In an age when newspapers face the threat of irrelevance, reinvention isn’t just a strategy, it’s a lifeline.
Tamil Murasu, a 90-year-old voice for Singapore’s Tamil-speaking community, offers a compelling example of how an ethnic newspaper can embrace change while honouring its origins.
For decades it held steadfast to the mission, anchoring generations of Tamil readers in their mother tongue, even as the world around them transformed. But survival, especially in a fast-changing media landscape, has always required more than just loyalty to tradition. It requires metamorphosis, which has always been in Tamil Murasu’s DNA.
As early as 1940, it began publishing news in English on one of its pages. That same year, founder G. Sarangapany launched The Indian Daily Mail, an English daily that ran until it was halted in 1941 due to wartime restrictions. After a brief post-war revival, it folded in 1956. In 1999, Tamil Murasu experimented with a weekly bilingual page again – a subtle but telling effort to expand.
As Tamil Murasu marks its 90th anniversary on July 6, it has successfully expanded and evolved. One sign of that evolution came in 2008, with the launch of tabla!, a bold English weekly newspaper.
What began as a single English page in Tamil Murasu soon grew into a weekly, and eventually a central pillar of a broader effort – to integrate and amplify the voices of all Indian communities in Singapore, not just Tamil speakers.
tabla! gave a platform to those who had long existed on the edges of Singapore’s media narrative, offering stories in a language they understood with a cultural lens they recognised.
Now, with its own standalone website and a growing digital presence, tabla! is capturing the daily pulse of Singapore’s South Asian communities – no longer just weekly, but in real time. Its mission is expansive but focused: to be a mirror, bridge and mouthpiece.
This transformation didn’t come from the top, but from within the newsroom itself, guided by the journalists who understood the community’s shifting needs. Most Tamil Murasu reporters are bilingual, moving fluidly between Tamil and English.
To make the paper even more inclusive, Tamil Murasu has been using AI-generated English summaries for its Tamil-language articles – a small technological step, but a helpful one. It signals a core belief that language should never be a barrier to access, understanding or participation.
And yet, even in its evolution, Tamil Murasu continues to celebrate its linguistic and cultural roots, while embracing the diversity of the broader Indian diaspora. This dual identity is what has allowed it to thrive in an era when many papers have faded into obsolescence.
In many ways, the story of Tamil Murasu and tabla! is the story of Singapore itself: multilingual, multicultural and radical in its commitment to inclusion. For the editors, journalists and readers who have shaped its journey, the goal remains unchanged – to reflect the community in all its complexity, in whichever language it speaks.
At 90, Tamil Murasu is not just surviving, it’s speaking more voices than ever.
