Vernacular Press Act

Vernacular Press Act, in British India, law enacted in 1878 to curtail the freedom of the Indian-language (i.e., non-English) press. Proposed by Lord Lytton, then viceroy of India (governed 1876–80), the act was intended to suppress criticism of British rule at a moment of rising imperial tension. Lytton’s “forward policy” toward Afghanistan, which sought to expand British influence beyond India’s northwestern frontier, was blamed for provoking the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80). The act excluded English-language publications. Under the act, the authorities could seize, close down, and censor newspapers at will. It elicited strong and sustained protests from a wide spectrum of the Indian populace. Read more: the print revolution in India.

By the 1870s the Indian-language press had grown into a substantial network. More than 150 vernacular newspapers with an estimated total readership of 100,000 circulated across British India, including long-lived Bengali weeklies such as the Som Prakash and the Amrita Bazar Patrika. Their columns increasingly carried grievances against colonial rule: The Amrita Bazar Patrika, for instance, had been founded in part to champion indigo cultivators against the exactions of European planters. It was this expanding reach and sharpening tone that the authorities feared and wished to suppress.

Provisions

The act bore the title “for the better control of Publications in Oriental languages,” and the viceroy’s council passed it unanimously on March 14, 1878. It became law in a single sitting, without the usual publication of a draft for public comment. The government said the act was intended to suppress seditious writing in Indian-language newspapers. To justify the measure, officials presented extracts from newspapers published in Bengal, Bombay (now Mumbai), Punjab, and the North-Western Provinces.

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• The restriction applied to any newspaper or periodical published wholly or partly in an Indian language that carried news or commentary on public news.
• A district magistrate, or the police commissioner in a presidency town, could, with the local government’s prior approval, require a newspaper’s printer and publisher to sign a bond promising not to publish such material or use the paper for intimidation or extortion.
• The bond amount was set by the local government.
• Publishers could avoid the bond and deposit by agreeing to submit all material for government review before publication for one year and printing only what the authorities approved.
• If a newspaper violated the law for the first time, the government first issued a formal warning published in the official gazette.
• If the newspaper violated the law again after the warning, the government could seize its printing presses, machinery, type, lithographic stones, paper supplies, printed copies, and any security deposit.
• Similar seizure powers applied to books, pamphlets, or newspapers printed in Indian languages, including publications produced outside British India. Violations were punishable by up to six months’ imprisonment, a fine, or both.
• Postal officials could be authorized to search mail and remove prohibited publications.
• Courts could not review actions taken under the act. The only appeal was to the governor-general in council, whose decision was final.

Reactions and repeal

The press’s responses were varied; some discontinued publishing, whereas others were served warnings. The Amrita Bazar Patrika, started in 1868 by Shishir Ghose and his brothers, carried out what became a celebrated act of editorial resourcefulness in the history of the 19th-century Indian press. The paper converted from a Bengali publication into an English one in a single editorial decision, placing it beyond the act’s reach and indicating that the legislation had been constructed specifically to suppress expression in Indian languages rather than to regulate journalism as a general matter.

The law was repealed in 1881 by Lytton’s successor as viceroy, Lord Ripon (governed 1880–84). However, the resentment it produced among Indians became one of the catalysts giving rise to India’s growing independence movement. Among the act’s most vocal critics was the Indian Association (founded 1876), which is generally considered to be one of the precursors of the Indian National Congress (founded 1885).