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Pressing On !

Pressing On !

William Bolt, an official of the East India Company was pulled up for carrying on private trade. Bolt resigned in a huff and in 1776 threatened to reveal all in the newspaper he was going to launch. Bolt made it known that he had "in manuscript many things to communicate which most intimately concerned every individual." The officials of the company took serious note of the threat and promptly had Bolt deported to the mother country. Bolt's daring newspaper remained stillborn!
Later, in 1780, James Augustus Hicky made history when he launched the first ever newspaper in India, Bengal Gazette or The Original Calcutta General Advertiser. In the first issue Hicky introduced himself as "the late printer to the Honourable Company". That Hicky's intentions were not entirely honourable became evident as his Gazette specialised in exposure of the private lives of the servants of the Company. The popularity the paper achieved made Hicky reckless and he went too far when he turned the spotlight on the wife of the Governor-General. 400 armed guards raided his press and Hicky was thrown into prison. But the valiant editor refused to put his pen down. He continued to edit the Gazette even while in prison and his writings showed no sign of repentance.
In 1785 the Madras Courier was launched by Richard Jhonson, a Government printer and four years later Bombay got its first newspaper, The Bombay Herald.
In 1818, James Silk Buckingham launched the Calcutta Journal. Buckingham was a man of principles. Earlier as a naval commander he had angered slave runners by refusing to transport slaves from Madagascar and had resigned from his post.
When he turned to journalism, he took a vow "to admonish governors of their duties, to warn them furiously of their faults and to tell disagreeable truths."
He threw open his columns to the general public and to whoever had a grievance to air. For five years he kept the company officials on their toes. The officials fumed and fretted and tried to get him deported but Governor-General Lord Hastings, a liberal who believed in the freedom of the press, refused to oblige. After Hastings' departure, one of the first things his successor John Adam did, was to deport Buckingham to England.
The Indian editors were as fearless and as adventurous as Hicky. In the 1840's, Shrinath Roy who wielded a caustic pen, made his tri-weekly Bhaskar, a household name in Bengal.
Once he wrote a piece criticising the Raja of Andul. The raja sent his goons to beat him up and bring him to Andul where his right hand was pounded with a pestle. Afterwards he was thrown into a dungeon. Roy escaped and launched legal proceedings against the raja who eventually had to pay him a compensation of one thousand rupees, a princely sum in those days.
Raja Ram Mohan Roy who was a friend of Buckingham, and who looked upon the press as a tool for social change, launched his publication Sambad Kaumudi in 1819. However, his editor, Bhowani Charan Banerji, walked out on him and started a rival paper Samachar Chandrika which defended the practice of sati. The Chandrika suffered a setback when sati was abolished but continued in business. In 1859, the Rev. James Long noted with satisfaction : "The Chandrika occasionally barks now but it is toothless, the body of the Hindu reformers is too strong for it."

News-Hungry Indians

In 1885 there were 421 newspapers with a combined circulation of 199,825. These included English papers, language papers and bilinguals and trilinguals. The readership was ten times more and came close to 2 million.


Raja Ram Mohan Roy also started a Persian newspaper, Mirat-ul-Akhbar in 1822.
After the suppression of the great revolt of 1857, the battle between the Indians and the Europeans shifted to the pages of the newspapers. The Indian press, by and large, had not lent its support to the revolt but afterwards when the European press mounted an attack on Indians, calling them perfidious and unworthy of trust, the Indian press stoutly defended their countrymen. When Dr. George Buist, Editor of Bombay Times continued his attack on Indians, Mr. Nowroji Furdoonji, one of the Indian shareholders insisted that the editor be asked to moderate his tone. Buist refused to change and he was replaced by Robert Knight.
Under the new editor, the Bombay Times became the leading pro-Indian paper of the Anglo-Indian press.
In the post-revolt years, Harishchandra Mukherjee of the Hindu Patriot, published from Calcutta emerged as an outstanding journalist. He was described as "a terror to the bureaucracy as well as the white colonists and planters in Bengal."
Another distinguished journalist was Man Mohan Ghosh who broke the news of the indigo agitation through the columns of the Hindu Patriot, resulting in the appointment of the 'Indigo Commission of Enquiry'.
In 1862, 1,200 railway workers went on strike at Howrah Railway station demanding an 8-hour working day. Dwarkanath Vidya Bhushan, the editor of Somprakash gave extensive coverage to the strike and wrote in support of the strikers.
Paying rich tribute to the native press of those days Rev. Long wrote: "The native newspapers are humble in appearance, yet like the ballads of a nation they often act where the law fails and as straws on a current they show its direction. In them questions of sati, caste, widow re-marriage, kulin polygamy have been argued with great skill and acuteness on both sides. They have always opposed a foreign language being the language of the courts. The atrocities of indigo planters and the blunders of young magistrates have been laid bare and letters to the editor open out a view of native society nowhere else to be found...
Some of the papers have correspondents and at the time of the Kabul and Punjab Wars accurate information was regularly given of the progress of events".
Newspapers launched in the post 1857 period were more vocal in criticizing the bureaucracy. Amrita Bazar Patrika launched in 1868 by Sisir Kumar Ghose and Motilal Ghose, Bengalee started by Girish Chandra Ghose in 1862, the Hindu launched in 1878 by a group of young men led by Subramania Iyer and Kesari and Maratha started by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and his associates in 1881 were quite outspoken in the criticism of the government. Writing on the increasing animosity between the English and the Indians Amrita Bazar Patrika wrote in 1868 : "The English want to keep the Bengalis down, the Bengalis want to stand up. The English find that the Bengalis can no longer be cowed down by merely bullying or bribery. So they adopt sterner measures…"
When Dwaraknath Mishra, Judge of the Supreme Court and an avid reader of the Patrika told Sisir Kumar Ghose that he found the language used in the Patrika somewhat coarse, Ghose replied that the Patrika had been started to infuse a sense of patriotism in the people of the country. "They are now more dead than alive," he contended. "Our language has, therefore, to be loud and penetrating."
W.S. Blunt paid high tribute to the Hindu in 1884 by declaring that their editors "contrasted by no means unfavourably with men of their profession in London."

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Dimdima.com, the Children's Website of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan launched in 2000 and came out with a Printed version of Dimdima Magazine in 2004. At present the Printed Version have more than 35,000 subscribers from India and Abroad.

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