The Hollow Fourth Pillar- A Study Of The Indian Press Under British Rule

By: Rounak Bose.

If one glimpses through the history of India, he or she will find a magnanimous role of the press in implanting the seeds of nationalism into the hearts and minds of people during the pre independence era in the early 1900s. Reports of the death of Lala Lajpat Rai while protesting against the Simon Commission along with his quote- "The blows struck at me will be the last nails in the coffin of the British rule in India" and the likes of such shook the entirety of the Indian sentiment.

From vernacular languages to Macaulay's English bred brethren, the press touched chords among all in equal measures. From bringing to light the gross injustice being met by the populous under the Colonial masters to Indian revolutionaries secretly publishing fliers and magazines from underground sources, the press has often been termed as a Messiah for the Indian Independence movement.

A comprehensive look at the various stages of development of press in India and the emergence of modern day print publications by Rounak Bose. Image Credits: The Hindu.

This holds true to a certain extent but what we generally miss is that there exists, in entirety, another dimension of history of the Indian Press which precedes the aforementioned period. This dimension plays a pivotal role in understanding the history of media in India and its evolution before the press actually became a voice for the voiceless.

Publishers and journalists have always been stereotyped as elitist college bred intellectuals but, ironically, the first Indian newspaper to have been published was started by James Augustus Hicky, a highly eccentric Irishman who had previously spent two years in Jail for debt.

James Augustus Hicky And The Bengal Gazette

There are two sides to the argument when it comes to Hicky's competency as the publisher of a newspaper. Though many historians consider him to have laid the foundation and parameters of journalism in India through the columns of his weekly 'Bengal Gazette', in honesty, Hicky's two page newspaper was no more than a scandalous mouthpiece splashing muck at the higher ranks of British officials. His public ridicule of Warren Hastings and his wife and the mindless criticism of Europeans landed him in Jail yet again.

James Augustus Hicky's Bengal Gazette did more harm to the Indian Press than good as it invited the imposition of censorship.

As a journalism student, I am all for the freedom of speech but we must understand to recognize the thin line between the freedom of speech and the freedom of speculation. It is this line that differentiates 'freedom' from 'abuse of power'.

James Augustus Hicky crossed the line time and again. No wonder his newspaper was a favorite among the British soldiers who devoured his juicy and scandalous stories about their superiors. Hicky's Bengal Gazette, which started an era of yellow journalism in India, ceased publication on 23rd March 1782.

The Indian Press in the late 18th century till the early 19th century had no semblance of India in it and catered only to the European community stationed in India. The Bengal Gazette, I believe did more harm than good to the Indian press of the time which was still in its infancy, as the whole debacle led to the censorship of press and the freedom being curbed.

John Zakariah Kerniander

Another name that has almost managed to slip away in the sands of time is that of, John Zakariah Kerniander. Swedish by ethnicity, he was the first Protestant missionary in Bengal. He arrived in Calcutta in 1758 from Tranquebar at the instance of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). After twenty years of evangelical work in Calcutta during which he was supplied printed religious material by the SPCK in London and the Tranquebar and Vepery Presses, he established the first ever mission press of Bengal and Northern India. Kerniander established this press in March 1779 with materials sent by SPCK.

In 1780 he printed The Christian’s Companion for his congregation. In the early 1780s however he ventured into the realm of commercial printing with English almanacs and court writs. This brought him into direct confrontation with Hicky.

Hicky vs Kerniander

Kerniander’s intentions of getting into advertising to print the “forms of writs used in the Supreme Court of Judicature, &c.” was seen as the arrogant Hicky as a direct attack to his then monopoly of the press. Desperately wanting to maintain his own distorted version of self-superiority, icky took it upon himself to poke fun at a man set out to become a prospective rival.

"For the good of the Mission…A part of the types sent out on the behalf of the Mission, to assist the pious design of propagating the Gospel in foreign parts, are now employed in printing Warrants, Summons, Writs of Lattitats, and Special Capias—those Blister Plaister of the Law."

This came out in the May 1781 edition of Hicky’s Bengal Gazette. Hicky also goes on to jocularly refer to Kerniander as “Mr. Caninder”. It must be further noted that another reason why Kerniander caused Hicky as a printer great distress and annoyance, was because of the help and assistance that Kerniander gave to the printers of the India Gazette.

India Gazette- A Worthy Successor To The Ramblings of Hicky

Bernard Messink was another of Hicky's principal foes. He was involved with the management of the Calcutta Theatre until about 1780 when he established the India Gazette with his partner Peter Reed. Reed was a salt merchant himself. The two are notable for establishing the second weekly after the Hicky's Bengal Gazette and for trying to lure away the readership of the latter.

This was the newspaper which received help not just from the above mentioned Swedish pastor, Keriander but ample encouragement from Hastings himself. These men of-course were much more sublime in their nature, actions and words and were sympathetic towards the East India Company.

The resultant being that the East India Company had made sure that there exists, no soul brave enough to raise a voice against its wrongdoings. From here onwards we can see a massive heap of newspapers and periodicals cropping up in the erstwhile city of Calcutta which was to be the capital till 1911.

The Calcutta Gazette followed in close succession, and began publishing under the direct patronage of the Govt. in 1784. In 1785, The Bengal Journal and a monthly, The Oriental Magazine of Calcutta Amusement started publishing from Calcutta, the former publishing all Government advertisements, free of cost. In the Southern Front, Richard Johnson brought out the Madras Courier. An “officially recognised newspaper”.

In short, within the next 6 years of Hicky’s Gazette, there was a hollow structural fray when it came to the “so called Indian Media” as newspapers that existed were too sterile to deliver the truth and mostly followed a policy of mindless appeasement of the East India company and its officials as they knew that for their newspapers to see the rays of dawn, this must happen.

Press In Britain Compared With British Controlled Press In India

When discussing about the Press in Britain, one must understand the paradigm shift that it went through after the Licensing of the Press Act of 1692 finally expired in 1695. In official court language, it was for preventing the frequent abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses. But the mentality behind it was the same, to choke the wind pipe of the general masses.

The London Gazette from June 1694.

Between 1690 and 1780 the number of newspapers printed annually in England rose from less than a million to fourteen million, a growth far in excess of that of the population. The period was the most dramatic in the history of the English press, with the creation of new forms- daily Sunday and provincial papers - and a greatly increased freedom of the press, after the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695. The relationship between the growth of the press and the political system of the period is crucial to our understanding of English society in the eighteenth century.

If one goes through the late 18th century newspapers and scribes which are freely available for viewing online, readers will be surprised by the dominance of national political and in particular, international news  and the extent of its availability to the British public.

This was commented on by contemporaries, the Grub Street Journal of December 12th, 1734 noting 'In the Daily Advertiser... there are but eleven lines of domestic news; in the Courant and Daily Post Boy not one'.

In Fact, it can be said that if there was a dearth of local news, it was not because of its unavailability but disinterest in the part of the readers. Those were the times, when sailors and navies were still discovering the huge land masses across Asia and Africa and the Europeans back home had immense interest in such matters. Stories of faraway lands and strange places (as they likely termed it) fascinated them.

Therefore local news took a long time to develop. On April 13th, 1723 the only items of Newcastle news in the Newcastle Weekly Mercury were the price of butter and the departure of ships. But this scenario slowly and steadily changed. Fifty years later an average of one-eighth of the space in the Newcastle Journal was devoted to items of news under the Newcastle by line.

It must be noted that advertisements however, streamlined early on into newspapers, one similarity to the Indian front which at this period of time was still in its Printing infancy, when compared to the “literal might” of the British.

Local advertisements can be of great value for throwing light on eighteenth-century life. The number of advertisements increased dramatically during the century and most of them were local in origin. The Birmingham Journal of May 21st, 1733 carried only five advertisements: for the products of a Stourbridge glazier and two Birmingham cloth warehouses, for the sale of an ass at Lichfield and for horses for covering in Warwickshire, the last a form of advertisement that became increasingly common. Those bored by a leading essay on tithes in the York Courant of March 17th, 1747 could turn to no less than thirty-eight advertisements occupying 46 per cent of the paper. By July 7th, 1761 the larger paper carried 416 occupying 74 per cent.

From the early 1700’s itself, there was such a huge outflow of newspapers that, there had been complaints of clogging the masses with too many tri weekly and biweekly’s. It can thus be concurred that “information overload” which has been used as a generic term in the post internet era, might actually have much earlier predated origins.

The extraordinary growth in the size of the press has led many to see them as politically influential, both cause and effect of an increasingly 'open' society. The total annual circulation of the press in 1713 was calculated as 2.4 million. 7.3 million Newspaper stamps were issued in 1750, 12.6 in 1775 and 16 in 1801.Twelve London papers were published in 1712, fifty-two in 1811. Contemporaries were very impressed with this growth, which followed the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695.

The first number of the Old Postmaster, a tri-weekly that appeared in 1696, noted, 'So many newspapers (or so called) are daily published, that it would seem needless to trouble the world with more'.

The Wednesday's Journal commented in 1717,

'We see so many Pretenders to Journals setting up every day.'

The British Observator, which first appeared in 1733, admitted that 'it is grown a general complaint that there are already such a glut of newspapers and of weekly newspapers.’

The Observator. Image: Timothy Hughes Rare and Early Newspapers.

When compared to the Press back in India in the 1700’s which acted as a mere mouthpiece for the East India Company, the Press back in Britain didn’t tag along in any particular political line and mostly didn't fall prey to bias.

The eighteenth-century British press was a medium not a message. Most historians who have considered it have seen it as part of the political world, the alternative structure of politics, and have studied or quoted papers with a marked partisan viewpoint, particularly those that adopted opposition, let alone radical, papers did not enjoy a monopoly of political opinion. Aside from those papers that were subsidized to take ministerial stance, there were others who independently adopted the same attitude.

For example, the Leeds Intelligencer lambasted those who criticised the war with America. Far fewer London papers were subsidized by Walpole than the opposition press claimed. In addition, the majority of papers, both London and provincial, adopted no obvious political stance at all. Historians have tended to neglect the economics of the press and to exaggerate its interest in politics. Most papers were owned and produced by printers or consortia of booksellers and published for profit, not in order to advocate a particular political line. Adopting such a line could indeed lead to extensive sales.

Back on the home front, the first signs of suppression were starting to be noticed. Censorship was 1st introduced in Madras in 1795, with the Madras Gazette required to submit all general orders of the government for scrutiny before the military secretary. Deportation of writers and editors started becoming common. From 1791-98 several newspapers in Bengal are pulled up for various offences. William Duane, also faced deportation during this period for publishing the rumoured death of Lord Cornwallis. Another notable, Dr Charles Maclean who had started the Bengal Hurkaru was also deported to England for engaging with the government in the early 1798. The first press regulations came out in India, which made it mandatory to print the name of the printer, editor, and the proprietor of the newspaper mandatory.

Warren Hastings brought more stringent forms of Press Censorship in India than ever before.  Image- Tilly Kettle.

Appointment of Warren Hastings as Governor General was almost cataclysmic for the press as he introduced the most stringent forms of restrictions. He ordered all newspapers to submit proof sheets of newspapers, supplements etc. to chief secretary for scrutiny and revision in 1813.

It’s interesting to see how, on one side the Press in Britain was enjoying unparalleled autonomy while on the other side of the globe, brethren of the very same colonizers went around gagging the Press with its distorted hysteria.

I henceforth, conclude by stating the paramount importance of Press being not just free but autonomous in its existence. Because if the above mentioned lines are of any significance, then it is visible as to how even the slightest of interference in the fourth pillar can bring the whole of our societal structure as we know it, crashing down to the ground obliterating its mere existence. Ignorance they say, is bliss. The question remains. What do we prefer- the blissful existence which cocoons our minds and shackles our very existence or the bare naked truth?

Edited By: Shariq Khan.