the nineteenth-century press in india || introduction: the nineteenth-century news from india

Introduction: The Nineteenth-Century News from IndiaAuthor(s): Julie F. CodellSource: Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 37, No. 2, The Nineteenth-Century Press in India(Summer, 2004), pp. 106-123Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Research Society for VictorianPeriodicalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20084001 .

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Introduction: The Nineteenth-Century News from India*

JULIE F. CODELL

Despite the plethora of books on the British empire, and the focus on

India in most of them, the in-depth study of the periodical press in India

beyond historical surveys has barely begun. A few early studies of com

munication and information under the Raj appeared in the last two

decades1 along with several books on the vernacular press.2 Studies of the

representation of colonial India in the Victorian press in Britain have

appeared in the last few years.3 The study of periodicals other than news

papers is still to be started. The press in India reported on imperial poli tics but was also a major vehicle for debates on Indian art, literature, social change, local events, and religion: Gandhi paraphrased Ruskin's

Unto This Last in Indian Opinion, a South African diasporic Indian peri odical for which he wrote while building his career and his philosophy in

his middle years in South Africa. Gandhi also owned two newspapers in

India in which he serialized his own autobiography in English in Young India (a paper he took over from its Bombay editor in 1919 that had 1200

subscribers) and in Navajivan (a weekly in Gujarati he started in 1919 that had 12,000 subscribers).4 Indians' travel narratives were serialized in

the press,5 where Indians could read about life in Europe. The rise of

Indian modern art was tied to several periodicals that promoted an essen

tialized Indian art in opposition to European realism, while the promo tion of British connoisseurship of Indian crafts was through the Journal

of Indian Art and Industry (formerly the Journal of Indian Art), in which amateur connoisseurs from the civil service institutionalized a Raj dis course about crafts.

The Indian press reflected much of the reformism, belief in progress and democratization of public life and of the press in Britain. The Victori

ans' confident worldview of orderly and rational progress and their self

image as the heirs of all the ages contributed to the cheery optimism in



JULIE F. CODELL IO7

which the Victorian Raj began with the 1833 British Parliament Charter Act promising Indians employment in the East India Company and Tho mas Babington Macaulay's 1835 Minute on Education which advocated

teaching Indians English language, literature, and culture. The Rebellion of 1857, however, dashed British ideals and belief in their civilizing mis

sion, which were replaced by increasing British racism, censorship, and

anxiety that characterized Raj governance and relations between Britons and Indians. The century closed with the smug egotism of Viceroy Cur zon's regime (1898-1905) that reflected growing hostilities between Indi ans and Britons and the Raj's failure to comprehend Indian political and social values. Yet, during the second half of the nineteenth century, many Indians advocated social reforms, especially in the areas of women's sta tus and religion, and promoted a blend of Indian and European educa

tional, political, and social systems, including the modern periodical press. The periodical press of India debated these larger changes, mirrored in the alternating patterns of British censorship, surveillance, and liberal ization of the Indian press and in Indian responses to these policies and to

Raj governance in general. The position of the press in India vexed British administrators since

Warren Hastings was Governor-General under the East India Company in the 1770s and '8os. Although the British introduced modern journalism into India, the relationship between the Raj and the Indian press was

often a hostile one. India had its own long-standing indigenous traditions of information collection and dissemination, which co-existed with the

modern press (Kaul 22)/ From about 1880 on to independence, the Indian press became increasingly vocal about political authority and

nationalism, though Indians expressed very diverse positions on these

topics. The press in India was really a spectrum of voices, as complex and

wide-ranging as any national press in Europe. The populations of India included Anglo-Indians, defined until 1911 as Britons living and working in India.9 Anglo-Indians were distinct from the British in the UK and often held opinions distinct from the views of the foreign office, Raj administrators, or the British public.

The Indian press run by and for Indians can be divided into vernacular and English-medium, both of which expressed wide-ranging views on

many topics and were not politically or ideologically monolithic. Geo

graphic, religious, social, and cultural differences are vast across India,

represented by a wide range of Indian periodicals and newspapers. The vernacular press was often motivated by regional and sectarian issues and

readership. Some vernacular papers were edited by Anglo-Indians: Sir Alexander Kinlock Forbes inspired the Gujarati Vartaman in Ahmeda bad in 1849, for which he was transferred due to the paper's criticism of the government.10 William Adam edited the Calcutta Chronicle, which



io8 Victorian Periodicals Review 37:2 Summer 2004

was suddenly suppressed in 1827 for its supposed disrespect toward the

Government.11 Another Anglo-Indian radical was James Silk Bucking ham, editor of the Calcutta Journal, 1818, an eight-page weekly, which in

1822 had a circulation of a thousand subscribers, mostly merchants, offi

cials, and military officers.12 Buckingham, friend of Rammohan Roy, the

radical reformer, ran aground with the government, despite Hastings' lib

eralization of the press laws. Tory hostility toward him inspired a counter

publication, John Bull in the East, 1821. Buckingham was deported in

1823, the same year as C. J. Fair, editor of the Bombay Gazette, was

deported, reflecting tighter censorship under acting Governor-General

John Adam.13

The Indian press connected India to the m?tropole and also linked the

people of India to each other across its vast geographical, linguistic,

regional, and religious differences. The press gradually contributed to an

emerging national identity, strengthened at times, ironically, by periodic

Raj repression of the press. The peak of the recognition of the colonial

press came in the 1909 Imperial Press Conference in which Lord Curzon, Chancellor of Oxford and former Viceroy of India (1898-1905), heralded

the press' role in consolidating the empire and the conference's function as the "Parliament of the Empire's Press."14 Communication through the

press, the wire services and the shortening travel time due to the Suez

Canal and other travel and communication technologies and networks

made colonies and Britain seem closer in time and space, matching emerg

ing economic proximities of global markets.15 Such increasing activity of

vernacular papers provoked the India Office to greater oversight of the

press.16 The populism of the press, initiated by the New Journalism in Britain

(in turn initially influenced by US newspapers), fit the press for many

political, polemical, and social purposes, constituting "a new sort of polit ical power."17 One colonial topic that dominated the press was the Boer

War, and the reporting of this event exemplified the power of the press to

control imperial information and policies. Publications such as the Illus

trated London News were successful in communicating imperial ideas and

events quickly, visually, and convincingly. As Joanne Shattock and

Michael Wolff explained, the Victorian press was "the context within

which people lived and worked and thought, and from which they derived their ... sense of the outside world,"19 often their only source

of knowledge of the outside world. English periodicals circulated to the

colonies and colonial news circled back to London, as well as among colonies. Metropole and colony, abstract dichotomies, were always inter

secting in political and social realities.20

Chandrika Kaul argues that the British press shaped "the conduct and

policy of the Indian Office," and her focus, like many other studies, is on



JULIE F. CODELL IO9

the "impact of the imperial experience in Britain."21 But Indians existed

apart from, as well as within, the Raj in various ways, and their own cul

tural histories, beliefs, languages, and practices could never be totally con

trolled or surveyed by the British. One historical strand of the Indian

press explored by several scholars is the history of periodic attempts to

control the press alternating with British recognition that such control

was antithetical to modern political development. These episodic changes reflected differences between Tory and Whig Prime Ministers and the

Viceroys they sent to India.22 The Indian press was inevitably the func

tion of the Raj in at least two senses: as the product of Raj administration

and laws governing the press and the product of Indian reactions to Raj laws and policies. Another historical strand would be the Indian press'

development independent of the Raj in its focus on local life, especially before 1857, and the continuing interest in local and sectarian topics

throughout the nineteenth century. Despite the distinction between

Indian (vernacular and English-medium) and Anglo-Indian periodicals, there were crossovers, through Anglo-Indian editors critical of the gov ernment in their papers and sympathetic to Indians, as in the case of

Robert Knight. In this introduction I can offer only a brief outline of the history of the

Indian press. The Portuguese missionaries brought a printing press in the

sixteenth century and the British East India Company brought printing

presses installed in Bombay in 1674, Madras in 1772, and Calcutta in

1779.23 The first newspapers - the Bengal Gazette, edited by James

Augustus Hicky, and its rival, the India Gazette, the arm of the Gover

nor-General Warren Hastings (whom Hicky repeatedly attacked) -

appeared in Calcutta in 1780. In 1784, the Calcutta Gazette and Oriental

Advertiser, with ads in Persian, Bengali, and English, began under gov ernment patronage and was followed by several other pro-government

newspapers over the next few years, such as the Bengal Journal in 1785.24 The Calcutta Chronicle became a weekly in 1786.25 The Asiatic Mirror

began in 1794, and in 1795, The Indian World, Indian Apollo, Calcutta

Courier, Bengal Harkaru (a daily in 1819, later a liberal paper edited by

James Sutherland in the 1830s, and in 1864 changed to the Indian Daily News), all started in Calcutta.2 The Telegraph was founded in 1796, the

Calcutta Morning Post and the Oriental Star in 1798, and the Relator in

1799.27 In Madras, the Madras Courier, 1785, run by Richard Johnston,

printer to the government, was published, followed by the Weekly Madras Gazette and the India Herald, both in 1795.28 In Bombay were

published the English weekly Bombay Herald, 1789, and the Courier in

1790, the first paper to appeal to the Indian public with advertisements in

Gujarati (it became the Bombay Times in 1838, edited by Robert Knight). The Bombay Gazette, iy<)i, merged with the Bombay Herald in 1792.29



no Victorian Periodicals Review 37:2 Summer 2004

The first Indian (as opposed to Anglo-Indian) newspaper in English was the weekly Bengal Gazette in 1816, edited by Gangadhar Bhattachar

jee, a teacher influenced by the liberal Rammohan Roy (1772-1833), who was behind several Indian press ventures.30 The first daily newspaper in an Indian language, Bombay Samarchar, edited by a Parsi businessman,

Fardoonji Murzban, appeared first as a weekly in 1822 and then a daily in

1832.31 The Serampore Baptist missionaries published a Bengali weekly,

Dig Darshan, 1818; the Friend of India, a monthly magazine in English, founded 1818; and the Samarchar Darpan, a weekly Bengali newspaper in

1819 at the subscription rate of one rupee a month, edited by J. C. Marsh man. To counter these missionary periodicals, Rammohan Roy started a

Persian weekly, the Mirat ul Ukhbar, 1822, and the Brahmanical Maga zine, though the Persian weekly was later closed down by the Adam Reg ulations.32 Indian proprietors or editors of newspapers were rare,

however, until later in the century, and before 1830, newspaper circula

tions were small, usually at most about 200 copies sold, though some esti mate that each copy reached about ten readers. The total number of sales

of the newspapers in Bengal c. 1855 was about 2,950 copies, with a reader

ship/listenership of about 30,000. In the NW Provinces the 28 news

papers had a total circulation of 2,216 copies.33 The government also

sponsored and patronized its own vernacular papers to control Indian

public opinion, and some Anglo-Indians started pro-government periodi cals: A. O. Hume, a government official in the NW Provinces, edited The

People's Friend (begun 1859), and Hodgson Pratt, a school inspector in

Bengal, started The Education Gazette in 1856.34 The government con

trolled the content of the press, and restrictions were applied differently in the various Presidencies (e.g., Madras, Bombay, Bengal). Some editors

were dismissed or deported: William Duane, editor of Bengal Journal, was removed as editor and almost deported in 1791; later, as editor of Indian World, he was deported in 1794; Dr. Maclean, editor of Bengal

Harkaru, was deported in 1798.35 Deportation remained a method of

removing British and Anglo-Indian editors in the nineteenth century, as

well. Government censorship appeared in the 1780s and continued in var

ious forms, with moments of leniency and moments of severe press con

trol instituted by the Governors-General until 1858 and then by the

Viceroys: Wellesley's Regulations (1799), instigated when Charles Bruce

published figures indicating the strength of the European and Indian

forces against Tippoo Sultan in the Asiatic Mirror, were softened by Lord

Francis Hastings, who abolished censorship in 1819 (though newspapers were not allowed to attack the government).3 The Adam Regulations (1823), aimed at Indian-owned newspapers (instituted by acting Gover

nor-General John Adam), were eased by Lord Bentinck, Governor-Gen

eral (1828-33). Lord Canning's regulation of the Press in 1857 was



JULIE F. CODELL III

followed by the more stringent Vernacular Press Act of 1878 under the

secretive Viceroy Lytton, appointed by Disraeli, but which was later

repealed by Viceroy Ripon, a Gladstone appointee, in 1882. These peri ods of repression echoed the sentiments of Thomas Munro, Governor of

Madras, who, in 1822, argued that colonial domination and a free press were incompatible.37 The Lt. Governor of the NW Provinces, James

Thomason, instituted a systematic reading of vernacular papers for sedi

tious articles in 1848.38 The government began publishing a weekly

Report on Native Papers that translated selected articles from Bengal

(1863), the NW Provinces and Punjab (1864), Bombay (1868), and

Madras (1872). It was published into the 1920s.39

Despite the general distrust of the press by Indian Governor-Generals

(the titular head under the East India Company), like The Marquis of

Wellesley (Governor-General beginning 1798), and after 1858 by the

Viceroys, increasing numbers of vernacular and Indian English newspa

pers appeared between 1830 and 1855, and then again in the 1860s and

'70s. Between 1813 and 1835, several social and political changes affected

the periodical press readership: English education was extended, jury ser

vice was opened to Indians (first to Christianized Indians and later to

Hindus and Muslims), and British interest in Indian activities and opin ions increased.40 Between 1830 and 1855, the Indian press also grew in

a variety of provinces outside Bengal and Bombay, where the press had

an early development: North-West Province, Delhi, the Punjab, and

Madras.41 Prices came down to one and two annas, thanks to the liberal

ization of press restrictions under Governor-General Bentinck and the

efforts of Charles Metcalfe, who passed the Liberal Press Act in 1835, written by Thomas Babington Macaulay (that held until 1856), which

helped newspapers spread across a wider range of geographical sites,

especially around Bombay.42 Not surprisingly, the 1857-58 Rebellion inflamed British suspicions of

the vernacular press and led to expanded censorship and surveillance. As

early as 1822, members of the Indian government's Council feared that

the vernacular press would have a strong influence on the native army.43 But the vernacular press continued to grow and become increasingly

engaged in political commentary, despite that fact that it rarely profited

financially. The most notable example in English was the weekly Hindoo

Patriot (1853), started by Hurish Chunder Mookherjea and later associ

ated with the Hindu reformer, I. Vidyasagar. The most notorious example of censorship was the Vernacular Press

Act. Sensitive to criticism by vernacular newspapers, which numbered 90 in Bengal alone, Viceroy Lytton, in 1878, imposed the Act to control the

vernacular press, thereby privileging the English-medium press not sub

ject to the Act. Mahadev Govind Ranade, a prominent nationalist and



112 Victorian Periodicals Review 3 7:2 Summer 2004

reformer, protested in the 1878 July issue of the Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, as did Gladstone in Nineteenth Century in the UK.44 The Act is considered by some historians as the galvanizer of

Indian nationalism, provoking the rise of Young Bengal and the promi nence of Surendranath Bannerjee, an admirer of Mazzini. As the propri etor and editor of Bengalee (a daily in 1878),45 Bannerjee was imprisoned for two months for publishing a leaderette about the Calcutta High Court in 1883.46 The prominent dissident bilingual Bengali-English paper

Amrita Bazar Patrika (1868),47 edited by Sishir Kumar Ghose and his

brothers, which agitated on behalf of Indian peasantry, dropped its ver

nacular columns the following week (it was then a weekly) to escape the Act's restrictions.48 The Act, based on the Irish Coercion Act (1870), was

condemned by Gladstone in Parliament and later repealed by Viceroy

Riponini882.49 The Act came after a period of the flowering of the Indian press. A

surge of Indian papers occurred in the 1860s and '70s, affected in part by the lowered postal rates for the press (lowered a second time in 1875) and

the development of the railway that expanded to serve the Post Office.50

Certainly a major factor was the Crown takeover in 1858, which made

government a matter of public policy and thus stimulated interest in gov ernment activities in India. Following the Rebellion, Urdu papers disap

peared but a Muslim revival connected with the scientific and literary writings of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan inspired papers in the north in Delhi, Meerut, Agra, Lucknow, Aligarh, and Lahore.51 The Indian Mirror, a

daily, started in 1861 by Man Mohan Ghosh and Devendranath Tagore (father of the poet, Rabindranath, and a follower of Rammohan Roy).

Missionary societies also published periodicals in English and in vernacu

lar, and the estimate of the numbers of periodicals and newspapers in

India in the nineteenth century is about 14,000, most short-lived.52 Brit

ish newspapers and periodicals were also exported to India.53

Uma Dasgupta argues that the 1870s were a period in which the press contributed to the rise of public opinion focused on social and political reforms. The British government supported social reforms but did not

condone political criticism in the press, while Indians often combined

these two areas of public debate, as the press became increasingly involved in political commentary. Finkelstein and Peers estimate that

"[i]n 1875, India had 382 vernacular newspapers" (including papers pub lished by and for Indians in English) and "166 English papers."54 Das

gupta notes that "almost every region had at least one newspaper in

another vernacular," indicating a growing mobility of Indians and the

integration of regional identities that would rise to a critical mass and

engender a national identity by the turn of the century (Dasgupta n).

During the 1870s burgeoning of the Indian press, many papers were one



JULIE F. CODELL II3

person enterprises, with the editor, usually a member of the educated

middle-class (although their backgrounds varied considerably from

region to region), functioning as publisher and proprietor. Writers, often

well-known and outspoken, wrote without remuneration (Dasgupta 16

17). In addition, literary periodicals increased, as well, during the 1870s,

shaping an intelligentsia. Many periodicals and newspapers were funded

by editors' own money, social organizations, wealthy maharajahs, local

governments, Indian businessmen, and sometimes the Raj government; most had no advertisements until later in the century (Dasgupta 19-21). A

circulation of 500-600 was considered large, and many papers had circu

lations of between 100 and 300 (Dasgupta 34-36), but many more read or

listened to papers being read in libraries, bazaars, and schools, as informa

tion trickled down from subscribers - largely landowners (zamindars),

schoolmasters, government officers, businessmen, and members of the court - to lower castes (Dasgupta 36-38). This widening distribution was

one of the conditions that worried Raj administrators who cited it as one

justification of the Vernacular Press Act (Dasgupta 37). Dasgupta summa

rizes this period of Indian journalism as a turning point: "In these ten

years it is possible to see the birth of a public opinion in India" (Dasgupta 44)

As Indians began organizing for political authority, social reforms, and

religious autonomy, many emerging organizations ran periodicals and

newspapers. Keshub Chunder Sen, nationalist reformer and religious leader, took over Sulava Samachar in 1870, a cheap weekly and the organ

of the Indian Reform Association of Bengal. It became very popular,

averaging a circulation of 3,500 copies per week.55 The Indian press often

used British statistics and censuses to argue for Indian political and

employment opportunities.5 In the 18 80s, inspired by literary and religious movements, the press

grew in relation to religious philosophies and causes in Punjabi, such as

the Sikhs, Arya Samaj (a reformist and nationalistic Hindu revival begun in Bombay in 1875 tnat promoted swadeshi, Indian economic indepen dence), and Ahmaddiya (a Punjabi pro-British Muslim movement

founded in 1889). The Gujarati press in western India was also expanding in the 1880s; in 1881, the Marathi press was galvanized by the work of Bal

Gangadhar Tilak, the revolutionary, who began his Maharashtran papers, Mahratta and Kesari (the latter is still published today), which gained a

huge circulation within a few years (Tilak suffered two trials for sedition

and was imprisoned). Journals in southern languages of Kanarese, Tamil,

Telugu, and Malayalam were tied to the missionaries until the mid-1880s,

except for the more independent Kanarese papers in Mysore.57 The development of the Indian press was tied to the educational sys

tems in India, including native and British schools and universities serving



114 Victorian Periodicals Review 37:2 Summer 2004

an increasingly literate public. But ever more stark and adversarial post

Mutiny political changes and the political divisions and awakening national consciousness following the formation of the Indian National

Congress (INC) in 1885 generated new topics and positions for the

Indian press (mostly weeklies rather than dailies at the end of the cen

tury), including open hostility to the government and to Viceroy Curzon.

The nationalist reformer Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Gandhi's mentor, wrote for reform papers like Sudharak, a bilingual journal.58

Hostility toward the INC and Indian nationalism dominated much of

the Anglo-Indian press that promulgated a growing racism and distrust of

educated Indians. The growing division is also reflected in the return in

the first two decades of the twentieth century to government deportation, this time of Indian editors, notably Srinivar Iyengar, editor of the Tamil

India, and of Hoti Lai Varma, who sent a "seditious" message to Bande

Matram (founded in 1905 by the social and political reformer Lala Lajput Rai, a champion of women's equality), and other editors of vernacular

papers. The requirement of security money whose sums were often too

much for newspapers to afford, caused many to close down due to this

requirement.59 In the early years of the twentieth century, several radical

Indian newspapers were also published in Paris.

Anglo-Indian papers from the Rebellion on consistently took the side

of the government, and their racist attacks on Indians increased dramati

cally after 1857, while the Indian papers were generally restrained (as sev

eral viceroys noted ), criticizing specific laws and policies, but avoiding racial attacks. The Indian press was not imitative of British media. For one thing, the Indian press, as C. A. Bayly points out, had networks and

lines of communication unavailable to the British: caste communities,

marriage connections, pilgrims' reports, various charitable groups, and a

growing sense of community and nation developed in and through the

press. As Prem Narain points out, the papers were filled with quotidian commentary and reporting on racial incident, educational and employ

ment limitations, distinct Muslim and Hindu concerns, and restraints

under the Raj. Regional and vernacular local papers contributed to re

gional communalism, as well as to a spectrum of Indian identities. 3

Among the prominent papers of the 18 80s and '90s were the Hindu in

Madras, which was a daily from 1889, and the Madras Standard in 1892 under Parameswaran Pillai, contending with two British papers, the

Madras Times and the Madras Mail. Allahabad had the Pioneer, and other

papers proliferated in Bombay and especially in Calcutta, the Raj capital, as well as in Lahore. Many papers were openly contentious toward the

government and outspoken on nationalism, reform, and economic dispar ities.

The British government eventually realized that one serious drawback



JULIE F. CODELL II5

of too much censorship would be their own inability to stay abreast of

Indian opinions, a source of information the British badly needed, espe

cially after the 1857 Rebellion.64 The press became a popular venue for

many members of the rising, entrepreneurial middle classes in India and a

site for the critique of British rule - tendencies that were further stimu

lated by the repeal of the Vernacular Press Act in 1882 by Viceroy Ripon. The topics of the Age of Consent Bill, cow-slaughter, and the plague rules were among the most sensational press topics in the 1890s.

Essays in this volume cover a range of periodicals from the 1830s to the

early twentieth century, to show how the press in India carried out a vari

ety of functions for its diverse readerships during the long Victorian

period. As M?ire ni Fhlath?in writes, papers reporting on the thugs in the

1830s appear to have been serving government propaganda.65 Debapriya Paul's essay examines a reformist and rebellious Hurish Chunder

Mookherjea, editor of the Hindoo Patriot during the years of the Sepoy

Mutiny or Rebellion (1857-58) and the 1859-61 Indigo Rebellion in Ben

gal. The Statesman, although run by Anglo-Indians, was highly critical of

the Raj government to arouse the public and reform the Raj. The found

ing editor of the Statesman in 1875 (first called the Indian Statesman and

then by the end of that year, the Statesman), Robert Knight, had the

backing of 24 Calcutta merchants, and at one anna undersold its four annas rivals, the Englishman and the Indian Daily News. An activist and

reformer, Knight, the subject of Edwin Hirschmann's essay, typifies

entrepreneurial, independent-minded, and adventurous Anglo-Indian editors.66 The Journal of Indian Art and Industry, 1884-1917, served

British aesthetic and economic interests in Indian crafts, in Peter Hoffen

berg's analysis, in its promotion and interpretation of traditional Indian

culture. Krishna Sen analyzes the complex, contradictory discourse on

women's education in the Bengali journal Bamabodhini Patrika, 1863 1922, exemplary of conflicts between traditional and modern female iden

tities. As I argue in my essay, the cosmopolitan East and West (1901-21), whose authors were not only Indian and Anglo-Indian, but also from around the world, was edited by the social reformer Behram Malabari,

who sought to bridge the widening gap between Indian and British cul tures and peoples.

This volume of Victorian Periodicals Review also contains the first

product of the project undertaken by the English Department of the Uni

versity of Calcutta to create an annotated summary of The Calcutta

Review.7 In April 2002, the Department was recognized by the Univer

sity Grants Commission (UGC) of India for its scholarly achievements

and high standard of teaching and research and was awarded a five-year

Special Assistance Program for research, publications, collection of archi

val material, and conferences and workshops, on a designated topic, "The




Literary and Cultural Interface between Bengal and Britain in the Nine

teenth and Twentieth Centuries." As part of this cluster of projects, the

Department has undertaken an annotated summary of The Calcutta

Review, established in 1844, one of the earliest and most influential

English periodicals to be published in Calcutta. Its ownership was

acquired by the University of Calcutta in 1921, and the University Cen

tral Library has one of the largest holdings of this periodical. In the first

phase of the project, the Department intends to cover the period from

1844 to the end of the First Series in 1912, when the capital of the British

empire in India was moved from Calcutta to Delhi: in the second phase, the Department will take up the Second Series (1913-1920) and the Third

Series up to Independence (1921-1947). The current plan is to site this

important archival material in INFLIB.NET (the academic website

hosted by the UGC) in 2005 after the work has been completed, so that it can be accessed by national and international scholars. This volume of

VPR contains the First Series.

Arizona State University

NOTES

* I wish to thank the authors in this volume for their suggestions

on this introduc

tion, especially Edwin Hirschmann for sharing with me his expert knowledge of

the Indian press and Raj history.

i Recent studies of the Indian periodical press appear in Antoinette Burton,

"Institutionalizing Imperial Reform: The Indian Magazine and Late-Victo

rian Colonial Politics," 23-50, and Ja ved Majeed, "Narrative of Progress and

Idioms of Community: Two Urdu Periodicals of the 1870s," 135-64, both in

David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers, eds., Negotiating India in the Nine

teenth-Century Media (Houndmills: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's P,

2000). Histories of the press in India, many with useful lists of periodicals and

newspapers published and charts on their circulations, include: Sunit Ghosh, Modern History of Indian Press (New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1998); J. S.

Natarajan, History of Indian Journalism, Part II of Government of India Press

Commission (Delhi, 1997); G. N. S. Raghavan, The Press in India: A New His

tory (New Delhi, Gyan, 1994); Rangaswami Vzr?iasaxzxhy, Journalism in

India (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1989); Merrill T. Boyce, British Policy & the Evolution of the Vernacular Press in India, i83j-i8y8 (Delhi: Cha

nakya, 1988); R. C. S. Sarkar, The Press in India (New Delhi: S. Chand;

Queen's Village, NY, 1984); Rangaswami Parthasarathy, A Hundred Years

of The Hindu (Madras: Kasturi and Sons, 1978); Uma Dasgupta, Rise of an

Indian Public (Calcutta: R[i]ddhi, 1977); P. Narain, Press and Politics in India,



JULIE F. CODELL 117

1885-1905 (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1970); M. Chalapathi Rau, The Press in India (Bombay, New York: Allied Publishers, 1968); Nadig Krishna

Murthy, Indian Journalism (Mysore: Prasaranga, 1966); Swaminath S. Natara

jan, A History of the Press in India (Bombay, New York: Asia Pub. House,

1962); Margarita Barns, The Indian Press (London: G. Allen and Unwin,

1940).

General studies of communication and popular media in India include: C.

A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence gathering and social commu

nication in India, iy8o-i8yo (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996); Vinay Dwar

wadker, "Print Culture and Literary Markets in Colonial India," in J. Mastens,

P. Stallybrass and N. Vickers, eds., Language Machines: Technologies of Liter

ary and Cultural Production (New York, 1997), 175-200.

2 R. Ramakrishnan, Press and Politics in an Indian State: Mysore, 1859-194/

(Delhi: Delta Publishing); Mrinal Kanti Chanda, History of the English Press in Bengal, iy8o to 18jy (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1988). There are many studies

of the modern press in India after Independence.

3 Chandrika Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880-1922 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003); James D. Stem, Journalists for Empire:

The Imperial Debate in the Edwardian Stately Press, 1903-1913 (Westport, CT.: Greenwood P, 1991); J. Codell, "The Empire Writes Back: Native Infor mant Discourse in the Victorian Press," 188-218, and David Finkelstein,

"Imperial Self-Representation: Constructions of Empire in Blackwood's Mag

azine, 1880-1900," 95-108, in J. Codell, ed. Imperial Co-Histories: National

Identities and the British and Colonial Press (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickin son UP, 2003); John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipula tion of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984); John M. MacKenzie, ed. Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester:

Manchester UP, 1986). See also J. Lee Thompson's book, Northcliffe: Press Baron in Politics, 1865-1922 (London: John Murray, 2001).

4 Parathasarathy mentions that Gandhi did not like editing an English-medium paper and did it in order to communicate with Indians in the south, because of

the language differences that made English a shared language. He wrote, "The

English journal touch but the fringe of India's population" (qtd. in Parathasar

athy 142). The subscription numbers I mention for both of Gandhi's papers are from Parathasarathy, 142, also.

5 T. N. Mukharji, A Visit to Europe (Calcutta: W. Newman, 1889), was first serialized in Indian Nation, at the request of the paper's manager (vii).

6 For a comprehensive view of the periodicals involved in the debates over Indian modernism and "Indianness" in art, see

Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The

Making of a New 'Indian* Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992).

7 Kaul, 22. Finkelstein and Peers note that in pre-colonial India there were

handwritten newsletters that continued to exist after printed sources became




available, though by 1890 most villages had printing presses (12). For about

twenty years after the 1857 Rebellion, the more seditious attacks on the gov

ernment employed the handwritten news medium to avoid press censorship,

as the British became more anxious about the Indian press after 1857; see

Bayly, 340.

8 Kaul points out that struggles

over the freedom of the press were often

between Britons unconnected with the government and the East India Com

pany, even before the Raj was officially under the British government. See N.

G. Barrier, Banned: Controversial Literature and Political Control in British

India, i9oy-i94y (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1974).

9 In 1911, Viceroy Hardinge officially proclaimed that thereafter Anglo-Indian would refer to those of mixed "race," for which Eurasian had been used until

then. For an early study of Anglo-Indian culture, see Benita Parry, Delusions

and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination, 1880-1930

(Berkeley: U of California P, 1972). 10 S. Natarajan, 75. Narain has a chart listing the numbers of newspapers and

periodicals in India in 1885, when the Indian National Congress was founded,

pp. 8-9.

11 Boyce, 26, 35. Adam was later appointed by Governor-General Bentinck to

investigate the state of education in Bengal.

12 S. Natarajan, 34ff.

13 S. Natarajan, 57.

14 Kaul, 1; see also J. Lee Thompson, "Selling the Mother Country to the

Empire: The Imperial Press Conference of June 1909," in Codell, ed., Imperial Co-Histories, 109-24.

15 On the wire services, see Alex Nalbach, "'The Software of Empire': Tele

graphic News Agencies and Imperial Publicity, 1865-1914," in Codell, ed.,

Imperial Co-Histories, 68-94.

16 Kaul, 2.

17 Kaul, 6.

18 On the reporting of the Boer War in the British press, see Paula Krebs, Gen

der, Race, and the Writing of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). On

the Illustrated London News, see Peter Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured

Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News (Aldershot:

Ashgate, 1998). See also Kaul, 7, and MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire,

6-y, on press jingoism.

19 Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff, eds. The Victorian Periodical Press

(Leicester: Leicester UP 1982), xiv-xv. See also Aled Jones, Powers of the Press

(Aldershot: Scolar, 1996). 20 For recent re-thinking of the dichotomy of m?tropole and colony,

see An

toinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and

Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994), 19. 21 Kaul, 7.



JULIE F. CODELL 119

22 See Robert Darnton, "Book Production in British India, 18 50-1900," Book

History 5 (2002): 239-262.

23 Raghavan, 2.

24 Raghavan, 2-3; Murthy, 18.

25 Natarajan, 19.

26 See Raghavan, 10-11.

27 Murthy, 22.

28 Murthy, 20.

29 Natarajan, 19; Murthy, 21.

30 Murthy, 30.

31 Natarajan, 28-29; Raghavan, 11. Murzban began by publishing the periodical

as an annual in 1812.

32 See S. Natarajan, 26-27, and Raghavan, 40.

33 Raghavan, n. There are numerous charts listing newspapers in India in the

following: S. Natarajan, 24-25, 58-59, 70, 72, 74, 103; Narain, foldout between

pp. 8-9, 297-306. These are variously organized by language, city, and date.

34 Boyce, 56-62.

3 5 S. Natarajan, 10-21; Narain also cites the deportation of the two editors, 3.

36 Natarajan, 23.

37 Boyce, 31.

38 Boyce, 45-47.

39 Boyce, 4, 69-83.

40 See S. Natarajan, 22-23, and Finkelstein and Peers, 9, whose own sources

include Dharwadker and Natarajan (9). Among the most prominent support

ers of the Indian press was Dwarkanath Tagore, who launched several Bengali

newspapers (see S. Natarajan 47). See S. Natarajan, 48, on causes influencing

the growth of the Indian press.


42 S. Natarajan, 58-59, lists papers in 1830 and added between 1831-33. See

60-62 on other changes.

43 Boyce, 37.

44 Boyce, in-13.

45 Natarajan, 129.

46 Narain, 88.

47 S. Natarajan, 86-87.

48 See S. Natajaran, 96-99. Sunit Ghosh writes that Amrita Bazar Patrika may have been the target for the Act as its editor had inflamed the Lt. Governor of

Bengal, Ashley Eden (Ghosh, 144-47). See Robin Jeff rey, <http://www.indi

anprinterpublisher.com/aug/archive-ipp/archive2000/publishing2000/Sep tember-robi.htm>.



51 S. Natarajan, 102-04; see the chart of journals in Urdu on p. 103.



120 Victorian Periodicals Review 3 7:2 Summer 2004

52 Finkelstein and Peers, io.

53 The Anglo-Indian population was always limited to several tens of thousands even

by the end of the century. According to Finkelstein and Peers, vernacular

papers (including English-medium papers intended for Indians) could expect a

maximum subscription of 400 (11).

54 Finkelstein and Peers, 11; their information is taken from William Digby, "Native Newspapers of India and Ceylon," Calcutta Review 65 (1877):

356-94. Dasgupta estimates there were 248 papers (1).

55 Raghavan, 223-24.

56 Bayly, 344-45. On pp. 346-51, Bayly describes some individual cases of Indian

editors and founders of periodicals. While Narain puts the origins of the mod

ern press in the medieval practices of spies under Mughal despots and govern

ment sources of information, my survey will cover only the beginnings of the

modern periodical press, not older practices of news gathering.

57 Natarajan, 105-06.

58 Raghavan, 30.

59 Natarajan, 168, 171.

60 Raghavan, 34-35.

61 See S. Natarajan, 92, for George Birdwood's assessment of the Indian press as

loyal, for example; Birdwood was a Company historian and scholar of Indian

art and culture.

62 See Finkelstein and Peers, 10, for some differences between the Anglo-Indian

and the British press.

63 Prem Narain lists a number of public leaders who used the press for political

expression, p. viii. See also pp. viii-ix for a sampling of topics

common in the

press.

64 See Bayly, 340-41.

65 The politics of thuggee have been the subject of recent studies which question the nature of the thuggee cult and its existence as

exaggerated by the Raj; see

Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolo

nial India (U of California P, 1998), chapter 2. This chapter on thuggee also

appears on <http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/yale_journal_of_criticism/

9.iroy.html>.

66 He promoted organizations to care for destitute Europeans in Bombay, an

Indo-British School, the Bank of Bombay, the Bombay Port Trust, a pipe scheme for supplying Bombay with water, among other projects. He even

invested in a coffee plantation in the Madras Presidency. This information is

drawn from S. Natarajan, 79-84.

6y The University of Calcutta was founded in 1857. Since 1913, the Department

of English has conducted graduate courses and doctoral research in literature:

M.A., M.PHIL. (pre-Ph.D.), and Ph.D.; undergraduate literature courses are

taught in over a hundred affiliated colleges. There are over 100,000 books and

national and international periodicals in its Central Library holdings.



JULIE F. CODELL 121

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