An Overview of the Press in Bengal up to 1947
A word on the news industry in Calcutta is in order here, since so much of my material derives from news publications.1
Initially the East India Company was not favorably disposed to the press, as the Company was fearful of exposure, intolerant of criticism, and suspicious of journalists, whom it saw as representing the interests of those outside the privileged, official side of the administration. Indeed, the first English newspaper in India, the Bengal Gazette / Calcutta General Advertiser (1780–1782), was launched by James Augustus Hicky, who savagely satirized Warren Hastings and the Company. Even Parliamentary proceedings in England could not be printed in India, as the Company considered them “seditious literature.” The restrictions of the press and the deportations of unwanted journalists did not go without protest from certain conscientious Englishmen, some of whom were even Company men, and one can observe the uneasy balance of power between official government ideals and the mercantile community by the founding of the Calcutta Chronicle (1787–1797) and the Calcutta Journal (1816–1823), which represented Calcutta merchants. Ultimately the government officials were the losers, as after 1825 they were debarred from having any interest in newspaper production.
Within six years of Hicky’s venture, there were four weeklies and a monthly in Calcutta. But most papers were short-lived; only seven of those founded between 1780 and 1800 survived for twenty years or more: the India Gazette / Calcutta Public Advertiser (1780–1834), Calcutta Gazette or Oriental Advertiser (1784–1818), Asiatic Mirror (1788–1820), Oriental Star (1793–1820), Calcutta Monthly Journal (1794–1841), Bengal Hircarrah (1795–1866), and Calcutta Morning Post (1797–1818). Why this turnover? Mrinal Kanti Chanda speculates that an English press could hardly flourish if it depended only on a handful of colonial subscribers; in the 1830s only fifty thousand British-born subjects lived in India. Moreover, the English papers had practically no “native” subscribers; in 1843 the Rev. James Long could find only 125 for the leading papers of the time.2
Three English-language British papers established in the 1820s and 1830s had better survival rates: the pro-Government and pro-native Bengal Hurkaru, which took over from the Bengal Hircarrah in 1828; its formidable rival, the Englishman (1834–1934), which by the early 1850s was pro-British, bitterly anti-Indian, and supportive of the military and the indigo planters; and the Christian, pro-Western Friend of India (1818–present, in various iterations), which began as a missionary organ. Of these three papers, the Hurkaru was the most and the Englishman the least pro-Indian; and after 1875 the Friend of India, newly merged with the Statesman, strove to bring Europeans and Indians together.
The first Indian-owned English papers, the short-lived Bengal Gazette (1816; no copies survive) and the Bengal Herald (1829–1843), were reformist papers influenced by the teachings of Ram Mohan Roy. The same is partly true for the early Bengali press: the Samācār Darpaṇ (1818–1852) and Digdarśan (1818–?), missionary publications brought out by the Baptists at Serampore, spoke out against social evils and for social reform; initially the Brāhmos wrote for them. But then Bengalis felt the need to have an organ to counteract missionary teaching. Hence was born in December 1821 the Sambād Kaumudī (the voice of Roy and the liberals) and in March 1822 the Samācār Candrikā (the paper of the conservatives). The supporters of the latter included Rādhākānta Deb from the Shovabazar estate, who also helped established the Dharma Sabhā in 1830. As a mouthpiece of conservative Hindu society, the Samācār Candrikā also publicized the Pūjās, festivals, and ceremonies of the Hindu community while simultaneously arguing against the spread of Western education and the movement to abolish sati.
Between 1818 and 1839, 38 Bengali and 33 English papers were founded by Indians; between 1838 and 1857, 104 papers and periodicals came out. Again, most were short-lived; only the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā (1839–1932) had any longevity, because of its loyal Brāhmo supporters. These papers in general were concerned with political, economic, socio-religious, and educational issues. Some were literary or scientific journals. Political issues addressed included the Indianization of higher branches of the administration, racial discrimination, economic exploitation, poverty, and administrative failures and abuses. During this time the Indian press may have been anti-government, but not anti-British, and there was no suggestion that British rule be ended.
In general, until 1857 the proprietors and editors of the English papers under European management were generally sympathetic toward the Indian press. The Calcutta Journal quoted from the Samācār Candrikā, the Sambād Kaumudī, and the Mirāt-ul-Ākhbar, Roy’s Persian paper. In fact, the presses of both communities worked together to pass through Act XI of 1835, by which Sir Charles Metcalfe freed the press. Indian-run papers were not quite as conciliatory toward the Anglo-Indian press. The Hindoo Patriot (1854–1922), begun by friends of the playwright Girish Chandra Ghosh, was the voice of the zamindars’ Indian British Association in their critique of the Company and the indigo planters; it also castigated the Englishman for its anti-native tone. However, it looked to Parliament and the British public for justice.
It was the Rebellion of 1857 that drove a wedge between English- and Indian-owned newspapers, as the former—particularly the Friend of India, the Englishman, and even the pro-native Bengal Hurkaru—indulged in post-Rebellion bloodthirsty racial invectives, ferocious tirades, and a chorus of cries for blood and revenge. The Hurkaru ceased publication in 1866, but its pre-1857 pro-Indian stance was taken up in 1875 with the merging of the Friend of India and Statesman by British journalist Robert Knight, who was extremely critical of the government. Alone among the British press, Knight vigorously protested when Surendranath Banerjea was charged with and convicted for contempt of court for an article published in the Bengalee, and it was the Statesman, again alone, that welcomed the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885. This liberal perspective was followed all the way up to Independence, with famous editors Arthur Moore (up to 1942) and Ian Stephens (1942–1951) sympathetic to Indian political grievances.
By the early 1880s, several Indian-owned English papers founded in the years soon after 1857 were strong and influential: the Bengalee (1858–1932), established by Surendranath Banerjea; Amrita Bazar Patrika (1867–present), born as a Bengali weekly in the village of Amrita Bazar in Jessore district to fight the cause of peasants exploited by their indigo planter-landlords; the Hindoo Patriot; and the Indian Mirror (1861–1889), run from 1871 by the Brāhmo Keshab Chandra Sen. All of these papers were dominated by Moderate politics, then current in the thirty to forty years after the Rebellion, although the Amrita Bazar Patrika began to move in a more overtly nationalist direction after it was forced, in 1878, to escape Lord Edward Lytton’s strictures against the vernacular press by becoming, overnight, an English weekly.
The furor over the first partition of Bengal threw up a number of short-lived anti-British, “Extremist” Bengali and English papers: Bande Mataram (1906–1908), founded by Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghose, the latter of whom was sarcastically critical of Moderate Indian papers such as the Bengalee and the Indian Mirror; Brahmobandhab Upādhyāya’s Sandhyā (1904–1907), Nabaśakti (1907–1908), and the most resolutely violent of all, Yugāntar (1906–1908). Most of these were suppressed. Interestingly, the partition controversy split the British residents of Calcutta: the Anglo-Indian press, chiefly the Englishman, vilified Lord Curzon for departing from the traditions of British rule, while he tried, unsuccessfully, to curb their editors’ blatant racial prejudice.
After World War I and the new political leadership of Mohandas Gandhi, several changes occurred in the press. The two most influential papers were, in English, the Statesman and Amrita Bazar Patrika, both widely read by nationalists. From 1922 and 1937, respectively, the Bengali Ānanda Bājār Patrikā and a rejuvenated Yugāntar joined the market; these two remain today the largest circulated Bengali dailies. In the early 1930s, however, two English-language papers died deaths of political irrelevancy: the Bengalee, which lost support in the Gandhian era for its Moderate stance; and the Englishman, whose pro-British policies (in 1919, for example, the Englishman contributed for a fund to aid General Reginald Dyer) were deemed, even by the British, to be too extreme.