(A new series)
by V Ramnarayan
Probably
born in Calcutta in the 1780s, Indian newspaper publishing spread to Madras and
Bombay soon, within a decade or so. By 1800 several dozen English newspapers
were being published, catering mainly to the British. The Armenian monthly, Azdarar, published in Madras in 1794,
making Madras the birthplace of Armenian journalism, was the first non-English
journal.
Language
journalism probably had its origins in 1818, with Digdarsana, a bilingual English/ Bengali newspaper published by the
Serampore Baptist Mission. The Bombay
Samachar first came out in 1922 in
Gujarati and English. It is published today as Mumbai Samachar, the oldest continuously published paper in India
and one of the oldest in the world.
Issues
from 1829 of the Kulasa-i-akhbar-i-lateef,
handwritten in Persian and read daily to Emperor Akbar Shah II can be seen in the Red Fort Museum in Delhi.
Eventually
papers came to be published in all the languages of the subcontinent as well as
Dutch, French and Portuguese.
Journalism
in Madras
The Government
Gazette was established in Madras 1831. The St George Gazette, whose first issue appeared in 1832, the various
military orders, the Queen’s orders and other such official publications were
printed by The Madras Asylum Press, originally meant for the children of
ex-soldiers and officers to learn
printing as a craft.
ENGLISH
JOURNALISM
Of
all the newspapers published in Tamil Nadu, The Hindu (1878) is surpassed in circulation only by the Tamil
newspapers Dinakaran and Dina Thanthi. It is one of three English
language dailies from Chennai, the Tamil Nadu capital. The New Indian Express and the Deccan
Chronicle are the other two.
As KP Viswanatha Iyer, Assistant Editor,
The Hindu, writing in the Madras Tercentenary Commemoration Volume, 1939, says,
newspapers in the city “had their origin in the needs of the small but growing
European Colony of the Presidency.” In “the first century of the city’s life,
it had no newspapers,” yet to be born even in England.
The earliest newspapers of Madras were The Government Gazette, the Madras Gazette and
the Madras Courier, all weeklies.
They covered mainly news of the social life of the community. They also carried
extracts from European newspapers, especially reports of parliamentary
proceedings. The news was often hopelessly out of date, thanks to the erratic
steamer service between Europe and India. The months between October and
December were particularly slack periods.
Modern journalism of Madras was a
byproduct of politics, political newspapers coming to be established towards
the mid-nineteenth century, with The
Spectator (1836), The Madras Times (1860)
and The Madras Mail (1867) all
established with a view to promoting European interests in the presidency. The
Madras Times, which, had a stormy
existence before it was absorbed by The Mail, represented the European trader,
the planter and the small merchant. The Madras Mail was aristocratic, supported
by Europeans in the services and captains of commerce. It was modelled on the
serious newspapers of England, ‘and under the Lawsons and Mr. Henry Beauchamp,
reflected the mind of the European intellectual.’
The
Madras Courier, established on 12 October 1785 and edited by Richard
Johnson, was the first newspaper from Madras, while Maasa Dina Sarithai (1812), published by Gnanaprakasam, was the
first Tamil magazine to be published in Madras, and perhaps the first
periodical to be brought out in any Indian language, even before the Bengal Gazette (1816) published
in English by Gangadhar Bhattacharjee, and the bilingual Dik Darshan (1818) in English and Bengali.
William Urquhart, the founder of The Madras Courier started it as an
advertising half sheet in large types, known as the Commercial Circulator, in Stringer Street. Its young editor C H
Clay, a clerk to the Chief Justice and Court Sealer, made it famous.
The first competition to the Courier came
in 1793, in the form of the short-lived new publication, the Hircarrah, edited by a former Courier
editor, Hugh Boyd. The Government Gazette—which from 1800 onwards was printed
at the first Government Press—and the Madras Gazette (both 1795) were followed
in 1836 by The Spectator—first
published by D Ouchterlony and later by C Sooboo Moodely and
C M Pereira from the Spectator Press.
C M Pereira from the Spectator Press.
Started as a weekly, The Spectator became
a daily in 1850, only to be taken over by the Madras Times (1835), the first paper from Madras to establish a
strong journalistic tradition. The Madras Times, located in Broadway, benefited
substantially from the cable link with England established in the year of its
launch. A father and son pair called Gantz took over the paper in 1859. The
paper went back to its 1835 beginnings as a biweekly, but appears to have had a
chequered career till it began thriving under Charles Lawson and Henry Cornish
in the 1860s. When they quit after a proprietor-editor dispute, the Madras Mail was born. Late in the 19th
century the Times grew in power under the editorship of George Romilly.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
