busy morning, and it is a fish market with all the chaos,” Hasan says with a smile.
He works there as a daily wage laborer sorting, weighing, and packing fish into white thermocol boxes during the monsoon season. In the dry season, he works at a nearby brick kiln, and over the winter months, around December and January, he works at a market selling sun-dried fish known as “shutki”.
Hasan’s day at Mohipur market starts early – around 4 am – with the fajr prayer and a cup of tea without milk, and earns him about 600 taka ($5) per day.
Today, as usual, he is impatient to finish because, besides this job, which he needs to provide for his family, Hasan has another occupation to get back to. He is the editor-in-chief of a handwritten community newspaper called Andharmanik (“jewel from the darkness” in Bengali, and also the name of the nearby river), which features stories from his village of West Sonatala. He publishes it every two months from his home in the coastal village about an hour by road from the fish market and more than eight hours from Dhaka.
Since Hasan and his team of reporters don’t own or use computers, the newspaper is handwritten and then photocopied. But they also believe writing stories by hand, in a place where newspapers weren’t available before Andharmanik began, makes the paper feel more intimate and brings their community closer together.
Finally, at around 11 am, when the last boxes of fish have been loaded onto carts and the shop floor has been cleaned, Hasan prepares to head home.
He hops onto a van-gari – a battery-driven, three-wheeled bicycle with a large wooden platform at the rear of the vehicle where passengers sit – to get home.
As Hasan climbs into the vehicle, he explains that the three-room home he shares with his wife, Salma Begum, whom he married in 2013, and three daughters, is also the editorial headquarters for Andharmanik. It is where he meets with the team once or twice in each publication cycle.
Hasan was driven to start a newspaper because he used to write many poems in his childhood and has always been attracted to reading and writing. Despite his love of reading and learning, he wasn’t able to finish school. When he was 14, Hasan, the eldest of two brothers and two sisters, had to drop out to work as a day laborer to support his family. He didn’t complete his SSC examination (10th grade) until the age of 35 in 2015. Two years later, he finished high school. In 2021, he enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts degree at a college in Kalapara, about 10km (6.2 miles) away.
Hasan wants to register the newspaper in the district as an official media organization, as he believes this would help protect it from political volatility. “For that, the rules are that the publisher has to be a graduate,” he says.
The idea for the paper arose in June 2016 when Hasan met Rafiqul Montu, a Dhaka-based environmental journalist who was visiting the area. Montu covers the impact of the climate crisis in Bangladesh’s coastal areas and travels the region throughout the year for his work. One day, Hasan saw him taking pictures of the Andharmanik River and went to talk to him.
As they spoke, Hasan shared some of his poems and other writings, which talked about his village’s problems – like the cyclones that afflict them or worsening climate conditions for farmers. No newspaper covered these stories, and with the local government often slow to help, people felt neglected.
Montu, impressed by what he heard, encouraged him to turn these stories into a newspaper.
“He wanted to do something for his community,” Montu explains. “I told him he could publish a newspaper and cover local news. I said he should focus on spreading good faith and hope in his community.”
Hasan and his team of reporters submit their stories on sheets from notebooks. They then write out the stories with a fountain pen on A3-size paper and have these photocopied at a copy shop in Kalapara. Each newspaper is four pages long and bound together using colorful plastic tape. The process is labor-intensive and the final handwriting, printing, and binding takes about a week. The team distributes the paper in West Sonatala and the nearby villages of Tungibari, Chandpara, Rehmatpur, and Fatehpur.
Hasan dreams of publishing the paper fortnightly, but as it stands, it comes out every two months from his home in West Sonatala. It’s a community effort, and they give it away for free or, where they can, sell it at cost.
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/8/30/our-story-a-day-in-the-life-of-a-handwritten-newspaper-in-bangladesh?traffic_source=rss
