A couple of days ago, a friend and I finished lunch and were about to part ways when he mentioned that he was going to try and find the office of “The Musalman”, possibly the last remaining Calligraphed Urdu Daily newspaper. Being a purported fan of typography and related areas, I had to join in the quest.
Our only lead was the information that the newspaper’s headquarters were in Triplicane, a Muslim dominant area of Chennai. We were in an area where we knew there was an open wi-fi connection, so we headed over to the hot-spot, pulled out my Mac Book Pro (which I happened to be carrying) :D and did a search on the internet. Fortuitously, we found a photograph of their front door on Scott Carney’s website, which had their address on it. We now had a destination!
We found the office with no trouble, Mr. Syed Fazlulla was kind enough to show us around, and tell us a bit about the history of the newspaper. There’s a lot to tell, but it’s already been told. Here is an article written by Scott Carney for Wired.com about The Musalman, and here are the photographs taken by him.
Now, for the hurriedly put-together ColoursAlive exclusive video shot on my phone (a Sony Ericsson K750i) ;) Don’t you just love digital technology?
The Last Calligraphed Urdu Daily - Susheel Chandradhas, 2008
Mr. Syed Fazlulla passed away on 26 April 2008, about five weeks after our visit.
The sign board outside The Musalman’s office in Triplicane. A frame from the video.
Mr. Syed Fazlulla at his desk with a copy of the paper. A frame from the video.
A front page of The Musalman, every line of it written by hand. A frame from the video.
More about The Musalman
Updated October 2026: Wired.com has since taken down the article and photographs this post originally linked to, so those links now point to copies saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. These pages also tell The Musalman’s story.
- The Last Calligraphers, Scott Carney’s own account of a day with the paper’s calligraphers and its editor, Syed Fazlulla. Scott also wrote the Wired.com article.
- The Medium Is Not The Message: 3 Handwritten Newspapers, Maria Popova’s 2011 piece on The Marginalian, which also points to Ishani K. Dutta’s short film about the paper.
- The Handwritten Newspapers Project, an online bibliography of handwritten newspapers around the world, where The Musalman has its own entry.
- The Musalman: The world’s only ‘hand-written’ newspaper turns 91, a 2018 update from The Siasat Daily. Mr. Fazlulla’s son, Syed Arifullah, has edited the paper since 2008. The article carries The Musalman: Preservation of a Dream, a short documentary about the paper.
