About Us

For the past few months, one question has followed us around: ‘When will Sawaal become a real website?’ Friends have asked it, so have viewers, sometimes jokingly and sometimes with genuine curiosity. ‘Still on Facebook?’ became the shorter version of the question.

We tried to laugh it off, initially. Yet we knew the question would not go away.

Sawaal began in April as a fairly incidental Facebook page. It grew faster than we expected: more than 25,000 people joined the page, and its posts reached nearly 30 million unique users. Those numbers mattered because they suggested people were reading and watching our posts, and responding to them. They also posed a question. If the audience was already there, why move? Why not simply keep feeding the page and let the numbers grow?

The answer had something to do with the politics of Sawaal itself. We did not want its fate to be decided by algorithm, by pursuit of numbers, by the peculiar economy of visibility that governs social media. Facebook helped us begin; it could not be our permanent inhabitation space.

So the conversation continued — in group chats well past midnight, in comment threads, after a post elicited the expected or contrary response, through suggestions and discussion on the launch of our YouTube channel, through all the small detours by which an idea becomes a practice. We kept asking whether we were ready.

We probably never will be fully ready. But we are ready enough.

Sawaal is now live.

Team Sawaal

Anitesh Chakraborty
Shounak Mukhopadhyay
Chhandok Guha
Amarta Khamrui
Arkadeep Goswami
Partha Halder
Kushal Kar
Akash Das
Tithi Roy

Special Thanks to

Tishyaroop Chakraborty